Portside

We are in a mess right now. Labor and community organizations are under attack. A cascading list of Executive Orders, cancellations of government funding, attacks on non-profit status, and arrests of union leaders and immigrant organizers may be just the beginning. The Supreme Court’s recent court decisions giving Trump legal carte blanche to do whatever he wants may also include the complete destruction of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and other progressive reforms of the past 90 years. Some foundations and other progressive funders are decreasing funding when they should be increasing their support. These attacks are destroying our ability to organize when we need it most.

Building Community Unions as the Answer

But there’s a way out: we need to build mass community-based unions and we need to do it now. By community unions, I mean unions that organize not only in the workplace but in the community and use community organizing models, tactics, creative dues collection, and strategies to organize and grow. These would be distinct from unions that solely organize within the limits of the NLRA and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election procedures and state labor relations acts.

Some workers’ centers –– community-based nonprofits that provide support and services for workers not covered by the NLRB –– utilize a similar model, but it is far from widespread.

Building a community union means signing up dues-paying members to fund our direct action organizing, which requires rigorous metric tracking and consistent engagement with our bases. It also looks like setting up systems of internal fundraising to support our work and using any and all technological innovations to help us build bigger and faster. It is rare to find this today, but there is no more important work to do.

When we first came to Chicago in 1983 to found Chicago ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and ULU (United Labor Unions) Local 880, ACORN’s independent labor union, we wanted to build community and worker power together.  We wanted to use our ACORN and ULU organizing models to build dues-paying community organizations and labor unions to improve neighborhoods, workplaces, and society with working people at the helm.

We chose Chicago because we knew if ACORN and ULU were going to build national power with working people, we had to organize in the second largest city in the country. Dues paying members were the foundation of both ACORN and ULU organizing models. We realized then, as some are realizing today, that relying solely on outside funding is a long-term threat to an organization. Especially to an organization that is committed to social justice organizing against the powers that be.

Then, we had Reagan in power declaring war on unions and taking apart the social safety net of the New Deal. Today, we have a much more serious threat from Trumpism ahead.

ACORN Community Organizing Drives

For my first six months in Chicago, I organized an ACORN neighborhood group on the Southside of Chicago in the majority Black New City/Back of the Yards working class neighborhood. This was the same neighborhood portrayed in the novel, “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair which showed the brutal working conditions in the meatpacking industry decades earlier.

By 1983, the stockyards had closed and the neighborhood was rocked by rapid de-industrialization of the meatpacking, steelmaking and other manufacturing industries and unemployment of former factory workers were the rule, replaced by low-wage service industry jobs in healthcare, fastfood, light industrial, and what little public employment remained.

As I slowly built the group, my days were filled with growth-centric goals and quotas like this: 

• Doorknock for four hours a day, usually from 3-7pm on weekdays, earlier on weekends;
• Hit at least 40 doors each day;
• Talk to at least 5-10 people each day; 
• Sign up at least 1, preferably 2 or more, dues-paying members per day; 
• Doorknock with new members to train them to sign up even more folks; and then go back and do 2nd and 3rd visits to members with leadership potential. 

We would do that every day for 6-8 weeks.

By the end of the drive, we had over 50 dues-paying members, held a big meeting where more neighbors joined and paid dues, elected temporary officers, and decided on three issues to take on. We won most of them: got many of the vacant lots mowed and trash picked up, got the streets and alleys cleaned, and had the local park lagoon dredged. In an early life-saving victory against environmental racism in the neighborhood, we forced a reluctant EPA official to investigate and cite a local chrome plating company for polluting the north end of the neighborhood.

Then, we did it all over again in other neighborhoods to build our membership and power to work on citywide and then statewide and then national issues. 

ULU Union Organizing: Building A Community Union with Technological Innovations

Thanks to our ACORN and ULU training, we knew how to hand-collect dues, house visit, doorknock, find and develop grassroots leaders, and engage in direct action campaigns with targets and win. This served us well in the early days of labor organizing as we painstakingly built a union of homecare workers, and later, childcare providers.

More than ⅔ of these members were legally classified as “independent contractors” and had no rights to organize a union under state or federal law, and no protections like minimum wage, social security, unemployment, or other rights that most workers had.  They were some of the poorest workers in Chicago who were paying a $5 joining fee and an average of $5 per month dues –– equivalent to $20 per month today –– to become members.

But the ACORN/ULU model was also too slow for what we needed to do. We needed to modify our model and we added our own technological innovations: Computers, Direct Mail, Telephones, and more.

When we bought our first Apple IIe computer, that helped revolutionize our organizing – as we found larger and larger homecare, and later home childcare units, we were able to get the lists by using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or use other means of “list liberation” from recalcitrant employers or bureaucracies. As we continued larger and larger organizing drives, and member signups, we experimented with direct mail and phone banks, greatly increasing our signups and turnout numbers.  Instead of depending solely on one organizer trying to do their house visits, we were able to do a “house visit by telephone” and receive hundreds of membership cards from potential members and leaders instead of just the few members that one organizer could visit in a night. Though we were reluctant to stray from traditional door knocking and lean on technological resources, using computer databases to track FOIA’d lists of potential members and reaching out to those members through mailings and phone calls, as well as house visits substantially increased our reach and we were able to build much bigger and faster.

Technology has rapidly changed since then. Organizers must continue finding new ways to supplement base building in ways that increase impact without sacrificing the face-to-face relationships that undergird the tradition.

Internal Fundraising and Budget

In addition to dues collection and larger drives, we developed internal fundraising systems to finance our organizing. We engaged in all types of grassroots fundraising, like raffles, selling ads in our newsletters, chicken dinner sales, door-to-door and phone canvassing and petitioning for donations, and even running tag days with neighborhood youth and volunteers at busy intersections collecting donations on our issues.

Internal fundraising systems like these –– some learned from our members, others homegrown –– kept our organization running when our dues income or small religious grants or later small SEIU organizing subsidies were not enough.

If we needed to rent a bus to get to the state capitol in Springfield to demand recognition from the state of Illinois, we fundraised it with our members and they paid for the opportunity to get on that bus. We would do marches, lobby days, and other direct actions in Springfield 2-4 times a year until we won on our issues, all financed by members.

That’s how we survived.

It was empowering to know that if worse came to worst, we could fundraise our budget and live off the land. We had to in order to survive. And we did.

Self-funded Lobby Days – it was lobby days like these in the 1980’s and 90’s, funded by members buying and selling tickets to coworkers, friends, consumers, and families to “Get on the Bus” and head down to the state capitol in Springfield for marches and actions against targeted state department heads, bureaucrats, and pols as well as lobbying and fun. The message of this March: “Fighting for a Living Wage!”

One Organizational Attack and one recognition campaign that Community Union Base Building Helped Us Win

As we grew bigger, our base building muscle was tested at every turn. Every time it seemed like we had hit a level where we were “safe” and were recognized by the state as a union, we would get attacked: either by the state bureaucrats against our rights to have a union or by right wing think tanks like the National Right to Work Committee and eventually their allies on the Supreme Court. 

1994-1998 – April Fool’s Attack: In 1994, a lawsuit encouraged by right wingers sued our union and the resulting political blowback resulted, on April 1, 1998, in the loss of Fair Share in our state Homecare Unit meet and confer agreement (not a full union contract, yet).

“Fair Share” in the public sector at the time meant that a worker could either join the union or pay a “fair share” fee of the cost of union representation, usually at or close to the amount of the union dues. This ensured that workers who benefited from the union but did not want to join would still have to contribute to the union. On April 1st of 1998, this loss of fair share dropped our membership in the unit from over 8,000 to under 4,000 overnight.  Luckily, we still retained dues checkoff –– the right to have your union dues deducted from your paycheck –– and had some reserves from the prior four years of fair share collections.

We fought back and kicked in our community union base-building systems again and overcame that loss. From 1998 through 2002, we made tens of thousands of home visits backed up by mailings and phone calls to sign up a net of over 10,000 dues-paying members and proved our majority in a unit that had grown from 8000 workers to over 20,000 in that five-year span. We were able to prove our majority in the expanded unit, change the state law to bring the homecare workers under the state collective bargaining act, and come out with a real union contract guaranteeing a 36% wage increase and other benefits.

1995-2005 – How we Built a Childcare workers’ union on Bank Draft Dues Collection: In 1995, we did not have dues checkoff for home-based childcare providers who were classified as “independent contractors” and got paid monthly by the state of Illinois.

Many were also homecare workers and approached us about organizing. We went back to our community union organizing model with a new technological aid –– bank drafts. A bank draft is a payment technology pioneered by ACORN in our community organizing where you can pay your dues directly from your bank account. We trained our organizers on this new technology and from 2002-2005 signed up over 1500 childcare members. Because of our years-long signup and direct-action campaign, we almost became dues self-sufficient in the unit by 2005. We organized small and large direct actions on local and statewide targets around reimbursement, late checks, municipalities zoning out home childcare centers, low reimbursement rates, etc. culminating in a large 600 worker march in Springfield for recognition in 2005.

It was that year when we were able to change the state collective bargaining act, win a recognition election, and win the first home childcare workers union contract covering a much-expanded 49,000 home childcare provider unit by 2006. It was the largest union election ever held in Illinois history and the first and largest home childcare union victory in the US at that time.

Home childcare providers demand their union in 2005 – they won it about ten months later after winning the largest union election in Illinois history and the largest childcare election in US history. Winning their first union contract despite having been classified as independent contractors.

Conclusion – Community Unions to Fight the Right!

We have to organize workers into self-sufficient, direct action, member-run organizations that can have a major role in dethroning Trump and be a permanent presence to institute some of the demands we want and to build a world of our dreams. A world where all are treated equally and humanely. A world where all are free to earn a living wage, have health care, and love who they want. A world where fascism is replaced by people power. A world where children and families don’t go to bed hungry or fearful that a masked thug will take them away.