New “Unity Unions” Self-Organize to Confront Workplace Abuses

On October 24, 2011

Originally Published on Truth-Out.

The last five years have been grim and isolating ones for immigrants and working people, right? Overall, this may be the case, but if you talk with organizers at Fuerza Laboral, an independent workers’ center in Rhode Island founded in 2006, you might get a different impression.

Despite difficult times, the group has taken on some bold and determined organizing. And they have some important victories to show for their efforts.

“Fuerza’s roots are really and truly the essence of what the labor movement is: workers organizing themselves and getting together with their communities to identify some real injustices that are systemic throughout the country,” says Josie Shagwert, the group’s executive director. “They got together to say, ‘How can we put a stop to this? Because the system is failing us.’”

Not long ago, workers’ centers were seen as service providers, staff-driven organizations where individuals could go to have caseworkers help with their problems. That has changed over the past decade, and the Rhode Island group is part of the transformation. “Fuerza Laboral builds worker power,” the organization’s web site explains. “[We] organize to end exploitation in the workplace. We train workers in their rights, develop new community leaders, and take direct action against injustice to achieve real victories.”

This work sounds a lot like what unions do. And, yet, Fuerza Laboral is not formally affiliated with the labor movement. Instead, it is an affiliate of National People’s Action (NPA), and shares with other NPA members an organizing model rooted in communities. Fuerza Laboral’s campaigns show two things: why organizing among workers remains essential, and how the labor movement still has work to do in bridging the gap between its traditional practices and new groups doing cutting-edge organizing, especially among immigrants and low-wage workers.

What Good Are Laws Without the Power to Enforce Them?

When Fuerza Laboral first started organizing, it focused on the abuses of temp agencies in Rhode Island, “employers who were underpaying, not paying, taking illegal deductions,” Shagwert says. Having first coalesced around this industry, the group soon moved to take on other businesses with unjust labor practices – notably a local manufacturer called Colibri. On a cold morning in January 2009, some 280 workers showed up for work at the Colibri jewelry factory, a nonunion shop in East Providence. They found a handwritten sign taped to the factory door reading, “Plant Is Closed. Go Home.”

“Shock turned to anger pretty quickly,” says Shagwert, “with people asking, What kind of treatment is this? People had worked there for 5, 15, 20 years.” One of the workers called a local Spanish-speaking radio station and complained on the air about the closing. The radio host suggested that he get in touch with Fuerza Laboral.

“For the first meeting they had 12 people,” Shagwert says. “By the time they got together for a second meeting there were 60 people in the living room of one of the workers, crowded in to talk about what to do and what an organizing campaign would look like.”

The group discovered that Colibri’s closing violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), which mandates that any business with 100 or more employees must give 60-days notice before closing. (The WARN Act was in the news during the December 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows factory by the Chicago company’s laid-off workers, which Kari Lydersen chronicles in her book “Revolt on Goose Island.”) The law affords an important protection for employees. Unfortunately, there is no federal agency to enforce it. The Colibri workers decided that they would take it upon themselves to make the company obey the law.

“The vast majority of those workers had never organized before,” Shagwert says. Yet, in the course of the campaign, they pulled together a 250-person rally at the Colibri site and also began engaging in direct action. “The workers practiced civil disobedience at the auctions [of company assets],” says Shagwert, “which resulted in 13 people getting arrested.”

During the action, one observer told the local NBC affiliate, “I’d like to see them get justice … This is another AIG deal. The rich get richer, and the workers get the shaft.”

The activists subsequently brought 100 people to the headquarters of the private equity firm in New York that had purchased the company, and workers held a sit-in in the firm’s lobby. “As a result of all those actions,” Shagwert explains, “a prominent labor lawyer in Rhode Island, Marc Gursky, felt inspired by this grassroots surge of energy. He stepped forward and said, ‘I know that to enforce the WARN Act you are going to need a lawyer.’”

For two years, Fuerza Laboral pursued the case in court, and it ultimately reached a settlement. The precise terms of the agreement have not yet been made public. Nevertheless, Shagwert notes, “I will say that the workers felt really happy that after two years they were vindicated.”

“Unity” and Unions

Fuerza Laboral’s efforts show why, even with only 7 percent of workers in the private sector of the American economy covered by traditional unions, there is no substitute for organizing among working people. Even with pro-employee laws on the books, there is little hope of justice without a grassroots demand. Prior to the labor laws enshrined in the New Deal, mutual aid among workers was the very essence of union life. With collective bargaining in decline, the revival of this type of action may be important for labor’s future as well.

Asked what Fuerza Laboral takes from the organizing model of National People’s Action, the national coalition of which it is a member, Shagwert says, “Networking and constantly building leadership. It’s a real belief that everyone who belongs to your organization, or wants to belong, has the potential to take leadership.”

In addition to developing leadership through their campaigns, Fuerza Laboral has also actively pursued a program of political education. “The essence of Fuerza Laboral is having the passion to develop leaders who will confront social injustice,” says Heiny Maldonado, a community organizer at the group. “We have a year-round calendar of trainings for our members and leaders.”

Shagwert adds: “Since 2006, we have put at least 3,000 workers through a really aggressive popular education model within which our members and leaders get trained to teach basic workers rights. We also hold democracy schools: a multi-week school that teaches about organizing, the history of the labor movement, and the history of immigration. Many of our leaders have come through those courses. They take a course, get fired up, and then we look for ways to plug them into the regular organizing we do. That feels like a huge victory.”

If there’s going to be a progressive revival in this country, having a broadly inclusive approach to worker education and developing community leadership will be just as important to traditional unions as they are to workers’ centers. Currently, the labor movement is engaged in efforts to reach out beyond its established membership in shops covered by collectively bargained contracts. From the AFL-CIO’s Working Americaprogram to Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU)Fight for a Fair Economy, labor organizations are seeking to expand their reach into working-class communities at large, recognizing that if they are perceived as a narrow special interest that benefits only a few workers, the movement will be destined to permanent decline.

Operations such as Fuerza Laboral represent another strain of organizing among workers that is taking place outside of traditional labor structures. A decade ago, the relationships between emerging workers’ centers in different parts of the country and traditional labor unions tended to be mistrustful – if not outright hostile, as Janice Fine discussed in her book “Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream.” Few ties existed in most cities. Since then, both sides have made inroads into this challenge and have strengthened their relationships with one another. In the past five years, the AFL-CIO has formed partnerships with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and with Interfaith Worker Justice.

Yet, gaps in organizational cultures and strategies still remain. The relationships between traditional unions and workers’ centers are continually being redefined, and the interaction of the groups represents a vital ongoing conversation.

As for Fuerza Laboral, Shagwert says: “Our board president has started calling us Unity Union. Which is what we are doing: Representing people in terms of grievances, doing a lot of the things a union would do for its members. But we’re not a union. We don’t identify with workers based on where they are working, we identify with them based on the abuses they are experiencing.”

While she cites alliances with unions such as SEIU and labor groups like Jobs with Justice as crucial to Fuerza’s work, she views her organization differently: “It’s the way I compare working on human rights to working on the rights of one small minority,” she says. “It doesn’t feel right to throw our hat in the ring and fight for one particular group of people. We are fighting for all of us because we are fighting for the most vulnerable.”

She adds, “I want to find a way to say this that isn’t critical of unions. Without unions what would our country be? But I see Fuerza as able to be a little more flexible than a union can be because we don’t represent one particular group of workers.”

Fuerza Laboral at once embodies an impulse toward mutual aid that has deep roots in the history of workers’ struggles and represents a new breed of organization that is expanding in areas where traditional union structures have not been able to reach. For a labor movement that desperately needs to make clear its relevance for all Americans, the task of deepening partnerships with such community allies could not be more urgent.

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Breaking Down the Silos: Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

On July 14, 2011

This article was originally published by Truthout for Amy’s Walking the Walk series.

“We don’t want just a seat at the table. We want to run the table,” Hugh Espey, the executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, said to me. “We want to run the table in order to win policies that put people before profits, people before polluters and communities before corporations.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), founded in the mid-1970′s, has grown over the past decades into one of the most thoughtful, aggressive, and innovative community-based organizations

in the nation, taking on issues of predatory lending, immigrant rights, clean elections, and the abuses of corporate agriculture.

If Espey’s vision is ambitious, it is backed by an impressive record of achievement and a bold organizing agenda – by grassroots campaigns that cross boundaries of race, bridge urban and rural constituencies and break down traditional barriers between issues. And his organization is pioneering this work not in a liberal metropolis, but at a statewide level in the heart of the country.

Increasingly, CCI is fashioning campaigns that draw on the strengths of traditional community organizing – the model most notably developed by Saul Alinsky – but that go beyond the confines of this model by building deep coalitions, employing sophisticated research, and combining direct action with policy reform and political engagement. Moreover, as a member of National People’s Action (NPA), a national “network of metropolitan, regional and statewide organizations that build grassroots power to advance racial and economic justice,” CCI is connecting what it is doing to a project with national scope.

All of these things made it an organization that I wanted to explore in more detail.

Taking on the Loan Sharks

When I spoke with Espey and Lisa Whelan, CCI’s special projects director, they were eager to tell me about their campaign against payday lenders.

Payday lending, Espey argued, “is legalized loan sharking, in that it traps people in a cycle of debt. It tends to prey on low-income people, people who are experiencing some sort of economic or financial crisis. Payday loans are short-term loans with exorbitant interest rates. If you annualized those interest rates over the course of the year, it would be about 400 percent.”

Over the course of several years, CCI found that community members had been trapped in debt because of these payday loans. After working with a variety of members to help them get out of this debt, they decided that they had to move beyond a bandaid approach of trying to locate more affordable credit for a small number of individuals. They decided to turn this realization into an organizing campaign that would bring people together and confront the lenders directly. CCI created “borrower action teams” that would bring a group of concerned citizens into the offices of the payday bankers.

As Whelan says, “We would take over the office. We would say, ‘Get the manager on the phone. Get the main company’s headquarters on the phone. We want to talk to a person who can make decisions.’ And we won a good number of those.” In a variety of cases, the direct actions resulted in the lending offices agreeing to refinance some of their more egregious loans.

A Much Bigger Fix

However, recognizing that they needed to incorporate a more systematic understanding of the issue, CCI also expanded beyond the traditional community organizing playbook, adopting research and analysis of the payday-lending industry. “We wanted to win on individual cases, but we also wanted a much bigger fix,” Espey says. “We looked at who’s financing these payday loan shops around the state. And we found out that it’s three or four or five main corporations that are making millions and millions of dollars off of these.”

“And then we asked, ‘Who’s financing those?’ and we come to find out that it’s big banks, like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. It’s the same big banks that crashed our economy and that got a taxpayer bailout. The big banks, because they can borrow from the Fed, get money at a half a point. Then they turn around and lend it out to payday loan corporations around the country, who end up charging us 400 percent.”

This wider view of the issue affected CCI’s organizing. First of all, organizers connected to work going on in other states. “Payday lending has also been a piece of the fair-lending work that NPA groups have been doing,” Espey notes, “so we hooked up with groups in Kansas and in Illinois whose members were facing the same issue and oftentimes were confronting the same banks.”

Furthermore, uniting with allies in the labor movement, CCI has joined in “Make Wall Street Pay” protests against Wells Fargo, linking their local payday campaign with national efforts.

CCI also started advocating for policy reforms at the state level. “We’ve been up at the Statehouse over the past two years with a coalition of folks working on this issue,” Espey explains. “And we’re pushing for state policy that would cap interest rates on payday loans at 36 percent rather than 400 percent, and that would also require payday lenders to notify borrowers of the availability of loan modifications.”

Connecting Diverse Communities

Over time, the payday-lending campaign has become a notable example of how CCI has been able to build alliances across diverse constituencies. People of color, immigrant workers and the white working class are those most likely to be directly affected by exploitative payday lending. But because many other people could relate to issues of credit and debt, they also felt a deep connection to the campaign.

Some middle class families got involved. Says Whelan, “As we were telling these stories about how people were being taken advantage of, some of the people who were most excited about the campaign were people who don’t have a payday lending shop in their community, who might not have even met someone before who needed a payday loan, but they could see just from a few simple descriptions of what was happening how wrong that is.”

Moreover, in Iowa, farming communities are especially sensitive to issues of debt and exploitative credit. “Farming is a very credit-intensive endeavor,” says Espey. So, for farmers, “some of those stories of the payday lending sounded very similar to how they’d been treated by their bankers.” Thus, the campaign could link urban and rural experiences.

All of this contributed to a vision more robust than that expressed in a typical community organizing campaign. “We want people to have a bigger and bigger vision of what ‘my neighborhood’ is,” says Espey. “It’s no longer ‘my street,’ but it’s my community, it’s my town, it’s my state, it’s my country.”

Fighting the Corporate Agriculture Lobby

Some of these same components – a desire to connect issues, build diverse alliances and expand beyond the tools traditionally used in community organizing – also characterize CCI’s other campaigns, including its fight against the abuses of large-scale corporate agriculture.

As CCI explains, the organization has taken a long-term interest in the issue of “whether livestock will be raised on sustainable family farms or produced in large, capital-intensive confinement facilities (factory farms) that concentrate the animals and their wastes in vast quantities and concentrate economic control in the hands of absentee investors.” Through this issue, CCI has engaged rural and small-town communities concerned about jobs and quality of life in those areas. But it has also mobilized environmentalists who recognize that factory farming is a key clean-water issue in the state.

“Ultimately, what we want is people in the middle of Des Moines standing alongside family farmers and rural people,” Espey says, “just like we want rural people standing together with people who live in big towns to fight back against payday lenders and predatory lenders.”

CCI members have taken direct action at the local level to confront landowners engaged in factory farming, and its leaders insist that organizing at this level will always be a central aspect of their work. “Direct action is part of the strategy to win,” Whelan notes. “Talking is great. Facts are great. But people have to move progressive change.”

At the same time, after repeatedly witnessing the power of the corporate agriculture lobby in state government, CCI has been motivated to get more aggressive about politics and policy. CCI is a nonprofit organization, so it doesn’t engage in electoral campaigns or lobbying, but organizers are interested in creating a 501(c)4 that can.

“We’re looking at the question of how to build up political power,” Espey says. “In our work at the State Capitol, again and again and again, we’re running up against powerful and well-financed groups and the people they put into office. The ‘ah-ha’ moment for us was about a year and a half ago. Coming out of a strategy meeting, we said, ‘We’re tired of getting our asses kicked up at the Statehouse.’”

“We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing, but we’re going to add another tool to our toolbox,” he adds.

In describing their approach to politics, Espey emphasized an approach that is different than simply getting a lesser-evil candidate elected and then sending new elected officials into office with hopes that they will do the right thing.

He explains, “Some of the 501(c)4 organizations we’ve seen set up in the past had no legs. They were viewed as organs of a political party. We’re not going to do that. What we’re doing is bringing the direct action organizing mentality into the (c)4 realm. We’re pushing our vision and our theory of change in a broader way – not being inside any political party, but being able to be part of governing ourselves.”

Connecting to a National Vision

A final interesting aspect of CCI’s work is its connection to a national network, NPA. Whelan says of CCI’s membership in NPA: “They have helped us think through our own growth as an organization, as well as being part of a network. They help us think about staffing issues; they help us think about how we are plugging into different issue campaigns, how do we make it work for us, how can we participate and help build national movements and progressive change. Those things are invaluable to us.”

George Goehl, NPA’s executive director, says, “I’ve worked with Iowa CCI for a long time, and I really can’t think of another organization in the country that has been around so long and never plateaued. More than anything, I think that the leadership has created a culture where, no matter how good they’re doing, they’re always willing to ask hard questions around, ‘How do we continue to transform what we’re doing and move forward?’”

Part of the process of always moving forward has been thinking about how to build deeper partnerships with the labor movement and other allies. For NPA, bringing groups together is about finding allies with similar values and political analysis. But it’s also about long-term strategy: “We definitely look for people who are interested in longstanding alignment versus simply coming together around one key, tactical moment or a strategic opportunity,” Goehl says.

CCI has taken these same criteria into building partnerships in its work in Iowa. While traditional community organizing groups have emphasized short-term, tactical alliances, Espey expressed a different vision: “Our role is to keep building transformational relationships with people. This means we get to know each other as people – I know what makes you tick; you know what makes me tick. I know when your birthday is; you know when my birthday is. I celebrate when you celebrate; I hurt when you hurt.”

“All this as opposed to transactional relationships, which is more like, ‘Can you show up next Tuesday at this event? Can we do these few things together over the next few months? And that’s it.’”

“Transformational is more of a marathon. Transactional is more of a sprint.”

For those interested in the marathon of creating progressive social change, CCI’s example has much to offer. The organization has been tireless in combining direct action and dogged community organizing with newer tools like deep partnerships, thoughtful research and invigorated political engagement. The gains it is making in Iowa suggest that its experience is a valuable one for study.

Moreover, talking with the organizers gives you a sense of the contagious optimism and excitement within the organization: “We’re the folks who don’t like to go to bed too early at night,” Espey says, “because we’re worried we might miss something.”

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An A-Team for Progressive Messaging in the States

On May 12, 2011

This article was originally posted on Truthout.

“Not everything that comes from D.C. is always better,” says Denise Cardinal. At a time when some of the most crucial political battles in America are taking place at the state level, we cannot wait for a progressive communications strategy to come down from national groups. Cardinal, who is executive director of both the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and ProgressNow, is among those working hard to promote an alternative approach.

ProgressNow is a network of state-level organizations that, among other things, brings together labor, environmental and reproductive rights groups around a common communications agenda. They bear witness to the fact that when progressives work in isolation or try to import a communications strategy from Washington, their efforts rarely leave behind the kind of grassroots infrastructure in the states that we need to move beyond defensive battles and to build strength for the long term.

Among ProgressNow’s state partners, Alliance for a Better Minnesota (ABM) provides an excellent example of how local organizations can do something different. Working as a coalition, they can create capacity for progressive messaging and communications that is far greater than anything the individual groups could manage on their own.

In the Footsteps of Paul Wellstone

ABM brings together more than 40 Minnesota organizations, including labor unions, the Sierra Club and Clean Water Action, and local branches of NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Cross-issue collaboration among such groups in Minnesota is not entirely new. Many of these organizations rose as influential political forces alongside the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, a progressive champion who emphasized the importance of coalition building. But ABM has extended this tradition in new ways.

In late 2005, a number of the political action committees associated with these organizations began discussing the idea that they would need to coordinate their efforts if they wanted to have a real impact on the governor’s election the following year. Previously, these organizations had conducted their own often overlapping communications programs – each pursuing their own door-knocking campaigns, television ads and issue mailings. Cardinal explains, “In the course of their conversation, it became obvious that if they pooled those resources and shared information with each other, they could be much more effective.”

Although the groups did not succeed in defeating Republican Tim Pawlenty in the 2006 gubernatorial election, they recognized that their coalition effort was a vast improvement over how things had been done before. They decided that the joint communications outfit should be made into a long-term entity. Hence, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota (ABD) was born.

“We are the communications consultant for the Minnesota progressive community,” Cardinal says now. Often, underfunded and understaffed organizations are unable to dedicate themselves to coordinating their messaging and positioning with others groups. ABD fills the gap by serving as a resource for these organizations and unifying efforts. It brings expertise in media relations, messaging and online communications to the common table. Furthermore, the organization allows the progressive community to collectively advance positions that any one group might be hesitant to shoulder by itself. “Sometimes I’m referred to as the ‘Messenger of Last Resort,’” Cardinal says. “When nobody else wants to say it, we’ll say what needs to be said.”

A Model for State-Level Intermediaries

We can learn several important things from the way in which ABM was formed and they way in which it now functions. In many ways, it is a model for how to create an effective “intermediary organization” at the state or regional level.

Intermediary organizations are operations that lend expertise and capacity to partner groups. Typically, they function at the national level, and typically they come into local areas only for short-term campaigns. ABM took a different approach, consistent with the model I call regional power-building. Here, local organizations, working in coalition, develop their own capacities. They develop on-going abilities to propose policy, to voice a progressive vision for local economies, and to run political campaigns. Having a communications A-Team is vital for all of these efforts.

In creating such a team, ABM did several things right. First, it formed out of a conversation among local groups about what needs they saw in the progressive community and what difficulties they thought could be overcome through collective economies of scale. Each organization understood that it needed better communications strategy, and each recognized that it could accomplish more by working together with the others. Because the partner groups had identified real needs and saw real benefits, they were invested in the intermediary from the start.

Second, the groups did not merely outsource communications to an outside organization, importing expertise from afar. Rather, they saw that they could take an existing local partnership and transform it into a permanent entity. They created an organization with its own staff and ability to raise funds, but one directly accountable to the partner groups on its board.

When it comes to capacity building and technical assistance, many national organizations, and many influential funders, tend to see a need among local groups and then try to solve it by bringing in outside advisers. Yet, they often end up disappointed, as the consultants sent to teach best practices are perceived as outsiders trying to sell their wares. The audience is almost invariably skeptical. The example of ABM illustrates how a totally different dynamic can be created, in which groups themselves come together to address a need they have collectively identified and for which they remain committed to brokering a common solution.

As a permanent state-level intermediary, ABM provides support and training to its partner organizations. It drafts and edits materials like press releases, talking points and mail pieces. It coordinates logistics for press events and provides media training for spokespeople in the groups. ABM assists organizations in Internet communications and using social media effectively. Its work extends into opinion and issue research. In addition to having a research director on staff, partner organizations contribute interns to help enhance their collective research capabilities.

In this way, while ABM grew out of a short-term need, it has become part of a long-term effort to build the capacity of the local progressive movement. This is a third important point to note. One of the key mistakes with communications is that some people view things like door-knocking campaigns and message formation only in terms of a single campaign – judging results solely based on what happens on the next Election Day.

In reality, door-knocking and public education should be viewed as part of the base-building efforts of progressive organizations. They should be recognized as a source of new membership and local knowledge for groups that remain active after electoral campaigns have closed up shop. ABM, as a lasting communications office accountable to lasting organizations, is structured to facilitate such activity. Guided by progressive partners that are in the fight for the long haul, it can balance short-term needs with long-term vision.

The Fight Continues

In 2010, ABM played an important role in successfully defeating Republican Tom Emmer and ultimately electing Mark Dayton as Minnesota’s governor. While the state’s Democratic establishment (known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) was immersed in an intense primary race, ABM, as an independent operation with a longer life than any individual candidate’s campaign, was able to focus on the bigger picture. “We knew that the one thing we could agree on was that Tom Emmer would be bad for Minnesota,” Cardinal says of her group’s partners.

Within an hour of Emmer being announced as the Republican nominee, ABM, in coordination with its partner groups, launched a web site called “Tom Emmer’s MN.” The site highlighted negative impacts for the state that would be felt if Emmer became governor. Because the web site had already been planned and researched, it was ready to go live as soon as his endorsement became official.

Rather than becoming mired in the highly competitive Democratic primary, ABM and its partners were able to spend the summer holding press events, creating online activities and talking to their members about what it would mean if Emmer became governor. Cardinal explains, “It was that constant drumbeat that people were focused on instead of the three-way fight that was happening on the Democratic side.”

In the end, the 2010 Minnesota’s governor’s race was extremely close, decided by a margin of fewer than 10,000 votes out of more than two million cast – or less than one half of one percent. There is no doubt that the early work in creating a united, coordinated opposition to Emmer was decisive in allowing Dayton to emerge victorious as a Democratic governor in a year when conservative candidates swept into statehouses across the country.

ABM’s work in the race provided a powerful illustration of why building permanent or ongoing capacity at the level of states and metropolitan regions is so important. When local groups can build deep coalitions, together recognize needs in their communities, then move beyond temporary alliances to build their own intermediary organizations, they have the ability to create a very different political reality than that which they would face as isolated entities.

Having Dayton in office at a time when Republicans have gained control of both legislative houses in Minnesota has been crucial. Currently, ABM is working with partner organizations on state budget issues. While debate is intense in Minnesota, the veto power of the governor serves as a critical stopgap. “We say all the time: ‘At least we’re not Wisconsin,’” Cardinal notes. “And that is exactly what we would be facing if it were not for the work that these organizations did.”

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