A conversation with Barbara Walden

We're going to turn a corner

Barbara Walden is president of Local 19 of the Bakery, Confectionery, and Tobacco Workers International Union in Cleveland, Ohio, and a member of the Labor Party's Interim National Council.

My members work in large baking plants, for the most part. We have about 5000 dues-paying members in my local, including retirees. These jobs are not getting sent to Mexico, because people want fresh bakery goods. But now we are facing the problem of technology. Employers are eliminating jobs by the dozens as they bring in this new machinery from Germany. They just built a new plant in Toledo that is not going to have nearly the number of workers that a plant of that size would have had just two years ago.

Photo: ©Michael Kaufman

My local is not having much organizing success - even though we have two full-time organizers. We're working our rear ends off, but not making much progress, because people are scared to death. And they're scared because the laws are stacked against them. The smaller the labor movement gets, the easier it is for the employers to walk all over us. People are scared for good reason. In an organizing drive, if a person gets fired, you can tell them it's against the law - fine and dandy. Five years from now, you'll get back to work. But what do you do in the five years in between?

So I'm pushing the idea that we need our own political voice because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans adhere to any coherent program. They're not representing us.

But I got so excited today! One of the people who was one of my hardest sells just sent in a Labor Party membership for one of his friends. I've been doing a whole lot of the recruiting by myself. And to have someone else just go out and do it, was very exciting. Like I say at our meetings, if every member got one other person to join, we would double overnight. I get my relatives, my friends, my lawyers to join - I'll ask anybody.

We have a Labor Party chapter here in Cleveland, and our local AFL-CIO central labor council is affiliated. We have four or five people on that board who are members. It's just a matter of letting them see that we're normal people with normal lives, and it's okay.

My Labor Party work within my union is moving slowly because some of my fellow officers are not in favor of the Labor Party. But I don't give up easy. At one meeting, I just said, Look, anyone who's interested in knowing more about this, don't listen to me - just read about it for yourself. Just come to me and I will give you a free year's membership. So I got a bunch of people to do that. These are people who want to do something different - they don't know what, but something.

I think in my union there's growing frustration. There's definite interest in getting away from this slavery to the Democratic Party, when they always turn around and kick us in the ass. I sense less dig-in-your-heels resistance to the idea of the Labor Party than there was two years ago. I think it's going to be slow, but then suddenly we're going to turn a corner.

I've gotten about 10 stewards to sign up to go to the convention in Pittsburgh. And I think it's really going to surprise and invigorate them - I don't think they've ever experienced anything as wide open as this. You know how union conventions usually are - they're like a production number. Nobody gets to speak up or anything. And I think they'll find this very exciting, and I hope they carry that excitement back to the shop.

I think the idea of institutionalizing the Labor Party within the unions is good - people can report at every executive board meeting about their progress in organizing and so forth. That will help remove that air of illegitimacy that seems to keep hanging over us.

We have some young people here in the Labor Party, recent college grads, and they're great, they have lots of energy and enthusiasm. But they haven't lived, you know? They haven't been through the grind, so they think it's easy to stand up to the boss and tell him to go stick his head in the oven. Well, it's not. You just can't realistically expect workers to be so radical when they have something to lose. American workers don't want to be socialists. But that doesn't mean they don't want to do something.

I'm able to put a heck of a lot into this, more than people who aren't union leaders, because I've got facilities and machinery, and so on. So they can't get on my bad side too much! It's nice to be in that position.

Believe me, the daily grind in unions is really tough. It's hard to turn out stuff for the Labor Party in addition to all the other things we have to do. It would be great if the Labor Party had more full-time people who could do this, but we're just not big enough yet. I wish I had a magic formula, but I don't. I think it's just a matter of chugging along.

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