by James Parks, Dec 9, 2006

The AFL-CIO Organizing Summit, which ends today, will be the catalyst that improves unions’ mobilization and outreach efforts, including that of Amalagamated Transit Union (ATU), according to ATU Organizing Director Charles Lester. The two-day summit brought together organizers, leaders and union members from around the nation. Participants focused on successful grassroots organizing techniques and innovative campaign strategies that have enabled workers to join unions despite the anti-union decisions of the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board.

I sat down with Lester to talk about the nuts-and-bolts behind a successful organizing drive. Although ATU found out last night that the union failed to win the right to represent 195 suburban Chicago bus drivers by a single vote, Lester says the lessons ATU locals learned in the last weeks of that effort in Gurney, Ill., and the knowledge they gained at the summit, will go a long way toward building future successes.

Ten ATU local presidents attended the Organizing Summit. They plan to use strategies they learned about successful organizing campaigns to build the union. Says Lester:

This summit was just what we needed. We’re going to make this our model. Tonight, we’ve invited our top officers to meet with the 10 local presidents who attended to talk about how we can integrate the things we learned into our overall program. We will present our model to (ATU) President [Warren] George and talk about what the locals can do and what the international can do in future campaigns.

The victory I see at Gurney is what we have been able to change in our union’s culture on the way we organize.

The change in culture has been swift. He credits George for his commitment to a new way of organizing.

ATU didn’t have an organizing director or an organizing department until Nov. 1, when I came on board. When I interviewed for the job, they told me that the union had won elections in spite of themselves. They had three international reps who handled trusteeships, arbitrations and organizing. Organizing fell mostly to the local presidents, 95 percent of whom are full-time workers.

Before joining ATU’s staff, Lester, 38, helped health care workers in California gain a union with AFSCME. Prior to that, he was political director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, working with the legendary late Miquel Contreras.

Lester says he first heard about the campaign in Gurney, Ill., after he came on board, when the election was only six weeks away. Within a week, Lester says he met with all the ATU local presidents in the Chicago area and discussed how they could share resources with each other and what resources the international union could share.

We put together a member-to member, door-to-door campaign. Every day, we had 15 member-organizers from Milwaukee to Chicago working. Twelve were volunteers or paid by their locals and three were paid by the international [ATU]. In three-and-a-half to four weeks, we were able to identify more than half the workers and build a secure foundation of union supporters. That’s in four weeks. Imagine what we could have done if we had been doing this when we started the campaign.

If they had the new organizing model in place when the Gurney campaign began, Lester says ATU would have:

• First assessed how much and what kind of staffing was needed to organize the workers.
• Identified key leaders among the workers to form a strong worker organizing committee. For example, in Gurney, the core group of supporters were white female drivers of small buses. But the bulk of the drivers are African Americans and Latinos who drive large buses. So there was not as strong a connection as there could have been..
• Made sure the organizers reflected the diversity of the workers.
• Made the campaign more visible with buttons and T-shirts.
• Agitated around the workers’ issues with marches and press conferences. “We would put in the bosses’ face what the power of unions is all about,” Lester says.
• Enlist community support for the workers’ freedom to form a union.
• Gain the backing and support of other local unions.

After the summit and the close vote in Gurney, Lester says the workers there plan to go back and try again for a union:

Now we understand that you start doing these things when you get that first call. You do the leg work before the first card is signed, and you will succeed.

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