Kicking their legs like Rockettes, affluent kids leaflet SUV's for UFCW
From Gangbox: Construction Workers News Service
Students, others learn firsthand about unions
Summer program teaches about organizing from the ground up.
Philadelphia Inquirer
By Jane M. Von Bergen
Inquirer Staff Writer
July 12, 2002
Learning by doing, students Jennifer Pickford, 21, of Steubenville, Ohio, and Tori Collins, 25, of Chicago, hand out flyers at Genuardi's in Wynnewood, saying the gorcery store needs to have union representation for workers.
One, two, three SUVs passed by and no one grabbed a leaflet from the fledgling union organizers in the parking lot at the Wynnewood Genuardi's supermarket.
Students Jennifer Pickford, 21, from Steubenville, Ohio, and Tori Collins, 25, from Chicago, linked arms and kicked their legs like the Rockettes. Still no takers.
"We're trying all different techniques," Pickford said, laughing.
Their goal? Helping the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 unionize Genuardi's 7,000 employees.
Too old and too sophisticated for summer camp and too idealistic to spend their summer shuffling papers at some business internship, 160 young people nationwide, including nine assigned to Philadelphia, are spending four weeks learning about the labor movement from the inside.
The program, called Union Summer, was created by the AFL-CIO in 1995 "to re-establish the story about what the labor movement has done for working people - a story that we have not been telling people for a long time," said Nancy Harvin, its director. Union Summer is modeled after Freedom Summer, the 1964 youth bus trip to support the civil rights movement.
"As a labor movement," she said, "we were fairly moribund in what we are doing. We were not paying attention to young people. We needed to change the way we dealt with things."
Union membership has held steady for the last five years at 16.3 million, but it has declined as a percentage of the labor force. In the mid-1950s, up to one-quarter of all workers were unionized. In 2001,
13.5 percent belonged to unions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
Besides getting some willing hands, the AFL-CIO wants to recruit organizers, build a cadre of potential union leaders, and focus young people on workers' problems and struggles, Harvin said.
"This is a very interesting group of young people who were activists in their own right, but didn't know much about the labor movement," she said.
Union locals involved in an active organizing campaign, such as Local 1776's drive to unionize Genuardi's, can apply to be a host Local for a Union Summer group. The AFL-CIO pays a stipend of $250 a week per person and the union local creates the program and covers lodging and local transportation.
Local 1776, in Blue Bell, is among five union locals working to organize employees at Genuardi's. The company has been nonunion since it began in 1920, while most other stores across the country owned by Safeway, its corporate parent, are unionized. Safeway acquired Genuardi's in 2001.
Since June 14, Union Summer participants here have visited homes of Genuardi's workers, held an organizing rally, and participated in a July 4 "news event" as Mayor Street signed a Declaration of Workers' Rights at Independence Hall. The Philadelphia program ends tomorrow.
On Monday, Local 1776's group had a full, but typical, slate - working on a newsletter, leafleting at the Wynnewood Genuardi's in the afternoon, tagging nearby houses with door-hangers and returning to their hotel to watch a documentary about the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike.
After a hot hour or two at the parking lot distributing the leaflets to customers, August "Augie" Montez and Luke Anderson didn't mind strolling through Wynnewood's shady streets hanging leaflets from doorknobs.
Montez, 28, will probably fill the AFL-CIO's goal of recruiting future organizers. He quit his bicycle messenger job in Chicago to participate in Union Summer and plans to go on to a more intense program next month.
"I'm trying to pursue this as a career," he said.
"Right now, the labor movement is in need of organizers," Montez said. "It's a thankless job. You put in long hours, you lead an erratic life, and you get a lot of negative reactions. A lot of people don't have the ability to handle that, but I happen to be a person that has the capacity for it."
So far, he has worked as a roofer, as a dispatcher, as a mechanic and as a bike messenger. None of the jobs had health benefits. "I think a lot of time, the workers are very overlooked," he said.
Anderson, 20, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania and the son of a Penn professor, will probably never be a union organizer. He wants to be a college professor.
Union Summer "is a good way to effect some type of change. It's better than working in some law firm for $15 an hour," Anderson said. "This is something that makes you feel like you are doing something good."
Union Summer has given him a glimpse into the working-class world - one that he does not see regularly. He began to understand that blue-collar workers take their jobs seriously, just as professionals do.
"They have become so much more real to me," he said.
Not everyone in the community of workers is kicking up their heels, this letter to the editor suggests:
It says volumes about the afl-cio's advanced state of decay that they can't recruit actual union members to be volunteers, organizers, and/or future leaders.
Perhaps they've so alienated the "dues units" [that's internal labor boss jargon for regular union members like you and me] that no actual rank and file members want to volunteer for the union.
Or....perhaps they can't trust us. After all, if the "dues units" get control of the unions we might actually fight the bosses to make wages higher, and working conditions better.
So, they recruit affluent kids from Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Temple. I guess the union bureaucracy feels more comfortable with upscale
folks, than with their own low to moderate income members.
Fraternally,
Gregory A. Butler, Local 608 Carpenter,
For Gangbox : Construction Workers News Service
quote:
Union Summer has given him a glimpse into the working-class world - one that he does not see regularly. He began to understand that blue-collar workers take their jobs seriously, just as professionals do.
"They have become so much more real to me," he said.
Great! 
This punk thinks "we're real" now.
:sigh:
This is such garbage. The UFCW can't even pay their own members to organize for them. I'd really like to know what they were thinking when they decided to bring in outside help.
quote:
"I'm trying to pursue this as a career," he said.
Bicycle messenger to union organizer?
I just don't see the logic in employing & training a completely inexperienced person to organize employees when there are 1.4 million members available to do that.
Can the UFCW get any stupider? (rhetorical question )
quote:
Can the UFCW get any stupider?
Every time I think they've reached the outer limits of stupidity, they surprise me.
There is just something about this whole strategy that drives home how disconnected, how desparate and how elitist the biz-u-guys have become. The thought of a bunch of well-healed preppies doing the can-can to rally the poor folk into the waiting arms of Doug 'n Mike's Union - makes me feel conflicted. I'm not sure whether I want to laugh, cry or vomit.
