A "Labor Intensive" Strategy For Building Workers’ Power

by Peter Rachleff

At noon on a beautiful June day in suburban
Minneapolis, eighty-five women and men streamed out of
the U.S. West corporate "campus" building,each one
carrying a pink, lime green, or lemon yellow square.
Each square bore a single letter in black paint.
Laughing, they lined up in a particular order, spelling
out "D-O-W-N-S-I-Z-I-N-G A-T U-S-W-E-S-T = R-O-A-D-K-
I-L-L F-O-R Y-O-U". They marched to a highway
overpass half a block away, took their positions, and
held their signs up to the traffic speeding below.
Local TV news cameras rolled. Horns honked, especially
from big trucks. "Listen," one woman said to another,
"They support us!"

This action, the first ever undertaken by these
white collar workers, was several weeks in the making.
Contract negotiations between their union, the
Communications Workers of America, and the fourteen-
state "baby bell," US West, had bogged down over
management demands for staffing cuts, the right to
outsource work, and higher worker co-pays for health
insurance. CWA activists sought to put pressure on
management by involving and organizing their rank-and-
file members to communicate the union’s stance directly
to the public. They hoped to demonstrate, on the one
hand, that the members knew what was at stake and were
united, and, on the other, that the public was
sympathetic to the workers and might turn against the
company. Given the growing number of complaints aired
in the media about customer dissatisfaction with phone,
internet, and related services, these were not far-
fetched ideas.

Some months earlier, CWA stewards had begun brown
bag lunch meetings with workers. They discussed the
stakes of action and inaction, and explored tactics
that might attract widespread involvement, be fun to
do, and grab public attention. Once the plan was
hatched, workers met one night over pizza to make the
signs. More than a quarter of all the workers in that
one building participated. This sort of action helped
bring US West management back to the bargaining table
in June with an improved offer, and it averted a strike
later that summer. The action also left this
particular local with an energized membership.
Attendance at union meetings went up, participation in
union elections rose, and more people were even willing
to run for offices.

This experience demonstrates how much can be
accomplished with a strategy that links the "internal"
– the mobilization of the membership - with the
"external" - communication with the public, customers,
community members, etc., in order to put pressure on
management. Even in a hostile political climate with a
largely unsympathetic mass media, and even in a legal
climate that limits unions’ options, this sort of
strategy, a "labor intensive" strategy, not only brings
immediate results but it also alters the long- term
balance of power. Unions can again merit the
nomenclature,"organized labor," as they fight not only
for their own members’ material interests but also for
the students, the consumers, the patients, the clients,
and the larger community, who, in this political/
economic climate, is experiencing reductions in the
quantity and quality of services they receive.

That same summer, bus drivers represented by the
Amalgamated Transit Union went on strike in the Twin
Cities. Poor and working-class inner city residents
were far more impacted by the strike than were suburban
commuters. When local radio, television, and newspapers
put on the spin that the strike was not having a major
impact since highways were not gridlocked, the union
devised a strategy to enhance the voices of communities
of color. Rank-and-file bus drivers were surveyed for
their church affiliations, and then they were asked to
become spokespersons for the union’s issues within
their respective congregations. Given crash mini-
courses in public speaking, they were dispatched to
approach their ministers and fellow congregants,
seeking common ground (the preservation, if not
expansion, of bus routes, decent wages and benefits for
working people who hailed from diverse communities,
etc.) around the strike and the future of mass transit.
These actions generated letters, phone calls, and
emails to the media and the management of the transit
service, as well as a collective statement by a number
of Twin Cities clergy.

Here, then, was another application of a "labor
intensive" strategy. Union leaders and activists
recognized union members and their off-work
relationships and networks as "resources." With some
direction and education, they could play an important
role in shifting the balance of power in a labor-
management conflict. This particular experience even
had the positive outcome of helping to inspire the
organization of a Twin Cities Clergy and Labor Network,
which has become a resource in other labor conflicts
since.

The Minnesota Association of Professional
Employees, an 11,000-member public employee union, is
applying this sort of strategy in its new "Public
Employee Pride" (PEP) campaign. The political
discourse in the once-liberal state of Minnesota -
driven now by right-wing radio talk show hosts and
newspaper columnists, conservative think tanks,
suburban evangelicals, and political demagogues - fuels
hostility to taxation and public services, and scorn
for the workers who provide them (who supposedly
receive "Cadillac" benefits while leaning on their
shovels). In this climate, stories abound of public
employees hiding their careers from their neighbors,
keeping low profiles at community meetings, and
doubting their own worth as workers and citizens.

The PEP program has taken shape to turn this
situation around. It began with labor history and
strategy lectures at lunchtime meetings in local
workplaces, and it has grown to include email and
telephone trees for communicating labor issues worker
to worker and mobilizing phone calls, letters to the
editor, emails, and petition signatures in response to
anti-worker, anti-government blather from pundits and
politicians. It is also working with locals in
specific departments, from the Pollution Control Agency
and the Department of Health and Human Services to the
Department of Labor and the Department of Natural
Resources, to produce position papers for public
distribution which will advocate for the expansion of
services in order to better the quality of life for all
Minnesotans. At some point, MAPE expects to use
various forms of public demonstrations, informational
picketing, guerrilla theater, mass lobbying, and the
like — but all of this will lie on the foundation of
member participation built through PEP. It is hoped
that these tactics will feed into a contract campaign
in the summer of 2005 with goals of preserving health
benefits and improving wages for state employees.
Strengthening members’ commitment to the union and the
union’s relationships to the wider community will
follow from such success, for ensuing budget cycles and
labor contracts.

This "labor intensive" strategy seeks no short
cuts, no political white knights, no charismatic union
leaders, no loquacious lobbyists, no brilliant
consultants, to pull the union’s chestnuts out of the
fire. Union leaders and activists turn first to their
members, offering them education, information,
strategies, tactics, organizational vehicles,
resources, and targets for action. In turn, membership
involvement, empowerment, and ownership will grow.
There will be more activists with responsibility to
recruit yet more members to the on-going campaign, to
make inroads into student, patient, client, and
consumer communities and bring them on board.

Through such "labor intensive" strategies unions
can fight their immediate battles in ways that will
build workers’ power in the future.

Peter Rachleff Professor of History Macalester College
St. Paul, Minnesota

A labor historian, Rachleff worked as an educational
consultant to the CWA and MAPE in the two campaigns he
describes in this article and he was part of the
support committee for the Amalgamated Transit Union bus
drivers.