We Are AFSCME: Campaign Volunteer, Retiree Renita Hoover
by Cynthia McCabe | October 09, 2012
Renita Hoover makes calls to recruit campaign volunteers. (Photo by Cynthia McCabe)
MILWAUKEE, Wis. – Renita Hoover has already hung up the telephone she’s using to phonebank and recruit campaign volunteers on this afternoon, but she still has a message to deliver to her fellow union members.
“What you used to do as a union member doesn’t count,” says Hoover, before going on to underscore the urgency of the coming election. “Sometimes folks will come to the union meetings to say hi but they’re not in the struggle. What we’re fighting for now, it’s an ongoing struggle. It never stops.”
In a brightly lighted union hall a short drive from downtown, Hoover, of District Council 48 (Subchapter 36), and a few other volunteers with the Workers Voice/We Are Wisconsin coalition are calling Milwaukee residents to recruit volunteers for upcoming canvassing and phonebanking on behalf of Pres. Barack Obama and U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin. It’s a scene being repeated across the country as AFSCME volunteers come to halls just like this one – with walls bearing encouraging signs and tables piled with snacks and leaflets – all because they believe in the candidates and the cause.
Hoover’s reasons for supporting Obama and Baldwin are many: their support for the working middle class, workers’ rights and retirement security top the list. She wants to see even more of her fellow unionists fighting in these final weeks ahead of the Nov. 6 vote.
“If Obama doesn’t win, it would be more of Walker,” Hoover says, referencing the state’s union-busting governor, Scott Walker. “The policies the (right wing) is looking to put in place, if you really hear them and understand them, you will see they are not in the interest of the average person.”
When Walker attacked workers’ rights early last year, Hoover protested in Madison and in Milwaukee as part of a movement that reminded her of her roots as a young activist.
“We went back to the old school, to non-violence,” Hoover, 60, says. “You can get things done just by saying, ‘No.’ You can show disapproval, disappointment and unity by standing together.”
Hoover’s road to the protests of the past two years and this phonebank stretches back decades to the civil rights movement. As a young woman, she was active with the NAACP Youth Council and marched for fair housing policies in the city. Travel even further back and an 8-year-old Hoover would sit at the kitchen table and work on the puzzle in the union newspaper that came to the house. Her parents worked in the city’s meatpacking plants by day, making hot dog and sausage casings, and held union meetings in their home at night.
When Hoover entered the workforce in Milwaukee, first as a recreation department employee and ultimately as a longtime Milwaukee County employee, there was no question that she would join AFSCME.
“I was union,” says Hoover. “What else would I be?”
But today, Hoover knows that’s a question whose answer isn’t inherently clear to young workers as unionism declines under the pressure of increasingly restrictive laws passed by Walker and his cohorts. She talks to young people about unionism and its importance. They take what they get in the workplace, she says, because they don’t understand the power of solidarity and the improved working conditions and benefits that come through strong union activism.
So Hoover keeps at it, urging others to participate in a campaign that is at its core about boosting the working middle class and the unions that built it. When the polls close on Nov. 6 it won’t mean any significant break in Hoover’s activism. She’s not even sure what a quiet retirement looks like.
“I’m always looking for the next campaign,” Hoover says. “There’s always a campaign worth fighting for.”
Find out how you can participate in a phonebank, canvass or other volunteer opportunity in your area at AFSCME.org.
