Organizing With a TWIST (of Arms)

Political pressure forces city administrators to abide by the law, while media coverage puts mayors in check.

By Jimmie Turner

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO & RICHMOND,INDIANA

"I’m not one to stand on the sidelines and watch people do things for me," says Danny Gonzalez. "If I want something done, I jump in with both feet and get involved."

Dozens of Gonzalez’ peers in Albuquerque — professionals who grew tired of watching other unionized city employees negotiating fair contracts — obviously felt the same way. They teamed with AFSCME Council 18 to sway public opinion and force the city’s mayor and administrators into honoring an ordinance that authorizes collective bargaining. Now, more than 1,000 white-collar workers across 18 departments are in the preliminary stages of structuring a first contract.

Almost 1,400 miles to the northeast in Richmond, Ind., some 100 workers from the sanitation and street maintenance departments waged a similar organizing campaign. Their goal: getting the mayor to live up to a city ordinance that would make them a bargaining unit under Council 62. Just like their counterparts in New Mexico, they prevailed. They, too, can begin to form a negotiating committee to hammer out a first contract.

POLITICS OF ORGANIZING. Both groups applied political pressure against local lawmakers, but their efforts were steeped in AFSCME’s basic organizing principles: Before grappling with government, activists had to rally their co-workers, using such grassroots tactics as card signings, house calls and worksite discussions.

In both cities, when a significant number of the frustrated civil servants volunteered to champion the causes of their respective units, activists’ hard work paid off. Media and labor allies proved supportive. In the end, politicians who were staunch opponents of unions recanted and opened the door to collective bargaining.

STAY WITHIN THE LAW. Albuquerque and Richmond employ many unionized workers, and in Albuquerque about 2,500 are represented by AFSCME. For a variety of reasons, their mayors wouldn’t let other employees organize.

AFSCME’s activists succeeded despite New Mexico and Indiana currently having no collective bargaining law on the books. The New Mexico effort was aided by the fact that union members managed to preserve negotiating rights in Santa Fe and Albuquerque after the repeal of the state’s collective bargaining law in 1998.

After the city council approved an October 2000 measure that directed city administrators to hold a union election for 200 management-level employees, Albuquerque Mayor Jim Baca, a firm believer in privatization, vetoed it. Under pressure from the Council 18 organizing committee and other union advocates, the council overrode the veto, 9-0. In December, the council passed an amendment to the city code that allows for recognition through proof of majority support, known as a card check.

Faced with intense political pressure from AFSCME allies and other public officials, Baca changed direction like the wind and stated: "I like to work with organized labor because I think it’s eas-ier to negotiate things. It’s good for the city, it’s good for the employees and, I think, in the long run it’s good for the taxpayers."

In Richmond, workers tussled with the administration for two years before getting their union election certified. Prior to the election in October, the demands for unionism, media attention and other pressures forced Mayor Dennis Andrews to resign. His successor, Shelley Miller, threw out the victory.

A second election was held in February, with the employees voting overwhelmingly to form an AFSCME union. They held their breath because Miller had until Feb. 28 to certify the results. Even if she did that, there was concern that the city’s three-person sanitation board would reject it. On the night of Feb. 26, however, Miller agreed to honor the election; the board, appointed by the mayor, followed suit the next morning.

ORGANIZING ‘BY EXAMPLE.’ Activists from both cities had lots of reasons for motivating their peers to take on lawmakers. Jeff Millsaps’ reasons were painful. A sanitation crew leader in Richmond, he was buried alive one day in a 9-foot trench while laying sewer pipe. A box supporting a hole caved in. The device was unsafe, and Millsaps says officials were aware of that.

He recalls being "interred" for a few minutes that "seemed like forever." When workers dug him out, he had a dislocated shoulder as well as a broken arm, leg and hip.

Out of work for nine months, he returned to the same job and was working with an inexperienced crew, laying more pipe, when tragedy struck again. "[We were] putting one piece of pipe inside another one, and I turned around and told them to wait a minute," remembers Millsaps. But the crew members had already moved to join the two pipes together and his right index finger was sliced off at the second knuckle.

Throughout both ordeals, officials tried to pin the blame on him to avoid liability. Without a union representing him, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. As a result, however, workers who for 20 or 30 years had been trying to organize with other unions suddenly woke up. "Once they saw what happened to me, and really stopped to think about it, they didn’t need much convincing at all," says Millsaps. "They all pretty much knew that we had to do something."

In Albuquerque, too, understanding was the first step. Loretta Naranjo Lopez, who works in the city’s planning department, explains that once co-workers realized that they shared the same concerns, organizing became eas-ier. "Numbers really bring a lot of support and power, and we need to organize together and make changes together."

TO COURT & COUNCIL. As support for the union grew, the unionists turned media support in their favor. And the road to the Albuquerque media ran through the politicians.

Convincing the city council to vote unanimously and override Mayor Baca’s veto reflects the work done by the organizing committee. "We really knew where to go and who to talk to," says Gonzalez, a paratransit division man-ager in Albuquerque’s Sun Van transit system. "As soon as the city council got involved, that’s when all the media coverage started. We have a very liberal council, and they started to make [Baca] look really bad. He almost didn’t have a choice. All of a sudden, we didn’t even need an election. The council just saw that it was the right thing to do" — and established voluntary recognition through a card check.

Richmond’s media, by contrast, were drawn into the campaign by public opinion. The city has a newspaper that, according to Dan Harris, an operator in the street department, "very seldom does anything good for labor. So I was amazed by the results we got from them. The press is going to do whatever sells papers, and when they saw that the people were behind us, they said, ‘Well, there has to be something going on here.’"

Carol Ferguson, a weigh master at a Richmond landfill, adds, "They [the media] were totally against us at first. But now the guy that does stories about this calls me and we just talk like we’re friends. I think people have realized that we’re not out to hurt the residents. We just want some respect and a voice where we work, and we finally got that point across to the newspaper."

BUILDING MOMENTUM. In Richmond, 400 union supporters rallied on Main Street in April 2000. To their delight, Council 62 brought in Taylor Rogers, one of the 1,300 African-American sanitation workers who in 1968 organized a two-month strike in Memphis for the right to form a collective bargaining unit. It was during the strike that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Rogers, a former president of Local 1733, told the demonstrators: "Stand up. Be tall. Look the Man in the face and say, ‘We ain’t going to take it no more.’"

"That had a tremendous impact on all of us," says Rick Jacob, a section leader in the street department. "For him to come all this way to support our cause just impressed the hell out of all of us. The similarities are amazing. You’d think 40 years later that we would have come a long way, but there’s still a lot of the same issues now as there were back then."

The Richmond workers make clear that if things hadn’t gone their way in February, they would have kept on fighting the mayor and her constituents. "‘No’ is not in our vocabulary," Millsaps says emphatically.

Recalls Harris of a discussion he had with then-Mayor Andrews: "I said, ‘We’re going to get the union. When it happens, you may not be the mayor and I may not be here, but the street department is going to have a union.’ He just looked at me and didn’t answer." Harris pauses and laughs, "He left, and I’m still here."

SMELLING FEAR. Barbara Kaiser, a code team inspector with the Albuquerque Police Department, was the former president of AFSCME Local 2962 (Council 18) before being promoted to her current job two years ago. She saw the writing on the wall when she smelled fear emanating from the administration. "The city got a little bit afraid of the fact that we were coming out in numbers and that we were going to be able to have elections," she says. "I knew this unit was going to make it."

An experienced union activist, Kaiser says officials ordered the employees to re-sign cards after the initial election petition went through. City administrators tried the anti-union practices of reclassifying workers and breaking up work units to dilute the vote and undermine worker confidence, but to no avail. "We realized the games that the city was playing to try to stall this union — keep it from going forward — and they came out massively to sign the cards."

Those numbers shook up the administration. Lawrence Rael, Baca’s chief administrative officer, feels that a union of city managers would strengthen AFSCME’s solid power base and challenge the influence of Albuquerque lawmakers over city politics. Rael told the Albuquerque Journal: "If they are all part of the same union, I begin to wonder, and I would as a citizen, who is in charge?"

Kaiser counters that the mayor wasn’t looking at a positive aspect of unions: When employees have a voice in the workplace, they’re apt to take more pride in their jobs, which further increases productivity and efficiency.

Another clue to the union’s forthcoming success was the apparent inexperience of the city’s lawmakers. Kaiser recalls hearing statements that AFSCME wouldn’t be able to handle a local with more than 1,000 people.

"I was just floored by that, because it showed me the naiveté of the people who were out there saying it. They didn’t understand that AFSCME has been doing this work for years, and has locals that are tremendously larger than anything Albuquerque could imagine. They really had not done their homework."

A NEW LEADER. For Ferguson, everything boiled down to this: "Why are you treating us like second-class citizens? Is it because we pick up your trash?"

She couldn’t understand why Richmond recognized unions for transit workers and for the police and fire departments — but not for sanitation and street workers. As an organizer, she heard the concerns of her fellow workers. As an employee, she saw an abundance of safety hazards and environmental violations.

When some of the workers expressed hesitation about organizing, Ferguson reminded them that the city would never respect them unless they fought to change the things that frustrated them on the job. In doing so, she made a discovery of her own.

"I still surprise myself every day. In two years, I’m a changed person. I have more backbone to stand up for what’s right — not just for me, but for my fellow workers, too.

"If there’s something in your heart that tells you you’re being wronged, there’s got to be somebody who’s going to stand up. It took a lot of courage for me to do that. I work here. My fiancé works here. My son-in-law works here. My grandchildren may work here some day. So I figured if I could make things better, I’d do what I could."