Interviews of LP Activists:
Brian King &
Rita Shaw
Seattle Chapter
Brian:
Everybody was kind of scared about going door-to-door. Because, you know, you spend your whole life as an activist and you hang out with other activists, and you might have fights, but they're all contained within these certain parameters, and you know what to expect. But now we're supposed to knock on people's doors and talk to them! So we're all very nervous.
We just went out for about an hour, and then we all got back together again afterwards.
Everybody felt good about it. It turned out that we visited about 30 houses, and about 18 of them signed the petition. People had a series of really satisfying discussions. And I'd say a majority of the 18 people who signed gave us their phone number, even though we warned them that we would be calling them.
At several meetings, we had discussions about how much time we should spend with each person we visited. Some people were saying that we had to get a lot of signatures, and we shouldn't waste time. But I said I thought that if we spent the entire hour talking to one family, that would be great, because if we could find one person in a neighborhood who got really turned on by this, they could help us organize the whole neighborhood. We're looking for people, and conversation is what we want. So we made that our emphasis.
Rita:
The reactions we got were so fabulous. We were so excited. We got an especially good reaction from young people -- we went to one door, and there was this guy in his early twenties. And when we started to explain why we were there, he said, "Wait a minute." And then we hear the television go off in the background, and another young guy comes to the door. So we started talking, and their heads are going up and down like they were on some kind of automatic spring. It was like people were waiting to hear what we were saying.
Before you can say anything, people are rushing out and saying things like, "Well, the job situation is never going to be the same. My father worked in one place for 35 years and retired in that job. That will never be my life."
We talked to a mother with a child of about seven, and she started telling us about how she and her husband each work different shifts, and they've been doing this since the baby was 10 days old, because they can't afford decent childcare. So they never see each other.
There was one woman we spoke to who was professionally trained as an early childhood educator and caregiver, and she had to leave because she couldn't live on it -- she has to work for a rich family as a nanny. Most people who do have a job don't feel good about it -- either because it's not secure, or it doesn't pay enough, or they're qualified for something else and can't find a job in their field.
One of the people we talked to started out by saying, No, I don't want solicitors. And we said, no this is different, we're not asking for any money, we're talking about working peoples' rights. And he signed it.
Sean Sweeney
New York
Metro Chapter
[The NY Metro Chapter chose the working class, largely Latino neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for their first door-to-door effort.]
We had 21 people go out, and there were six bilingual people and nine women. And some people who hadn't been to a meeting in a long time came out for this, so that was good.
We met at a local restaurant for about 45 minutes of preparation. And we decided that in this neighborhood, unemployment is not the main problem, it's more that people work too many hours. So when we talked to people, we stressed that people are working, working, working, and not seeing their families. We said, If people got decent pay they could have more time with their families. And that really resonated.
We went out in nine teams of two, and we had three people at a table. We took one street each. Each team had 80 doors.
The general feeling was that it was really worthwhile. There was no negativity, except for one guy. But even he got more encouraging after a while. A lot of people weren't in or didn't answer the door. I would say the average team got between 15 and 20 signatures -- so we got over 100 signatures. But they were all worked for -- we didn't just stand there and say, here, sign this. Most people liked what we were doing.
We ran into some older people living alone, and they tended to be a bit dejected -- they'd say things like, "If anyone can help us, that'll be fine." A lot of the Latinos were very open. They were sort of, "Yeah, we're for the workers, that's good. Yeah, we need it."
No one said anything like "What do you mean, a job is a right?" No one said that. A few people -- at least in my experience -- were very enthusiastic. They said they wanted more information, and we took their names. And we left a notice in English and Spanish that said "The Labor Party was here" and explaining the campaign, and telling people to call if they wanted more information. Well, we've already gotten a couple of calls.
We convened again after we'd gone
door-to-door and had reports from each team. The general sympathy is that we should come
back and do it again.
Chris McKennan
Sourthern
Maine
Our group didn't come together until January. Since then,
we've met monthly. We agreed that the first city council district in the city of Portland
made the most sense. There are six precincts in the district, and almost 11,000 registered
voters. It's a working class neighborhood, and
there are a lot of activists in it. And a number of our
active members live in the district, and so do some local union leaders.
So far, the response has been somewhere between perfunctory and positive. People will say, "This is interesting." Some people will even say, "I'm glad you're having a meeting, I'll come." But sometimes they're kind of caught off-guard by it. And nobody's writing checks yet.
But we're only just now getting past talking a good game and actually going out there and mixing it up.
We've committed to staying the course in this district, with this strategy, through Labor Day. And on September 11, we're going to have a community meeting/event in the neighborhood community center, which is a really visible place to everyone.
Ideally, we'd like to have worked the whole neighborhood by that time -- actually gone out and talked to people.
Bill Hoyle
Utah
Chapter
We've done one round of door-to-door, and we plan to go out again in mid-August. We targeted a state legislative district in the center of Salt Lake. It's an older, inner city neighborhood pretty much of a working class neighborhood. Like all of Salt Lake, it's mostly white.
We sent seven people in four teams to 140 houses. There were 60 houses where people were home, and 41 of them signed the petition. Everybody was positive about the response.
We found a lot of interest among young people who felt discriminated against or exploited because of poor job opportunities and poor pay. So they were especially eager to talk about what we were doing and to sign the petition. A lot of questions came up about the campaign that we didn't really have answers to -- people asked many good questions.
We had newer chapter members who had never
done this kind of house-calling before, and they were nervous. But we used the buddy
system, and through the experience they became much more confident and positive about
doing that kind of work. That was very valuable. And everybody who went out the first time
was eager to go again.
Lisa Frank
Metro Pittsburgh
Chapter
We went door-to-door in four different neighborhoods. We knew we needed to concentrate on just one neighborhood, and all these neighborhoods looked like pretty good bets. So we thought we'd feel them out a little bit, and then we would choose one. And we actually did that at our last meeting.
The area we decided to focus on is called Hazelwood, and it's a mostly working class, racially mixed area of Pittsburgh. It's an area where the steel industry has had a big presence, and in fact the LTV coke plant there just closed this week. It gives us a lot to talk about in going door-to-door.
The neighborhood has a mix of public and private housing, and it has a conservative councilman. Hazelwood is like a lot of working class Pittsburgh -- most people are pretty good on labor issues, but sometimes more conservative fiscally.
The other reason we chose Hazelwood is that we have two very active members of the chapter who have lived in Hazelwood for a long time and who both really know their way around.
We thought when we went out to the four different neighborhoods that we might get very different responses in each place. We picked two racially mixed working class neighborhoods and two predominately white working class neighborhoods; two had progressive council members and two didn't.
But it was surprising -- there wasn't much difference: We got auniformly warm response everywhere we went. We could hardly think of anyone who had just said "No" -- except for a doctor who thought it was a harebrained idea. But otherwise the response ranged from, 'Well you guys are kind of nuts, but it's a good idea" to more enthusiastic. In Hazelwood we got two members in the course of going door-to-door. And sometimes we got into pretty decent political conversations with people.
We did roleplays in advance, but people were still nervous before we went out for the first time. They thought it would be awful. And it just wasn't. People came back really energized, really sold on the campaign. Everybody reported that the response was overwhelmingly positive, and the people who did it were really happy to be doing it.
Until then the steering committee had really had to argue with the membership about the campaign. Some people were worried that it was pie-in-the-sky, or just had trouble conceptualizing it. But it was amazing, because after we came back from doing the door-to-door, the only problem was that we hadn't put the 28th Amendment Campaign high enough on our list of priorities.
So what we're going to do now is get as much of our membership as possible to commit to some reasonable schedule of door-to-door work -- maybe every other weekend. The idea is to maintain a steady presence in the neighborhood.
