From the beginning, LP leaders, including Campaign Organizer Ed Bruno, have said that
the 28th Amendment Campaign will be shaped by those who do the work. Although we are
really only 
just
beginning the Campaign, with a few months of door-knocking behind us, we have already
begun to take stock of our experience "on the doors," and to be guided by it.
Since the Campaign's spring beginnings, LP activists in some 25 locations have taken 28th Amendment petitions to their neighbors. In every location, our canvassers have found that 70-95% of the people they talk to sign the petition. The more working class the neighborhood, the more positive the response. These experiences have told us a lot about our potential for building a powerful movement of working class people in this country.
The 28th Amendment Campaign, stresses Bruno, is a Labor Party constant. "This campaign will go on all the time, accompanying and enhancing other campaigns and recruiting work. It is meant to be the LP's signature campaign, our calling card. It's what we propose as the fundamental solution to declining wages and vanishing jobs. That doesn't mean it will always be timely in every place and under every circumstance. And it doesn't need to be."
Bruno argues that "There is no substitute for expanding the party through this type of work -- door-to-door and workstation-to-workstation. There are no short cuts. This is how we'll build a membership organization, how our future campaigns will be operated, and how LP electoral work will be carried out, when that day comes."
In January, Bruno organized a conference call of Labor Party activists who had been
taking the 
28th
Amendment campaign door-to-door in six areas -- Pittsburgh, Chicago, Western
Massachusetts, Long Beach (CA), Connecticut and Seattle. The focus of the discussion was
on the activists' experiences so far in trying to develop new local LP activists from
among the petition-signers they had met in their communities. Some of their comments are
included on this page.
Photo: ©David Klein
Below, Ed Bruno makes some preliminary assessments based on the discussion and on all our experience so far with the door-to-door component of the 28th Amendment Campaign.
1. People support the 28th Amendment idea. Almost everyone we talk to agrees that a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a job is a good thing, and they're happy to hear that someone is pushing it. Gathering signatures is not difficult. We can reach the 10% sign-up goal which we originally set, and we should push until we get it.
2. Few people we encounter going door-to-door are burning to join the Labor Party and certainly very few are interested in becoming active. This should not surprise us. When was the last time any organizer heard people plead to be given something more to do in their lives?
Those who are willing to help us organize are a valuable and rare resource that must not be wasted. We should patiently develop two or three interested people from our neighborhood petitioning. We should begin looking for potential leaders at the very beginning of petitioning, give them some convenient and easy organizing tasks, and bring them along as the LP leadership core in the neighborhood. Then when we reach the 10% sign-up, we will have LP resident leaders ready to help lead the activity we choose.
Leadership development is best done individually, one-to-one. It's not necessary to have a meeting in order to develop leadership. Just about every local Labor Party that has done canvassing has named a coordinator to organize the work. Our experience tells us that one of the key jobs of the coordinator is to make sure that we follow up with every potential new activist we've encountered in petitioning.
3. The common obstacle faced by all chapters is that too few current chapter members are willing to organize new people. Some are already busy with other assignments. But others are afraid to knock on anyone's door, preferring to stay in the small circle of usual suspects. The problem raises three suggestions:
-- Those who are willing to do the organizing should go out and do it, with or without the participation of everyone in the chapter.
-- When possible, we should target neighborhoods in which there are already a few willing LP members, or even a motivated volunteer coordinator. Or, seek out a union local that will actively sponsor a campaign in a neighborhood.
-- Insufficient people power from inside the current chapter makes it all the more essential to identify and nurture new activists we encounter in petitioning.
4. It's a big world. In April, we asked local Labor Parties to get started by picking some small precinct or district. We all needed to get a handle on this campaign, to work out organizing methods and a style of work, to identify problems and confront obstacles. Most importantly, we needed to test our capacity to plan and execute a mobilization. Some 25 locations have done a good job of this. But we shouldn't limit ourselves to this initial location. Get the 10%, try to bring along two or three new LP activists from the location, and move on.
5. Move on, but don't forget that the thousands of petition-signers are our future Labor Party membership. These signers are our new constituency, the beginning of mass Labor Party membership and eventually, our voters. An occasional leaflet drop, a report-back on what was done with the signed petitions, a Labor Party Press in the mailbox or an invitation to a particularly exciting LP event all go toward the day when this party has a membership numbered in the millions.
6. Here are a few smart ideas that help move our organizing along. There are plenty more. Chicago holds open Labor Party meetings in union halls and cafes in the targeted neighborhood, and has signed up new members that way. Connecticut talked to voters coming out of the polling places in the targeted neighborhood, and received a heavy response. Pittsburgh plans to give each signer a sticker to display in their house window to create a physical Labor Party presence in the neighborhood.
"We have 200 signatures in Hazelwood [a Pittsburgh neighborhood], which is about 10% of the registered voters in the neighborhood. In the course of doing this work, I think our chapter has gotten much clearer about the Campaign and why we need to figure out how to do this. What the 28th Amendment Campaign asks us to do is to figure out how to build the party among people who are not already activists. And if we can't solve that problem, we can't build the Labor Party.
We're now more aware of needing to build leadership in Hazelwood, identifying people as potential leaders and figuring out how to develop them. We know we have to do more systematic follow-up."
