Report from Green Bay: In the Phone Bank Trenches

by Mike Hall, Oct 12, 2006

AFL-CIO blogger Mike Hall traveled to Green Bay, Wis., where he is working with union staff and volunteers getting out the vote among working families. He sends us the first of periodic reports from the field.

The first major cold snap of the season is roaring across the upper Midwest and the local TV meteorologists are telling viewers that the growing season in northeast Wisconsin is now officially over.

So Green Bay-area union members are growing something that doesn’t depend on the weather—political activism, part of the AFL-CIO’s Labor 2006 mobilization to elect lawmakers who will fight for working family issues such as affordable health care and fight against the corporate wish list that includes even more tax breaks for Big Business and millionaires.

At the Greater Green Bay Labor Council offices, Diane Kuse is on the phone calling union families about the Nov. 7 elections. She lets them know their unions are backing Steve Kagen for the open U.S. House 8th Congressional District seat and Gov. Jim Doyle’s bid for re-election because of their strong records and support of working family issues.

Kuse is an AFSCME Local 1205 member and a Red Cross registered nurse—part of what she calls the “Clara Barton Brigade.” Says Kuse:

I want to change things and I can’t complain if I don’t do something to make change—like making these phone calls. We’ve got to people back in office who will do the right things that will help people, who will remember the promises they made to get elected.

Kuse pinpoints the start of her political activism this primary season to a meeting she attended as part of AFSCME’s PEOPLE project—the union’s political mobilization program:

We started looking at the record and saw how different it was between how they [congressional and legislative members] said they voted and how they really voted.

Phone banker Steve Doherty says political action “is in my blood.” The United Steelworker (USW) Local 1096 member and chair of the local’s Rapid Response team says his late father was a major player in local politics.

If I wasn’t doing something, he’d probably come back and kick my ass. But seriously, it’s like I tell people, you have to get involved, you can’t sit back and do nothing to have you voice heard as working people it’s getting tougher and tougher for families. I’ve been lucky to work at the same job for 24 years, but I have a two year-old daughter and I worry that she won’t be able to get a good job, something that’s not going to be outsourced or something that pays a decent wage or has health care.

Mary Goulding is a veteran political activist and union leader who still does her part in the phone bank trenches. A vice president of AFSCME Local 3055 and member of the District Council 40 executive board, Goulding says she became a union political activist way back in 1984, when she had a couple of good mentors who demonstrated the connection between public service work and politics, between any job and politics. Jobs and politics are linked because

whoever you elect is going to have an impact on your job, whether it’s the cost of healthcare at contract time or if your job stays in the states or is exported. Politics is my drug, getting people involved is my high. I feel like its part of being an American. You can get involved and you can make a difference.

A little more than three weeks from now, working family voters can make a difference here in Wisconsin and across the country. We can change the nation’s direction.

This portion of this website is paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, 815 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006, with voluntary contributions from union members and their families, and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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