Going to the MAT

Faced with low membership in Local 3299, the University of California Contract Campaign mobilized Member Action Teams. The result: a break-through contract and several hundred feisty new activists.

By Roger M. Williams

Torrance, California

It’s a beautiful Southern California Sunday, and 20-odd members of Local 3299, all employees of the vast University of California (UC) system, are voluntarily spending it indoors at a retreat. They’re talking union business, their business: the planning and implementation of an unusual activist/leadership program — Member Action Teams (MATs).

On this second day of the retreat, although sunshine and warm air beckon, nobody wanders outside the meeting room. Hardly a glance even goes in that direction. Leaders refer frequently to hand-lettered charts that line the walls, and everyone listens intently to what others are saying. At session’s end, people leave energized, purposeful and knowledgeable about what they — and their colleagues back home — are supposed to do.

Asked if their MAT work has made a difference, a pair of employees at UC/San Diego flash broad smiles that say, Absolutely! "When we finished working on our contract campaign," explains Robert Hardrick, "the members we dealt with thanked me for getting them involved, turning them on to the union. That kind of response empowers you to the point where you almost want to explode."

The MAT program has enabled rank-and-file members — most with no leadership experience, many with little union experience, some without a firm command of English — to become front-line commanders in the workplace. MAT recruits, who begin as "Organizers" and graduate to "Captains," stir their brothers and sisters to activism and action, in the workplace and beyond. For example, they stand up to management to set good examples for co-workers, help set union strategy for job actions and negotiations, volunteer in political campaigns, sign up members for PEOPLE (Public Employees Organized to Promote Legislative Equality, AFSCME’s political-action arm).

Not by chance

In a sense, MAT Organizers function as stewards, though oriented more to activism than to providing traditional forms of assistance. An informal motto of the California campaign: "Whenever possible we fix problems by mobilizing, not by filing grievances."

None of the MAT activities — or the follow-up — are left to chance. Each of the University of California’s nine campuses has an action plan as well as overall and individual-unit goals for the numbers of members to be recruited. Each participant has a goal, too. Beyond that, MAT members represent change within AFSCME — to a strong new emphasis on organizing.

The MAT program became an essential element of the UC Contract Campaign, which in itself is one of our most successful recent efforts. Although not unique to this campaign (MAT operations are also underway in Nebraska and Missouri), nowhere else is the program so fully developed.

"In little over two years," says Bob Lawson, who until recently directed AFSCME’s Western regional office, "we’ve come from basically no activists to several hundred of them — MAT members who are working hard and well to get their co-workers really involved in the union."

A host of problems

To appreciate the accomplishments of both the MAT program and the contract campaign, one needs to understand the situation before the campaign cranked up. During most of the 1980s and ’90s, Local 3299 floundered. Several problems were instrumental: anti-union management; weak servicing; and, not least, a lack of financial resources.

As recently as 1983, when UC employees first voted for collective bargaining, Local 3299 represented 32,000 UC workers. But by 1997, when a clerical unit voted to form an independent union, the number of workers represented had been cut almost in half, and only 2,200 of those were dues-paying members.

Two years later, the local confronted the opportunity (and challenge) of "fair-share" legislation, which obliged employees working under a union contract to pay a portion of that union’s dues. AFSCME lobbied very effectively for the bill.

So the International formulated an "organizing/survival plan" agreement with Local 3299. A key part of it was to recruit an experienced team of organizers who could help hundreds of new leaders learn how to solve problems through organizing and action. To ensure the agreement’s success, the International provided substantial financial support. By April 2000, the UC Contract Campaign was born and fully staffed.

Activists wanted

There were formidable challenges. The local was still held in low regard by a substantial portion of the UC workforce. And the university system was known as a bad employer: tough in negotiations, prone to keeping large numbers of workers in temporary positions rather than offering them job security, decent wages and benefits.

UC management was only one of the obstacles. A lead organizer recalls that when he arrived on the UCLA campus, he found only a union of 600 members out of 4,000 employees and little information about the 600: "I didn’t know who they were or where they worked."

The contract campaign rode on what Lawson concedes was "a huge wish list. There’s always a risk in making a long one, but in this case it kept management off guard." High among the demands were job-security protections for both "casual" and career employees. The campaign’s overriding objective was to create a union that people would want to join and then play an active role in.

While MAT participants helped mobilize members to fight for aggressive contract demands, AFSCME applied political pressure in the state capital. Pres. Gerald W. McEntee, who had first asked Gov. Gray Davis (D) to support the fair-share legislation, then urged him to closely monitor negotiations between AFSCME members and the university. John Burton, president of the state senate and a power in California politics, offered assistance. And our Sacramento lobbyist, Willie Pelote, continued the effective behind-the-scenes work he had done to promote fair share.

A winning contract

The aggressive mobilization and negotiation strategy paid off bigtime. Despite a daunting $17 billion state-budget deficit, UC agreed to a 2 percent, across-the-board raise for 2002 plus an additional 3 percent that will go into a special, interest-bearing account that employees can cash out when they retire or leave the university.

The across-the-board increases effectively killed UC’s unfair "merit pay" scheme. Improvements were made in shift differentials and grievance procedures. In addition, the university promised to stop contracting away most union jobs and to formulate a plan to bring back outsourced custodial positions. The contract also ended UC’s practice of replacing career jobs with "per-diem" ones that provide no security and skimpy benefits, and it allowed per-diem workers who want career positions to get them. In safety and health, employees on every campus won the right to create committees with the power to operate training sessions and programs.

Down the list

On the political front, the contract for the first time allowed workers to join PEOPLE by means of check-off. MAT activists promptly used that provision to ratchet up the PEOPLE program, signing up more than 600 new contributors.

Other specific victories went right down the union’s wish list, including the right for union members to bargain over parking fees: UC agreed to bargain over all proposed increases. (As a MAT Organizer commented at the retreat, referring to the current fee on his campus, "For $71 a month, they should be picking me up at my door.")

The ratification vote in January produced a resounding 95 percent in favor, while adding 524 members to swell the local to more than 8,000 — almost four times its size when the campaign began. Some members were disappointed with the 2 percent raises. But the campaign strategists con-sider that a realistic number — especially when added to the big raises won for the previous year. "We wanted to get a total package of 5 percent," Lawson points out, "and we did — the raise plus the 3 percent CAP that goes to every worker who belongs to the UC Retirement Program."

As the participants in the MAT retreat drift away to begin the trip home, Gail Price and LaKesha Harrison linger to talk about the program. Says Harrison, a licensed vocational nurse at UCLA’s Santa Monica Hospital: "Before I joined the union, management said it was going to close the operations on my floor and lay us off." She joined a group of workers who decided to organize and challenge the management decision. That experience, Harrison says, "pulled me in" to activism. She has gone on to become president of the local.

Harrison adds, "When people ask me, ‘What’s the union done for you?’ I say, ‘A union’s like a personal trainer. It shows you how to gain power so you yourself can do what needs to be done.’"

Price, a patient biller at UC/Davis and secretary-treasurer of the local, joined AFSCME after being victimized by a management "evaluation": with raises tied to the evaluation, "everybody in the department was rated below par. I distributed flyers, signed people up for the union and coordinated a couple of marches to change the rules." Soon she joined MAT, and has gone from there to do organizing work for the local as a lost-timer.

Making calls count

"Sometimes I can’t believe this [MAT effort] works, but it does," Price says. "Not long ago at Davis, for instance, we were caught up in an illegal-overtime crisis. I made a couple of calls, others in my network made more calls, and within an hour about 60 people showed up to protest. We won the fight."

Nowadays, Price says, the power of the MATs has forced UC bosses to be more respectful. "Management shut down our first MAT meeting," she recalls. "But when we got organized, it got so my boss would work with me to get my co-workers involved to solve problems."

John Sims, a UC/Berkeley food service worker, came to MAT after it helped him redress problems caused by working outside his classification. "I had never worried about the next person — just concentrated on ‘getting what John has coming.’ That experience gave me the feeling that I must give back, and I’ve been doing that as fast as the opportunities come to me." So fast, in fact, that he rocketed up through the MAT ranks to the position of Captain.

Steve DeLuca, a cook, became incensed at the injustice — "favoritism, discrimination" — he saw in the dining hall. Since joining MAT, he has stood up to management on another outside-classification issue: "A food service worker was being sent out as a cook. I’ve seen that done a hundred times, and this time I wouldn’t let the guy go. We had to shout a little, but management backed down." DeLuca has risen to the rank of MAT Organizer.

Stephanie Martinez, who drives a bus on the Berkeley campus, has taken her passion for community activism (she serves on the local public-housing authority) right into MAT. In her unit, she has signed up "all but two" of the dozen workers. "What I enjoy most," she says, "is bringing in somebody who at first doesn’t want to join. I gave one lady our card even before she knew she was going to be hired."

At the Southern California retreat, the participants talked intently about the next steps MAT will take. Whether the target group is part- or full-time workers, UCLA’s LaKesha Harrison is eager to tackle the task. "Those people are working side by side with us, often for $6 an hour and no benefits. They need the power of MAT. It’s worked for us."