By Richard Mellor in California, Afscme Local 444, retired.
Note: I am putting this personal account, a little bit of history of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (Afscme) Local 444, on the blog because a considerable number of my former and present co-workers read it and also because I know that many rank and file activists like myself and the people mentioned herein who fought the good fight in the workplace where the “rubber meets the road” can identify with it. Besides which, it still has important lessons for today.
I know that if you also waged an open struggle against the labour hierarchy and its concessionary policies, you will find some similarity with this struggle at work. We have a lot in common no matter what industry.
Sisters and brothers, comrades and co-workers at work and in local 444 and 2019. I am clearing out my garage and, naturally, there are boxes of union-related material I have saved here, local stuff, international and other records, all from 30 years of union/political activity.
Unions locals bargaining together
I came across a newsletter from April 2003. There is an article in it from Marty Englander, a union fighter I have a great deal of respect for, though we had our differences; she worked at SD1 [Special District 1]. She reported that “For the first time, all four unions are bargaining together.” She was quite excited and wrote that, “Hopefully this experience will lead to better understanding among all four locals and will be a first step towards working together to solve many issues at Ebmud”.
[This was the East Bay Municipal Utility District, a public water agency serving around three million people on the east side of San Francisco Bay. SD1 covered the effluent side, the ‘shit plant’ as we called it]
I was out of the leadership by 2003 and retired the following year. Here we are 17 years later and the benefits, wages and retirement that I was fortunate enough to have, thanks to the old timers that built the union, have been driven backwards and the two Afscme locals are still apart.
The leaderships of the four unions meeting together to discuss only economic issues is not the members of the unions “working together”.It was a trick and has been played many times.
In my years there, it was always Local 444, the blue-collar union, that stressed the need for there to be one union at EBMUD and encouraged and campaigned for the merging of Locals 2019 and 444 as we were both Afscme Locals and most members were represented by Afscme. The leadership of Local 2019, Afscme District Council 57, and for obvious reasons the employers, opposed this. What a great situation for the boss, when we (Local 444) went in and negotiated with them, left and then Local 2019 did the same.
Mass meetings needed
The way to strengthen the members, our bargaining power and bring the two locals together, was to have mass meetings of the two memberships. We can see how similar the most important concerns are and we get a sense of our real strength. We can learn from and influence each other. But this is exactly what an opportunist leadership or simply genuine folks that have no plan or strategy for fighting the boss or the union hierarchy, avoid, although for different reasons.
Local 444 was instrumental in bringing this about in 1988, despite the opposition from most of the leadership of Local 2019 and behind the scenes, from the leadership of the District Council and the national union.
We persisted in this approach, that it was essential to unite the two locals, and this persistence resulted in forcing the leadership of Local 2019 who, although they opposed a merger wouldn’t say it openly, to agree to the idea of joint meetings, while throwing up all sorts of obstacles to them and ensuring politics was never discussed.
Persistence won out in the end
Most of them and the union ‘Business Agent’ [the full-timer employed by the District] that represented both unions, blamed Martinez (too aggressive and loud. One accused him of slashing tires). They blamed Mellor, (aggressive, a commie, a foreigner perhaps). And Zuur, (she was being manipulated, a woman after all). Joanne Wong, who supported us within Local 2019 was accused of simply being Mellor’s puppet. These were two strong women fighters, but sexism is useful even for self-professed union activists and leftists when it suits them.
That persistence wore the leadership of Local 2019 down somewhat, despite its president, John Rohan, who was a liar and a bully, and they were forced to have a vote on merger. The average worker, having no agenda but improvements in their material conditions, and a more powerful voice on the job, know that unity with other workers is power.
Leaderships though, can have different agendas, like keeping themselves in power and mass meetings of the troops to discuss demands and the strategy and tactics needed to win them, is a dangerous situation for them. It places demands on them that they are unwilling to take up, as it threatens the relationship they have built with the boss, based on labour peace and concessions. So they blamed their members as Local 2019 leaders did; they were ‘weak’, needed ‘baby steps’, were ‘afraid’, ‘backward’, even ‘spineless’, one said.
The mood among Local 2019’s membership for unity was such that the ballot their leadership had designed on merger had no “no” vote on it. The only card they played in this struggle was the “fear card”.
Massive arbitration victory
Anyway, Marty, as hard as she and her co-worker, Henry, were on defending the contract – and that persistence won a massive arbitration victory with regards to staffing at the work unit – her weakness was the internal struggle. There is no shame in this, because the internal struggle is the hardest of all; it’s harder than fighting the bosses. Marty has a lot to be proud of and the young workers at EBMUD today owe her a debt of gratitude.
By 2003, myself, Zuur and Martinez had collectively agreed not to run, after the 1997 negotiations. Roger stayed a little bit longer, but he too withdrew. Why we did that is another commentary.
But in the same newsletter, The Mainline, April 2003, John L Morra penned a piece about the Employee Excellence Awards. This was in support of the Team Concept, workers being awarded for their service by the boss. Years ago, it was called the Merit System, or something like that, and we got rid of it.
Any class-conscious workers who’s not bootlicking the boss for advancement knows what these merit programs and “teamwork” awards are. No union activist who genuinely fights for the members on the shop floor will get such an award. If my memory serves me right, I think Jim Bradley got one and received it at the union hall, to show his loyalty to the boss and support for the ‘jointness’ program. That’s what you call a complete absence of class-consciousness. It’s not about being a hard worker: Bradley was one, by all accounts. It’s about how you see the relationship between the boss and the worker and the role of the union in this.
Awards programme ‘a waste of money’
So Morra’s article on the awards was an attack on those of us who took up the Team Concept and management/labour committees most aggressively: myself, Roger Martinez and Cheryl Zuur, people he described in the piece as those who oppose it because it is pitting “worker against worker” – which it does and being “anti-union” – which it is. Morra had played a very positive role in 1997, when we were in negotiations, as foreman in the gardening department, using his position to spread our literature at the unemployed, the welfare offices and other public sector workplaces.
Morra admitted the awards program was expensive, a “waste of money”, as we called it, but he was in a different position now, as a member of the Awards Committee and claimed it was a morale-booster that recognized people who “put out that little extra”. That would mean those that would start work before the workday, or doing out-of-class time without being paid, and other little things that please the boss, and showing how you can be relied on not to talk up the union.
He was wearing a different hat now, having once opposed the management-labour teamwork agenda, as did John Hayden, who also even wrote quite eloquently about the negative aspects of the Teamwork crap. It’s the dialectic isn’t it? People can play progressive roles in one period and regressive ones in others, abandoning the welfare of the group for individual gain. John L Lewis, the former miners’ leader and founder of the CIO, is a great example of this.
Workers will fight for the right things
It is politics, program and a strategy for winning it that can rescue us from this trap. And of course, a gut understanding that working-class people will fight and will fight for the right things if given the opportunity and leadership. The leaderships of the locals over the years have always boasted that they are talking with each other, that they are communicating. They even call these talks join labour activity. This is an activity of maybe twenty people out of a joint membership of possibly around 1,500.
My advice to any young union member at EBMUD, who is genuinely looking to get involved in the union for the right reasons and not for opportunistic ones, getting closer to the boss and such, or to avoid the ditch or wherever you work, is that it is imperative to raise as one part of your platform that we cannot win without having one united local at EBMUD. We can’t even defend what we have. We can’t avoid a fight, the bosses won’t let us.
And we can’t win without being active in our communities and their issues linking the two and working to transform the local labour movement, Afscme and organized labour nationally. No one said it would be easy.
From the blog on Richard Mellor, on the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
November 3, 2020
