January, 1999
Labor Party Press
Conversation with
Ron Baker
Ron Baker is
Organizing Director
for the United Mine Workers of America
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photo ©Michael Kaufman, Impact Visuals |
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My union had about 65 people at the convention. We’re going to do
better next time. We only had four people at the Labor Party’s founding convention.
Our goal is to triple the number of UMWA members in the Labor Party in the
next two years. I think we’ll be able to do that pretty handily. And with a
systematic organizing plan, I think we’ll be able to get 25 or 30 percent of our
locals affiliated as well.
What we’re doing to organize is we’re sending reps to local
meetings. The first thing we talk about is the issues that impact the union that we need
to do something about legislatively now. The second thing we try to relay to members
— and you don’t have to work too hard to do this — is that there is just no
urgency on the part of politicians to solve our problems. And then we just launch into
talking about the Labor Party. Usually the local leadership recommends to the local
members that they affiliate with the Labor Party, and then the vote comes from the floor.
And everywhere the vote’s been taken, it’s passed.
We just don’t get much argument from people. In fact, most of the
time you’ve got to make an argument about why you’ve got to support the
Democrats on certain things. Things have really changed, and I hope they continue to
change. Sometimes it takes really difficult circumstances for a union to recognize that it
has a problem with the way things are going. We’ve seen it as a problem for a long
time and [UMWA President] Cecil Roberts has been talking
about alternative politics for a long time.
I think the UMWA members who were at the convention like the concept of
the Labor Party, and they believe it’s the direction we’ve got to go. However,
there was a lot of debate on the floor about not a lot of things. Our conventions are run
somewhat differently. If you don’t have a resolution that is timely, you have to
muster the support of two-thirds of the delegation to bring it up. So our members were not
accustomed to a motion and a second going off into an hour-and-a-half long discussion,
especially when only a small number of people supported it. I understand that some of the
people there had never been in a union or gone to a convention before. And they felt this
was a place for them to say what they wanted to say. But it can’t bog down 95 percent
of the people.
Our delegation had one slight disagreement on a resolution. It was the one
about whether a chapter needed 250 members to qualify, or just fifty. If the party had 20
million members, I could see how you could say, "Anyone who doesn’t maintain a
certain level, work harder and see you next week." But we can’t afford to throw
a hundred people out. But other than that, I enjoyed the convention. And I give a lot of
credit to the people who chaired it, because the rules were not favorable to them.
If you looked over the delegations that were at the convention, you see a
lot of people who are aligned or have been aligned with industrial unions in this country.
And the reason they’re so damned mad is that not only have politicians, but a lot of
other sectors in this country have basically written off heavy industry and those of us
who actually make things. And they’re pissed off about it. Our members are not really
willing to just lay down and say, "Our days are over, and now let’s just go take
a computer class." Eventually everybody’s going to be working at Domino’s.
There’s nothing out there to rejuvenate our communities.
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