By Laureen Lazarovici
As part of a bold new campaign to help workers win a voice on the job, Hoffa’s Teamsters are among an increasing number of unions retooling their programs and rechanneling resources to focus on the union movement’s bottom line: helping new members organize.
Last fall, the trash truck drivers who work for BFI in San Carlos, Calif., at the edge of Silicon Valley, were growing frustrated with management capriciously changing work rules, raising medical insurance costs and treating older workers disrespectfully. Workers say when they began forming a union with the Teamsters to win a voice on the job, BFI managers started making threats and calling mandatory anti-union meetings.
To combat the employer’s campaign, IBT activists mobilized religious allies and elected officials in the Northern California region just 30 miles south of San Francisco. Many of the workers are members of Our Lady of the Pillar Catholic Church, so IBT activists reached out to the church's pastor, the Rev. Domingo Orimaco. He visited workers at their homes and wrote a letter in support of workers telling them they have a right to respect in the workplace and the free choice to vote for the union. “For more than one hundred years, the Catholic Church has defended the right of workers freely to join unions,” wrote Orimaco. “As the pastor of many of those who work at BFI, I support your efforts to defend your dignity on the jobs.” Buyoyed by the support of religious leaders such as Orimaco and elected officials, including San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a strong majority of the 253 workers voted on Oct. 24 to join IBT Local 350.
The workers’ victory in San Carlos is just the beginning of what Teamsters President James P. Hoffa and IBT leaders are confident will be many more as the union embarks on a bold new campaign to help workers win a voice on the job and strengthen the entire union movement. The Teamsters are a model of the increasing number of unions that are retooling their programs and rechanneling resources to focus on the union movement’s bottom line: organizing new members.
At IBT’s 2001 convention, Hoffa appointed a blue-ribbon commission to propose restructuring the union’s finances—and boost organizing. Commission members solicited ideas and comments from union members nationwide, recommending the union increase dues to provide money for organizing campaigns, strikes and strengthening locals. IBT delegates ap-proved the recommendations at a special convention in April 2002. Since then, the organizing fund has grown to $13 million. The increased dues also provided more funding for joint councils and locals, many of which use the added funds to hire and train organizers.
Union leaders are focusing efforts on companies in the core Teamsters industries such as trucking and waste hauling. “We want strength in an industry and strength at the bargaining table,” says IBT Organizing Director Jeff Farmer. “We want organizing to support our members and our bargaining.”
IBT, like other successful organizing unions, is combining a winning strategy that involves increasing funding and other resources to organizing, focusing on the union’s core industries, training a diverse group of staff and volunteer organizers, aiming for card-check agreements and reaching out to community allies for support.
Teamsters leaders say money alone won’t help workers form unions and build workers’ strength: The union has created a new strategic vision for organizing. IBT is recruiting a diverse team of organizers and member-volunteers, who identify workplace leaders and help them create effective workplace committees and make house calls to prospective union members.
Last year, these leaders gathered for training sessions at three regional organizing conferences, culminating in the union’s first-ever national organizing conference in December. Activists reach out to religious, community and political allies, who lend moral support to workers and intervene with employers that interfere with workers’ freedom to form unions.
In many organizing drives, IBT activists are fighting for agreements that require employers to remain neutral during campaigns and provide for majority recognition through authorization procedures, typically known as “card-check.” Under card-check or majority verification procedures, typically an employer agrees to recognize a union after a majority of workers indicates a desire to form a union by signing authorizations.
Majority verification through authorizations is a fairer alternative to the drawn-out, contentious National Labor Relations Board process that enables employers to intimidate and harass workers. Taken together, these proven strategies are guiding the Teamsters to help workers win economic justice. Workers at more than 90 workplaces won a voice on the job with IBT in the past year, many through the authorization or card-check process. “We are on the verge of an organizing revolution,” says Hoffa. “We are ready to go.”
Proven method of organizing success
Activists are applying these strategies to boost the Teamsters nationwide organizing campaign among workers at USF Dugan, one of the many companies owned by the USF trucking empire. Nearly 10,000 USF workers are already IBT members, so enabling USF Dugan workers to win a voice on the job would strengthen the union within the company and throughout the trucking industry. “Our members understand that with deregulation and mergers in the industry...their power as IBT members will dwindle if there isn’t more organizing,” says Farmer.
“We do the same job out on the road, and we want them to be up there with us,” says Tim Tully, a shop steward at IBT Local 557 in Baltimore who works for USF Red Star. But that won’t happen until USF Dugan workers have a voice on the job, too, says Tully, who adds that he feels blessed because he has health benefits and a grievance procedure enforced by a strong Teamsters contract.
IBT organizers are recruiting members such as Tully to aid the Dugan workers’ campaign. Tully urged his manager to tell USF corporate decision makers that Teamsters members want the company to stop fighting organizing efforts. “I told him they shouldn’t be using USF funds to fight the union—a union I’m proud to be part of,” says Tully. “We’re all wearing pins that say, ‘USF: One Company, One Union.’ ”
In addition to mobilizing members, IBT leaders on the freight campaign are helping build strong workplace committees that are standing for workers’ rights and reaching out to community allies.
Workers backed by the strength of the community
Tyra Johnson, a BFI trash truck driver near Atlanta, has experienced that energizing sense of power. She is involved in the IBT organizing campaign because she is fed up with long hours, capricious rule changes, lack of a pension plan and persistent safety problems. “Our trucks break down every day, but we don’t get paid while they’re getting fixed,” says Johnson. “And we have to finish the route.”
Last fall her manager suspended her, accusing Johnson of a performance problem—though she suspects it was because during her break she was talking to another worker about joining the union. Because IBT activists had spent months building community support among groups such as the local Jobs with Justice chapter, the central labor council, Concerned Black Clergy and the NAACP, they could reach out to elected officials and the Rev. Joseph Lowry, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and mobilize them to call company officials and urge them to give Johnson her job back. “I was back to work the next day—and the manager apologized,” says Johnson. Having community support “makes me strive harder to get the union there,” she says.
During the Dec. 10 International Human Rights Day mobilization in Atlanta, community allies joined workers—including Johnson—in revving up the union movement’s campaign to restore workers’ freedom to form unions. More than 20 state and local elected officials, including Mayor Shirley Franklin and U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), vowed their support. “They came because they know unions make communities thrive,” says Chuck Stiles, an IBT organizer in Atlanta. “If people are treated with respect and earn a decent wage, the whole community benefits.” Johnson, like so many other workers involved in the Teamsters’ newly invigorated organizing campaigns, agrees. “I’m not just in it for me,” she says. “I’m in it for all of us.” @
