Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) by Jane McAlevey

Author:Jane McAlevey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

CHAPTER SEVEN

Launching the 2006

Las Vegas Labor Offensive

January brought our first big test of 2006: electing bargaining teams for all those contract negotiations. Electing a bargaining team is usually pretty routine, but our commitment to big, representative bargaining meant that we would have to mobilize 15,000 workers spread all over the city to elect 1,000 representatives. And to stay on our timeline, which because of the expiration dates of the various contracts included no wiggle room whatsoever, the elections had to be completed in the space of a week. The logistical challenge of pulling this off was, shall we say, not trivial. But it was also exhilarating: Elect one bargaining team for one hospital and everyone feels like part of a real organization; elect 1,000 team members across the city from a multitude of employers and professions and everyone feels like part of something much bigger—a labor movement.

Beginning in October of 2005, our organizers had begun to identify leaders for every shop in every unit that hadn’t already been charted. This was a time-consuming process with no shortcuts. The walls of our war room were covered top to bottom with charts showing our progress in each shop or unit: leadership identified, nominations in, nominee accepted, nominee said no, and so on. Staff and leaders were getting dizzy from this process, but it worked. By the third week of January the voting was concluded, and before the month was out we had mailed letters to just over 900 workers inviting them to their first mass bargaining team meeting, in two weeks.

At the same time, we were wrapping up our first negotiations at Southern Hills, the HCA-owned hospital where we had eked out an election victory by the slimmest of margins less than a year before. The campaign at Southern Hills had been organized in a mad rush to beat the expiration date of an Election Procedure Agreement, and though we had won, we had by no means built the sort of union there that we had at other hospitals. That’s part of what’s wrong with these types of agreements. After the election, we assigned a young organizer named Pete Reilly to build up the new Southern Hills union—increase membership, identify leaders, the works. As was always our policy, he was told that when he had majority membership in all the units in the hospital we would put together our bargaining team elections and prepare for negotiations.

Pete was green, but he also seemed hip. He projected a cool image and talked a really good line in staff meetings. And he methodically reported his growing membership numbers to Morgan, our organizing director. She then walked him through holding the bargaining team elections. In early September Morgan forwarded to me Pete’s list of the newly elected Southern Hills bargaining team. With that in hand, I sent a letter to the employer stating who had been elected to the bargaining committee and asking for bargaining dates. It wasn’t until the employer called me a week later that I had any idea what had really happened, which was nothing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.