Midwest Unite! goes LP 

The Midwest Joint Board of UNITE! -- the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees -- recently voted to affiliate with the Labor Party. We spoke to the joint board's vice president, Noel Beasley, about that decision and about plans to build the Labor Party within his union. [UNITE! is the product the 1995 merger of ACTWU and ILGWU .] 

How did the Midwest Joint Board of UNITE come to affiliate with the Labor Party? 

Our midwest region actually introduced a resolution at the ACTWU convention in 1983 in Detroit, calling for an independent political party. So we've been on the record in favor of this for a long time. And our Joint Board over the years has done a lot of workshops and discussion groups on the necessity of workers having an independent political position. 

So when the original Labor Party Advocates came along, I attended a couple of meetings, and we just followed it. We sent four or five observers to the Labor Party's founding convention in Cleveland. I deliberately sent observers with very different political perspectives and backgrounds, and they came back unanimous in their opinion that this was genuine and that it was going to go somewhere. So it's really something that's been imbued in our political culture for 15 years. 

Who does the Midwest Joint Board represent? 

We represent all the workers in UNITE locals in five states -- Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We also have a small presence in Michigan and Kentucky. We're very diverse industrially, and that's part of our strength, because we haven't taken the same kind of hammering as unions that are consolidated in one sector. We have about 5000 members in the auto parts industry, about 3500 in distribution centers, about 3000 in flexible packaging, and probably 1000 in apparel. 

Is there something about what's happened to this bunch of workers that explains their support for independent politics going back to 1983? 

Well, I think some of it comes from the independent political militancy of the old Textile Workers Union. And I think certainly by the early 1980s there was tremendous disaffection with traditional politics. People had seen what had happened in the Carter years. They saw very clearly what was happening in the Reagan years -- we talked about that at length. And there was just a growing feeling that you weren't going to find any particular vision for working people in either of the established parties. 

We followed very closely the development of things like the Democratic Leadership Council [the conservative wing of the Democrats that has supported Clinton]. And when Bill Clinton came along, there was no shock or surprise about his political direction. 

So I'd say we recognized that we were always going to have to do some form of traditional political action, and yet we should continue to agitate in the direction of independence. And if a vehicle ever came along that we could associate with, we would. So we did. 

It sounds like you guys do a lot of internal political education. 

Yeah. For the past three years, we've been doing leadership schools where we bring in 15-20 of our shop leaders -- both veteran and emerging leaders -- and we go through a three-and-a-half to four-day orientation on the interconnection of labor history and labor economics, and what that means to our shops. We've done a lot of workshops over the years in our district meetings on politics. 

We've focused on it a lot in part because we feel that if the members don't understand that there's a larger political world out there, we're going to end up being held responsible for everything that's going on! We're not trying to do this to create a diversion, it's just that we have an obligation to say that we recognize very clearly that things are all screwed up, and we have a multifaceted program to try to do something about it. And part of it is organizing and organizing, and fighting hard for our membership. But if we just did those things, we'd still end up getting taken. 

Have you begun to try to introduce the Labor Party to your members? 

Yes. We're trying to do some prototype models to get experience about how to build the Labor Party in a couple of different situations. In our three district meetings, we had presentations about the Labor Party and formally affiliated with the Labor Party through resolutions. 

In addition, we will send 8 or 10 folks to the Labor Party's Corporate Power and the American Dream training that will be taking place here in Chicago. And those people will include both staff and shop leaders. 

And then we've identified three geographical areas where we already have a large concentration of members and a pretty good concentration of political activists. And we want to dig into those areas and see what we can do -- both in our work in central labor councils with other unions, and with our own members -- to build Labor Party membership. 

The three areas are Janesville, Wisconsin; St. Cloud, Minnesota; and Terre Haute, Indiana. We specifically chose them because they're not big cities, they're not places where there's a long history of this kind of work going on, and yet we know from having been imbedded in these areas for years that there's a tremendous desire for independent political action on the part of our members there. 

What kind of response have you gotten so far when you've talked to your members about the Labor Party? 

Oh, there's been tremendous enthusiasm. We had a couple of local presidents from the central district here who took copies of the Labor Party Press back into their shops and signed members up. And it wasn't anything we were putting a tremendous push on at that point. It was just that they were so delighted to see it, they moved on it. 

As you would expect, there have been a few negative responses here and there. But mostly, there's a lot of curiosity, a lot of open interest and excitement. 

Interview with Ed Bruno 

The LP's "style of work"  

Labor Party organizer Ed Bruno continues to collect information from LP organizations around the country as they take the 28th Amendment Campaign into their neighborhoods and workplaces. Lately he's been talking about how important it is for party members to adopt what he calls the "Labor Party style of work." We talked to him about it recently. 

Cartoon: ©Konopacki What do you mean, "style of work"? 

In a neighborhood, we want the style of work to be door-to-door. In a workplace, we want it to be machine-to-machine or desk-to-desk. We are establishing this style of work via the 28th Amendment Campaign. Between now and the 1998 convention, we need to get this style of organizing sunk deeply into the Party, and become very good at it. 

What's the rationale for doing it door-to-door? 

See, our style of work has to be directly connected to the goal of building a political party that intends to win power. And I think just about everybody in this party knows it has to be mass-membership based. And there's no other way to do that but by going door-to-door or desk-to-desk. We can rule out all the other options that various other parties have: corporate money, control of the media, lots of access to high-level politicians... Our lifeblood is membership. 

So that becomes the direct connection between the goal of this party, which is political power, to the style of work. 

So you're saying, this style of work would also be the one we will use with electoral work down the road. 

Yeah. But it's really inside the 28th Amendment Campaign that we're going to work this out in practice. If we had the wherewithal, we could be running ten campaigns, but we don't. So this is the one we're going to work on. 

What's the next step with this "style of work," once we've done some door-to-door or desk-to-desk? 

Well, with the 28th Amendment Campaign, we have two very clear approaches. One is a neighborhood approach, the other is a workplace approach. 

In neighborhoods, we've established that people must get at least 10 percent of the registered voters in a particular political district to sign the petition before we approach the political leaders of that district with the campaign. And once we've built up some interest, and preferably some members, we ask the Labor Party to hold a meeting in the neighborhood. 

In the report-back form for the neighborhoods, we're asking people to make a very distinct definition of this place they've picked so we know what the goal for the petitioning would be. We ask people how many members are there now, how many are we adding each month. And then we need to start listing the most active organizations in that place. We can then begin to ask the churches and community organizations in that neighborhood to endorse the campaign. Now, even for one small place -- that's a lot of work. 

So the answer to "What's next?" mostly is -- "We'll see." We have a subset of local labor parties that are really out there conducting this campaign. And by September, we should know more, based on their experience, about how to proceed. But we've just got to stay on those doors, talking to people. 

There's another point here. We've said from the beginning that we're not going to compel any local party to participate in this campaign. On the other hand, people ought to understand that it's through their participation and experimentation that people are going to have the biggest contribution to make in shaping what's going to happen next. Really, this is how you establish your reputation inside the Labor Party. It will shake out eventually -- those who do party-building are the ones who will have the most say in this party. And that's the way it ought to be. Because the rest is just so much hot air. 

What about the workplace campaigns? 

In a workplace, we ought to be able to get at least 50 percent of the people to sign the campaign petition. And in the process of doing that, we can have some discussions and build up some membership in the workplace. Once we've gotten 50 percent to sign, we introduce the resolution to the local union. In a way it's like the old LPA poll. First we would poll a local's members about their support for a Labor Party, and almost invariably most of the members would support it. And then the local leaders would respond. 

There's a second step -- and so far this is taking place mainly in OCAW and UE. As we build a small number of members in these workplaces, we form Labor Party committees or clubs. We start to build up a core of members in the workplace, just like we would in a neighborhood. 

It really does seem like the response is positive so far. 

Yeah. I think our experience so far tells us that this is a good way to go about our work. Because we are having good discussions with people all over the country. And there's simply no way to have these discussions without going door-to-door or machine-to-machine.