Labor Rallies for Health Care, But Keeps it Vague

— Jane Slaughter

It’s no secret that the union movement is divided on health care reform. Resolutions favoring “Medicare for All,” a single-payer system, have been passed by 558 unions, central labor councils, state federations, and other union organizations. Yet in practice leaders of many of those same unions have acted as if actual single-payer legislation (Representative John Conyer’s HR 676 and Senator Bernie Sanders’ S703) didn’t exist.

They’ve promoted milder changes that will leave private insurance companies in place, instead of kicking them out of the temple, as every other industrialized country—from Canada to Japan—has done. In effect, labor’s leaders are placing on the table first what logically should be their fall-back position.

They’ve gone along with the D.C. consensus that the most that can be won is a plan that includes a “public option” to compete in the marketplace with private companies. And they’re not wrong about the unwillingness of this Congress to buck the system. Conyers was asked in May, “What would it take this Congress to pass single payer?” He replied, “Nuclear weaponry.”

Even so, the staunchest single-payer advocates believe they will win most by continuing to agitate for what they really want rather than a compromise. These folks see large amounts of activists’ anger and energy wasted.

RALLY FOR?

A big June 25 rally at the Capitol sponsored by the AFL-CIO and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), both of which steer clear of single payer, was attended by 7,000 people. But the organizers “didn’t know what to get them fired up about,” said Mark Dudzic of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer.

“It was a good, high-spirited group of people, who want to fight, who honestly believe they’re fighting for national health care,” he said. “A lot of the focus of the rally was to mobilize anger at private insurance companies, and it’s tragic where the leaders want to leave those folks.”

John Armelagos, grievance chair at the University of Michigan Professional Nurse Council, said the rally and subsequent lobbying visits were well-scripted but light on details. Every speaker, Democratic leaders and union heads alike, promised that any health care bill that emerged would include some “public option,” and most participants cheered.

“They thought that would save the day,” he said. “It was all very fluid and not concrete.”

When New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer kicked off the rally with a speech heavy on rally slogans, a large group of single-payer supporters in front began chanting “we want single payer.” He ignored them, and the rally marshals walked them to the back of the crowd.

Armelagos said the rally’s most specific speaker, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, attacked a proposed tax on already existing health-care benefits, an idea gaining popularity among Democratic senators. The intent is to raise part of the estimated $1.2 trillion needed to expand coverage using the current private-insurance model. (Such a tax would hit many union members, who enjoy better-than-average coverage.)

Obama campaigned last year against John McCain’s proposal to tax benefits, but now won’t rule the idea out. Armelagos left D.C. frustrated that labor’s efforts are now devoted to fighting a position taken by Republicans in the last election, leaving wide open other crucial questions.

For instance, if most insurance will still be provided by employers, he asks, “does that mean people who don’t have jobs won’t have coverage?”

Madelyn Elder, president of Communications Workers (CWA) Local 7901, talked to rally participants who said over and over they’d prefer single payer “because it would be the cheapest and easiest way, but there’s no way we’d get it passed in Congress.” A subsidiary variation included, “I’d hate to lay off all those people who work in the private health insurance industry.”

While visiting senators, Armelagos’s group noted that Democrats outmuscled Republicans to pass Medicare four decades ago, making the program so popular that 13 GOP senators jumped on board.

He and other United American Nurses union delegates endorsed a single-payer health care system at their 2007 convention, but he’s convinced today’s Democrats don’t have the fortitude to stand up to the health care lobby. So, he thinks, it’s better to get something than nothing.

“If single payer doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell—even if three of four citizens want a national health plan—we’ve got to get something now,” he said. “There’s too many folks out there hurting real bad.”

BETTER THAN NOTHING?

Is something better than nothing? It’s too soon to predict what will come out of the wrangling—the insurance industry’s Harry-and-Louise-type commercials that helped sink health care reform in 1994 haven’t even started yet. But we can imagine three possible scenarios.

1. The whole reform debate collapses of its own weight. Dudzic predicts that people will resist the unpopular elements that would have to be included to pay the high price of keeping private insurance at the core of the system. Those include “individual mandates,” as in Massachusetts’s plan, that require each person to buy his or her own coverage (like car insurance). Private insurers have lured away the healthiest of the population, saddling the state with the sickest and leaving Massachusetts’s mandates under strain. Limits were placed on enrollment this year and services, including dental coverage, were cut.

Taxation of existing health care benefits, a poison pill for unions, is also likely to be broadly unpopular. Members of Congress who get an earful from their constituents during the August recess may well decide that no bill is worth the cost of alienating many voters (and campaign donors).

2. Compromise legislation will be so unfavorable to working and poor people that even the most eager compromisers in the labor movement feel they must oppose it. A tax on benefits, an HMO-like public option so restricted it’s doomed to fail, a subsidy plan that fails to relieve working people of the high cost of insurance—any combination of these could be a cure worse than the disease.

Even then, some unions could be tempted to support a bad bill in hopes it will serve their particular ends. A union focused on organizing low-wage workers, for example, finds the cost of benefits a main reason why employers fight organizing drives so hard. The Service Employees (SEIU), with its homecare, childcare, and security guard drives, is a case in point. If a new government health care program subsidized benefits for poor workers, perhaps their employers would be more open to signing deals that let the union in the door.

Another factor that could cause some unions to support even a bad bill is the desire not to displease the Obama administration. They want the Employee Free Choice Act, and they may hope that making nice over health care reform could win them points. This is the “if I let you kick me once, you won’t feel the need to kick me twice” school of unionism.

According to Dudzic, the desire not to make waves extends even to the insurance companies. “The view,” he says, “is that we can’t piss off the insurance companies because they’ll run Harry-and-Louise ads, but they’re going to do it anyway.”

3.A bill will be good enough that most labor leaders feel they should support it. A bill that mandates that employers pay for insurance and includes a decent public option would be seen by some as a victory, by others as a livable compromise. SEIU paved the way this week when it released a letter co-signed with Wal-Mart that supports forcing most employers to offer insurance to workers.

However, this is the least likely of the three options. As Obama has signaled his willingness to go along with just about anything, more and more activists are convinced that any public option will be only lip service.

In fact, at an AFL-CIO meeting in mid-June, some affiliate representatives pushed AFL-CIO political operative Gerry Shea to say where the federation would draw the line on the parameters of a public option. Shea wouldn’t say, but some fear that the real answer is “wherever Obama tells us.” Mark Gaffney, head of the Michigan AFL-CIO, volunteered to write to the federation asking for clarity on its lobbyists’ bottom line.

One union, CWA, highlighted its demands as it dispatched hundreds of delegates from its yearly convention to the D.C. rally: a public option, no taxes on working people’s benefits, retiree health care for those not yet Medicare-eligible, and a “play or pay” option for all employers.

Taxing benefits is the deal-killer for most unions. Given how universally unions oppose such a plan, it indicates the disregard for labor in the administration and Congress that the idea was even floated.

Thirty-one union presidents signed a letter to senators arguing against such a regressive tax. Of course, in a tactic long used with members, union leaders may later claim that keeping taxation of benefits out of the final bill equals a victory.

THE DARK HORSE

Though it’s a long shot, the best outcome might be a bill that allows the states to experiment with single payer. Voters in California have approved a single-payer system for their state twice, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Senator Sanders of Vermont is backing such a provision, and Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is organizing support in the House. Some single-payer lobbyists are trying to get a state option attached to other legislation.

“Enabling states to do single payer actually moves us closer to a single-payer solution than a public option does,” said Michael Lighty, the California Nurses Association’s director of public policy. Lighty said that a successful program in a big state like California would lead other states to follow suit. He pointed out that in Canada, single-payer health care was initially adopted one province at a time, leading eventually to a federal system.

“But if you pass a plan that’s watered down and bad, you’ve squandered the political moment,” Lighty said. “You’re going to fuel the cynicism and distrust so many people already have in what can be accomplished in Washington.”

BARGAINING TACTICS

Say you’re a union bargainer who thinks her members deserve a dollar-an-hour raise, but believes that realistically the company won’t give more than 50 cents. Would you start out by asking for 50 cents? Yet that’s what union lobbyists are doing, in effect, around health care reform in D.C. this year. It’s how labor has been doing its politics for a while now: behaving as supplicants rather than as actors trying to define the game, consenting to the accepted wisdom.

Ironically, the desire to be “relevant” and at the table is leaving much of official labor with little actually to say. The tragedy of this year’s morass, say unionists passionate about universal health care, is that any legislation that stitches insurance companies into the heart of the health care system now makes it that much harder to get them out of the way later.

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Additional reporting by Mischa Gaus.

UNITE HERE Split Gets Even Messier

— Paul Abowd

It’s been three months since UNITE split from HERE, morphing into Workers United (WU) and affiliating with the Service Employees (SEIU). The battle, primarily over money and members, rages on after settlement talks fizzled in May and International President Bruce Raynor resigned from UNITE HERE. Three days later he took the top post at WU as the breakaway union fights for viability in court and in the shops.

UNITE HERE, now controlled by hospitality president John Wilhelm, rejected a settlement proposal from WU and SEIU President Andy Stern. They offered $45 million to UNITE HERE over the next five years, in exchange for the right to organize hotel and gaming workers.

Those jurisdictions are in contention regardless as WU tries to hijack hotel organizing campaigns, leading UNITE HERE to retaliate by disrupting SEIU drives. Both sides are awaiting a July court ruling on the legality of WU’s secession.
At stake are the union’s major assets, a 30-story Manhattan headquarters and the Amalgamated Bank.

Raynor joined up with SEIU, preferring an organizing model stressing quick growth, often through partnership deals with employers. UNITE HERE also seeks such deals, but as a first step in a longer process of forming worker committees to fight for contract standards. HERE leaders criticize a 2005 Stern-Raynor secret deal to organize food service workers, which resulted in weak contracts due to shallow worker involvement.

Workers United’s growth strategy is in rough shape. After claiming 150,000 members supported the March split, the union collected dues from only 100,000 in April. Plans to peel away members in Detroit, Phoenix, and New England faltered, and some employers have withheld dues at Wilhelm’s request. The union is burning through a $1 million loan from SEIU during a critical phase in its battle for legitimacy.

BREAKING IN

On suspicion that UNITE-side allies were removing documents from the International offices in New York, Wilhelm hired private security to break into Raynor’s office in May. They uncovered memos, dated as early as October 2008, detailing plans to “take turf from HERE” and “control all resources” in a “high road campaign” that still manages to “highlight their dirt.”

One memo instructs UNITE affiliates to “kick out HERE staff” in Phoenix, San Antonio, and Indianapolis, areas where UNITE HERE hopes to grow.

But WU’s attempts to snap up hotel organizing-in-process have been mostly stymied.

Wilhelm’s allies won neutrality in 2005 at the new Phoenix Sheraton, gaining a foothold in right-to-work Arizona. Workers signed cards in May, but not before fighting off SEIU, which sent staff to steer workers into the new union instead. “They thought this was just an easy target,” said Bethany Holmes, a UNITE HERE organizer.

Workers United’s raid threw the drive into disarray, forcing UNITE HERE staff and workers to expedite their committee building and call for representation more quickly. Workers stuck with who they knew, supporting UNITE HERE. At the Phoenix Airport, the fight for representation rights rages on, while SEIU, defeated at the Sheraton, looks down the road to Texas.

UNITE HERE organizers in San Antonio see an opportunity to transform an expanding tourist center into a Las Vegas-like union stronghold. At the town’s giant Hyatt hotel, workers won recognition by card check months ago.

Workers United, with help from SEIU organizers, now claims to be the bargaining representative and the company has been happy to oblige, meeting behind closed doors with WU, which has nearly no support from workers.

When Hyatt management gave Workers United access to the shop—barring UNITE HERE—angry workers confronted the raiders in the cafeteria and gathered community allies outside the hotel to shame management. SEIU staffers are “worse than scabs, because they’re undermining us and using other people’s dues money to do it,” says a Hyatt worker.

On top of it all, a group of workers filed a petition to decertify after UNITE HERE presented cards. The NLRB called a July election with both unions on the ballot. UNITE HERE organizers fear Workers United can play only a spoiler role.

Wilhelm sent a letter to employers in late March asking them not to recognize Workers United. Several companies have responded by holding onto dues and blocking union representatives from shops.

The letters even targeted industrial laundries, where UNITE-side locals have represented workers since long before the 2004 merger with HERE. The NLRB recently granted WU bargaining rights at Royal Laundry in California after the company tried to use Wilhelm’s letter to shut down talks.

CONTRACT TIME

At Local 96 in New Jersey, now part of WU, workers at the Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick won a union and have been bargaining for months. With Wilhelm’s letter in hand, the company severed talks at a critical stage, calling WU a phony union. The NLRB unexpectedly threw the case to the Change to Win board to resolve.

UNITE HERE insists the short-term disruptions are worth the struggle to keep hotel workers in one union—the union that’s developed a national strategy for organizing in that industry.

“You’re putting members at a huge disadvantage if they’re expected to negotiate with some of these major chains and not be part of the same union,” said Local 11 President Tom Walsh.

With SEIU staff stretched thin by multi-front battles, UNITE HERE has gone on offense. A crew of researchers was summoned to attack Stern and SEIU, while other staff contacted legislators and leafletted worksites in Arizona and California, where SEIU is organizing public sector workers and security guards.

Meanwhile, at dozens of hotels, contracts with major chains open this summer. In Los Angeles, Local 11 members voted to raise dues and expand the strike fund in preparation.

They face trouble at Disneyland from several directions. Food service workers there split to join WU, while the company is attacking the free family health coverage of workers at the park’s three hotels. Local 11’s challenge, Walsh said, is to fight both the employer and a rival union eager to cut a deal.

While UNITE HERE shuffles staff to fend off attacks and undermine Stern, the union is trying to maintain the momentum of its “Hotel Workers Rising” campaign. The nationwide drive using aggressive tactics and coordinated contract campaigns notched victories in 2006, but it’s hard to imagine the union’s focus can be as steady this year.

Raynor and Stern are pushing for binding arbitration to settle the dispute and reopen the bank vaults, garnering support from a growing number of union leaders desperate to see the feud end.

Central labor councils have condemned SEIU for aiding the split, supporting UNITE HERE while the union refuses any settlement that allows SEIU to organize hotel and gaming workers.

The factions head back to court in July, but neither side expects the dispute to end there. Says one Workers United organizer, “It’s ugly, and it’s on both sides.”

Viewpoint: Finally, Hospitals' Unsung Heroes Carry the Show

— Suzanne Gordon

Editor's Note: This article was originally printed June 18, 2009 in The Boston Globe.

Since the birth of television, Hollywood has given doctors a permanent starring role in prime-time hospital dramas. But most doctor shows have relegated the nation’s largest healthcare profession - nursing - to the status of bit players. Whether it was “Marcus Welby, M.D.’’ or “St. Elsewhere,’’ TV routinely presented RNs as mere handmaidens of physicians. In more contemporary shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,’’ “The Practice,’’ and “House,’’ medicine is now full of ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. Unfortunately, there’s hardly ever a nurse in the house.

That’s why it’s so remarkable that two new shows put the spotlight on a nurse. In TNT’s “HawthoRNe,’’ Jada Pinkett Smith is a chief nurse who’s smart and feisty. Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie’’ --played by Edie Falco--displays an edgier and far more realistic view of nursing.

In each show, we see the challenges of modern nursing depicted in an unprecedented way. In the first episode of the Showtime series, a young bike messenger is brought into the emergency room at NYC's "All Saints Hospital" after being hit by a car. Because she’s a veteran RN, Jackie knows the boy has a brain bleed but a cocky young doctor blows her off and fails to treat it. The patient dies. In episode two, an angry man storms into the ER and socks Jackie in the jaw. Jackie figures out that the guy isn’t crazy, just distraught. He’s taking care of an obese, diabetic mother - a double leg amputee - all by himself. Jackie gets him an overnight stay and calls in social services.

“Hawthorne’’ is smart but a little too saintly, and Pinkett Smith is a one-note actress. “Nurse Jackie,’’ however, is a real gift to the nursing profession. The series reveals the critical role nurses play in healthcare and the price they pay for their expertise and commitment to patients. Jackie self-medicates because she injured her back on the job and is in constant pain. (In the real world, 6 to 11 percent of all nurses leave hospital work because of back, neck, and shoulder injuries). She’s a stressed-out recovering alcoholic. (Because of the pressures of their work, more nurses do, in fact, have higher rates of stress-related illness, depression, and even suicide than the rest of the population.)

In spite of all this - and here Jackie may be functioning better than some real-life RNs - she’s worn out, but not burnt out. Like the best nurses I know, she displays deep compassion for her patients but without a shred of sentimentality. When a nursing student confesses to being unsure whether she’s cut out for the work, Jackie takes her aside and let’s her in on the secret of work in a modern hospital:

“You know what this job is honey, this job is wading through a shitstorm of people who come here on the very worst day of their lives. And just for your information, doctors are here to diagnose, not heal. We heal. And All Saints is in the business of flipping patients, that’s it, end of story. The fact that you have even the slightest inclination to help people puts you miles ahead of 100 percent of the population. So buck up.’’

Nurses are already reacting to nursing’s star turn. Three RN unions, including the Massachusetts Nurses Association, ran ads during commercial breaks on the first episode of “HawthoRNe,’’ advocating safe staffing legislation. And the blogosphere is buzzing with rank-and-file feedback on Jackie’s human foibles. Some RNs are upset that Jackie may hurt the image of their profession. The New York State Nurses Association is even demanding that the show’s producers run a disclaimer stating that Jackie violates nursing ethics.

To focus on Jackie’s flaws, however, is to miss the point. Most television doctors are oversexed, self-absorbed, and idiosyncratic. But when it’s time for diagnosis and treatment, they’re brilliant. Even though TV is supposed to be just entertainment, shows like “Nurse Jackie,’’ and even “HawthoRNe,’’ can help convince the public that nurses matter. Not just because they’re kind, sweet, and selfless but because they have the knowledge and skill that often makes the difference between life and death.

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Suzanne Gordon is author of “Nursing Against the Odds" and many other books about health care and nursing.

Immigration Reform: What's Labor Up To?

— Tiffany Ten Eyck

Labor Notes’ Tiffany Ten Eyck interviewed longtime Bay Area immigrant rights activist David Bacon about the new joint position on immigration recently released by the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. Bacon argues that the new stance is inconsistent—some parts contradict other parts. He believes the resolution is based on the CTW view: that in order to get any form of legal change for immigrants through Congress, unions must ally with employers. That means supporting a guest worker program, which employers favor. It wasn’t always like this. What happened?

LN: Why is a united position important right now? Where have the federations and key unions differed in the past?

DB: In 1986, the AFL-CIO supported the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It had an amnesty provision which gave about 4 million people legal status, but it also had a section called “employer sanctions,” which says that employers may not hire people who don’t have papers. It becomes illegal for people who don’t have papers to work.

Immigrant communities and immigrant rights activists inside the labor movement opposed that bill, but the AFL-CIO supported it. Their rationale was that if people can’t work, they will go home, or they won’t come here. It was an us vs. them argument. In other words, the labor movement and jobs belong to citizens, and immigrants shouldn’t be here.

After that, immigrant rights activists inside unions agitated and organized against that position and tried to get unions to call for the repeal of employer sanctions. As the demographics of the workforce changed, and as unions became more interested in organizing unorganized workers, we were able to win battle after battle inside unions around repealing employer sanctions. That meant that if you try to fire somebody because they don’t have authorization, we’re going to fight you.

Inside the AFL-CIO, the first unions we won were the garment unions, and then the Service Employees (SEIU). This was during the period of rising activity of Justice for Janitors. Employers were using employer sanctions against those workers whenever they would try to organize. We won the battle in SEIU by showing that employer sanctions had become a weapon against the union in its efforts to organize workers.

John Sweeney got elected in 1995 on the promise that he would move organizing unorganized workers into the center of the agenda. So we were able to argue that if you are really interested in organizing workers, then you must oppose employer sanctions, because they are going to be used against you whenever you try to organize. This was proven time after time. Sanctions were used against the Teamsters when they tried to organize apple workers in Washington state, they were used against janitors in Silicon Valley, used against clothing workers in New York.

We had an organization in Northern California called the Labor and Immigrant Organizers Network, which wrote a resolution in 1998 and began circulating it in unions and labor councils around the country, calling for four things: repeal employer sanctions; legalize people without papers; protect the rights of workers to organize, including undocumented workers; and reunify families. We didn’t include guest worker programs in that resolution, because the AFL-CIO was already opposed to guest worker programs.

That resolution caught fire and coming into the AFL-CIO convention in LA, we had many labor councils from around the country signed on, and international unions that were prepared to call for a change in position. The executive council meeting a couple of months later adopted a new position calling for all the things in our resolution.

That was a historic change for the labor movement, because it said “our movement belongs to all workers, not just some; we have to fight for the legal status of everybody; we have to oppose laws that criminalize work.” It was the high point.

LN: What happened in years to come that led to opposing positions on immigration reform by the major unions and federations?

DB: The big question after the convention was how to get immigration reform through Congress. Those unions that went off to form the CTW federation, generally speaking, adopted a position that the only way we are going to be able to get legalization is by building an alliance with employers, and employers want guest workers. If we give them guest workers, and we agree that enforcement of employer sanctions will continue, maybe we’ll be able to get amnesty in trade for that.

And that was the architecture for the “comprehensive immigration reform” bills we saw in Congress over the last few years: big guest worker programs, increases in enforcement of employer sanctions, and some degree of legalization. But the legalization proposals were actually more pro-corporate: they proposed things like 18-year waiting periods, but they would immunize employers from punishment under employer sanctions. In other words, they would grandfather in the existing workforce while guest worker programs were getting up and running.

So we’ve had the labor movement divided in the last few years on immigration reform, with AFL-CIO continuing to support the position that we won in 1999 and SEIU, UNITE HERE, and other unions in CTW basically changing positions and supporting those comprehensive immigration reform bills instead. The irony is that these are the unions that fought the hardest in 1999 for a repeal of sanctions!

So the new joint position between the AFL-CIO and CTW is an effort to overcome that division. I think it’s actually an effort to bring the CTW and AFL-CIO back together, period. If you can do it on immigration reform, then you can do it pretty much on everything else, because this is one of the places where there was the sharpest conflict between CTW and AFL-CIO.

A joint position on immigration reform is a good idea if it’s a good position. It’s not a good idea if it’s not. We have to look at what it actually says.

There’s one good piece to this position that is worth trying to get the labor movement to live up to it. It says a long-term solution to uncontrolled immigration is to encourage just economic integration, which will eliminate enormous economic inequalities. An essential component of that is a fair trade globalization model that promotes the creation of free trade unions for all workers.

There was an even better statement that Sweeney and Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress wrote to Obama about NAFTA. They talked about the displacement of people, that NAFTA caused migration by increasing poverty.

So here we look at the connection of immigration policy to trade policy. We can’t support a free trade agreement with Colombia if it is going to lead to the displacement of millions of Colombians, which it will. Same thing with Panama, with Peru, all these agreements and the economic model they are part of are displacing millions of people. So we have to not only oppose the trade agreements but also call for a new economic relationship with other countries. That is a very profound thing to say, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get our labor movement to live up to those words.

Because what we are really saying is that we demand a fundamental change in the foreign policy of this country, economic, political, military. That’s going to bring us into confrontation with the Obama administration.

LN: It’s great on paper but how do we make it real?

DB: It represents a basic increase in understanding by our labor movement and by workers. NAFTA educated us, with some very painful costs. It taught us not just that corporations would be more than willing to take our jobs and move them to Mexico but that those same trade agreements were no good for the people in those countries either.

They impoverished people, they eliminated their jobs, they tore up their union contracts, they dumped agricultural products on their markets so that farmers couldn’t survive, all of these things that produce migration.

In other words, working people in this country and working people in those countries, Mexico, specifically, we have a common interest in opposing these agreements.

That’s an important realization for us. We’re on the same side here. Those Mexican workers that are crossing the border into the U.S., we have the same problem.

So if it’s true that the reason that people are coming here is NAFTA and unfair economic and trade policies, then we need to make sure that those people, as they come into our workforce, have the same rights as we do. They’re not somebody else, they’re us.

So the question is, does the rest of this statement live up to that, is it consistent? It’s not.

It says that those people who are displaced and coming here should not be allowed to work. In fact, they should really go home.

When you say there must be a “secure and effective worker authorization” mechanism, what you mean is that employers may not hire undocumented workers, and if people are already in the workforce, they must leave.

LN: That brings us to amnesty. This platform offers up the adjustment of status for current undocumented workers.

DB: Amnesty is important, but it is not going to eliminate the effect of worker authorization. Because people are going to continue to come so long as this economic inequality exists—they will be in our organizing drives, they will be members of our union.

So the real question for us is, are we going to defend our sisters and brothers who don’t have work authorization?

We just had a good example at Overhill Farms down in LA. Management fired 254 people on May 31 for not having good Social Security numbers. These people belong to UFCW Local 770. What is the union going to do?

If the union was following the protocol in the AFL-CIO-CTW position it would say, “OK, you don’t have work authorization; I guess you shouldn’t be here." That basically gutted the union. How can you have a union in which 254 members out of 800 get fired and you don’t defend them?

LN: Part of the platform calls for an independent commission that determines the number of foreign workers admitted to work. I wonder if the folks who charted out this new platform would argue, “There’s going to be plenty more work visas and people can come in legally.”

DB: This is the heart of the employers’ proposal. Employers have been proposing guest worker programs since going back a long way.

But we now have 10 percent unemployment. So proposals for allowing employers to recruit 400,000 or 500,000 workers a year under work visas and bring them to the U.S. are not politically realistic. Congress is not going to pass them.

So what employers have proposed is to kick the ball down the road: if in the future employers want to claim there are labor shortages, they can go to a commission and if the commission agrees, then the commission will allow them to bring people in on temporary work visas.

Now, there are a lot of things wrong with work visas. First of all, people are recruited by employers. That means a system of corruption and recruitment in the countries that people come from. People have to pay someone off in order to get visas.

The workers at the Signal shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, paid $20,000 apiece for those visas to come to the U.S. People have mortgaged everything their family has in order to send someone here.

The other big problem is that these are all visas that say you can only stay in the U.S. if you are employed. If you are thinking about signing the union card or you want to make a complaint about unpaid wages, if your employer fires you, you become deportable. So people are not free in this status. These are not visas that lead to permanent residence or citizenship, they don’t carry political rights, these folks are never going to be able to vote or receive social benefits. They’re not the social or political equals of the people living in the community around them. This is what employers want. Because this is the way of forcing people to work for cheap.

If you believe that there have to be full rights for immigrant workers, then you would not support work visas or guest worker programs. If there’s work for 400,000 people a year in the U.S., why not give people green cards instead of work visas?

Besides that: what is a good union supposed to do if there’s a labor shortage? If an employer is having a hard time finding workers, what do you do? You go on strike. You use that as a way to force wages up. So why are we being bad trade unionists?

LN: Why did the AFL-CIO soften its stance against guest worker programs?

DB: The AFL-CIO agreed to a position that is much closer to Change to Win’s, specifically to SEIU’s. So you could say that this is the price of unity.

But the rationale always given for this by union lobbyists was that this is just political realism. That we are not going to be able to get any kind of immigration reform without the support of the employers, and the employers are not going to support any reform proposals that don’t include guest workers. So this is surrender to that logic.

And the answer to that is that we are only going to get what we are able and willing to fight for. And we have to fight for what we really want, not for what we think employers are going to give us. When we go into contract bargaining, we don’t start by offering employers what we think they are likely to agree to. We fight for what we need.

That’s exactly the same thing as what’s going on here—if we want immigration reform based on human rights.

LN: My sense is that it’s a hard time to talk about immigration among native-born union members because of the economic crisis. How could labor deal with them together?

DB: We can’t win the right of undocumented people to work without saying everybody in this country needs to be able to have a job. Because the way they defeat us is they say, there aren’t enough jobs. Why should someone from Mexico who crossed the border without a visa have a job, and I can’t get one?

The answer to job competition isn’t for us to fight over the crumbs.

The response to the plant closures crisis in the 1980s was that when employers said, “we have the right to close plants and we determine whether there are jobs there or not,” we said, “no, we have the right to a job. And if the private sector is not willing or capable of providing employment, then the federal government has to do it.” That’s what the New Deal said.

The answer is to force the federal government to guarantee the right of all workers to be able to work—and to fight against things like the GM bankruptcy that are leading to the unemployment of tens of thousands of workers. Undocumented workers did not steal the jobs of those 14 plants that GM is going to close. GM took those jobs, with the Obama administration.

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston is saying that there is a common ground. She authored a bill that said, have an amnesty for people who are here without papers, and then let’s take the fees that those workers are paying for the normalization of their status and use them to set up job creation and job training programs in communities with high unemployment.

If we fight for jobs programs at the same time that we are fighting for the legal status and legal rights of immigrant workers, we can have a program that unemployed African American workers and Latino and Asian workers can benefit from.

It’s the same thing in talking about rights at work. The lesson at Smithfield Foods was that when the employer and ICE were able to use raids against the workers when they were trying to organize the union, everyone in that plant suffered. Not just the workers who got picked up, not just the immigrants. The Black workers at Smithfield suffered, too, because so long as they could terrorize the workforce, they could stop that union drive from succeeding. It was only when workers could say to each other, “everybody in this plant has a right to be here,” that they were able to get enough strength that they finally beat the company.

But if we say that there are not enough jobs for everybody, some people have the right to put bread on the table and other people should go hungry, all we’re doing is helping our employers beat us over the head.

LN: So how do activists get unions to do the right thing on immigration?

DB: We have to look for a rational immigration policy that reflects what’s actually happening to us. In LA at Overhill Farms 254 people are fired and then replaced with part-time employees with no benefits. It makes no sense for us to have a policy that allows employers to do this and then to go to Congress and lobby for a bill that says we want a “secure and effective worker authorization mechanism.” We are lobbying for the same thing that’s being used against us!

We need a reality check and an immigration position that helps us, not our employers, and we have to look for the things that bring us together.

LA Teacher Cuts Prompt Walkouts, Arrests, Hunger Strike

— Joshua Cook

Each year around budget time, Californians hear a familiar story from Sacramento: There’s another stalemate, because state law caps property tax rates and requires two-thirds of legislators to approve tax hikes.

The state’s inability to make budgets continues to mean less money for California public schools, which are funded at well below the national average, 46th in the nation in per-pupil spending. This time, Governor Schwarzenegger wants $10 billion in cuts from the state’s $45 billion yearly education fund.

In response, the Los Angeles Unified School District outlined massive layoffs and cuts. Members of United Teachers of Los Angeles—already facing down concessions in a contract year—are making clear they will not take these cuts lying down. A new layer of teacher activists and students have joined the fight with walkouts and a hunger strike.

Teachers packed a March school board meeting and refused to leave, daring officials to arrest them in front of the media. They hoped to stall the elimination of more than 8,000 administration, support, and teaching jobs, but the school board retreated to a back room and emerged calling for pink slips.

Ultimately around 6,000 layoff notices were sent. After much pressure from UTLA, the district agreed to spend more of the $1 billion in federal stimulus funds it had received, and rescinded layoffs for some teachers, academic coaches, and non-teaching coordinators. But around 2,200 classroom positions are still gone—which means that class sizes in some schools could explode to 40-plus students per teacher.

ONE-DAY STRIKE THREAT

As layoff notices were distributed throughout the district, many of the union’s leaders and members were calling for a one-day strike to protest layoffs. At the end of April, members authorized the strike by a vote of 75 percent. The day would be May 15—Pink Friday.

The union’s contract forbids a strike over layoffs, so the district pursued and was granted an injunction. According to teacher and executive board member Alex Caputo-Pearl, the majority of the board thought the costs of an illegal strike would be too severe.

“Individuals might face fines of $1,000 each and place their credentials in jeopardy. UTLA as a whole could incur multiple millions of dollars in fines,” said Caputo-Pearl, a member of the Progressive Educators for Action Coalition within UTLA.

“There were no good choices,” said Joel Jordan, UTLA’s director of special projects. “It did hurt morale to call off the strike, and if we’d gone ahead despite the injunction, less than half the members would have come out, and that would have divided us.”

UTLA’s leadership voted instead for a civil disobedience action and protests before and after school, where more than 1,000 teachers turned out. Many teachers called in sick and arranged for substitutes. Nearly a hundred protesters sat in front of the district’s office, and about 40 union members, including President A.J. Duffy and Vice President Josh Pechthalt, were arrested for blocking traffic. The majority of union members went to work.

STUDENTS TAKE UP THE FIGHT

Jose Lara, a UTLA chapter chair at Santee Education Complex, was shocked when the strike was called off. “Duffy told us that the union would strike if it was necessary,” he said. “Everyone thought this was going to be a strike year.”

Teachers at Santee voted “no confidence” in their union leadership, while teachers at Lincoln High delivered a letter of no confidence to UTLA.

Students at Santee sprang into action against teacher layoffs, gathering outside their school a few days after Pink Friday, where they were joined by more students refusing to enter school. Instead, they marched around the campus. Similar walkouts took place at six other middle and high schools.

School administrators finally convinced students to enter the school with the enticement that Superintendent Ramón Cortines would meet with them—which he failed to do. So 400 students marched three miles to his office a few days later, where Cortines commended them for speaking up. In later news reports he said the student walkouts would not affect the budget or prevent teacher layoffs.

SUMMER SCHOOL AXED

Meanwhile, the majority of the city’s summer school program has been axed, and others, like the one at Crenshaw High School, will have drastically reduced course offerings. Next fall, Crenshaw’s new “Small Learning Communities” model will be crippled by the elimination of courses that define each of the seven SLCs. In the school of Social Justice, the first class to go will most likely be a popular African-American literature course.

Four out of Crenshaw’s five counselors were delivered pink slips, leaving one counselor serving approximately 2,100 students, or more likely, pushing counseling work onto teachers and administrators.

The cuts to seven English Language Arts teachers could drive class size as high as 46 students per class.

After the strike was called off, a UTLA House of Representatives meeting escalated into noisy argument over the next steps of the fight. Chapter chairs at four schools decided to launch a hunger strike and a camp-out.

The hunger strike began immediately. Calls were put out for volunteers to staff the campsite, and the Hungry for A Better Education campaign was launched on May 26, demanding a stop to increased class sizes and layoffs. For weeks, supporters camped out every night at schools facing the most severe cuts, joined at times by state legislators, before moving the encampment in front of district headquarters.

“Things have been happening so fast that the House of Representatives has not been able to keep up with the actions,” Caputo-Pearl said.

As momentum builds, chapter chairs from around the city have been calling fasters, interested in holding their own camp-outs and solidarity hunger strikes. Calls of support for fasters have come from national labor and social justice organizations and the Puerto Rican teachers union.

The hunger strikes and camp-outs are mostly led by young teachers. Many leaders of the Hungry for a Better Education campaign are first-year chapter chairs. “We believe that the union should be led from below,” says Lara.

Meanwhile, members were voting on the results of a contract reopener June 15-17—but it did not address the layoffs, legally not a subject of bargaining. Some members argued for a “no” vote as a message to management that they are angry about the layoffs.

“We can’t both wage war and make peace simultaneously,” argued two elected officials, writing on the section of UTLA’s website devoted to pro and con arguments. Most union leaders argued for a “yes” vote in order to preserve the language improvements won, and said UTLA would continue to fight the layoffs in other ways. For both sides, other issues faded beside the priority of saving jobs and class sizes.

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Joshua Cook teaches at Animo Justice High School. Visit the Hungry for a Better Education website at www.LAhungry4Ed.com.