January, 1999
Labor Party Press
Conversation with
Richard Monje
Richard Monje works
with UNITE’s Midwest Joint Board in Chicago.
My union brought about 16 people from the region. A number of them had
already been active in the Labor Party, but we also had some new people from Oklahoma,
Missouri and Indiana. I think they were surprised by the convention — I don’t
think they expected it to be as large and influential as it was. They might have liked
more discussion on the substance of the proposals.
If you step back and look at what’s happened in the Labor Party over
the past two years, we’ve grown a lot, especially qualitatively. At the founding
convention, some people seemed to be there just to push their own agenda. A lot of them
are gone now. Instead, there are more affiliated locals. So there’s a different kind
of input now.
At this convention we established the organizational foundation for what
the Labor Party is going to do — both in the electoral and nonelectoral areas. Now
the central question is building the Labor Party.
Here in Chicago, we’ve held meetings with some of the trade union
leaders to encourage them to join the Labor Party. Given the history of independent
politics in Chicago, there is a good base for people to do a lot of work here, to reach
the communities through the local unions. You can’t just go out and demand that
people join the Labor Party. But we’re now in a good position to draw in some new
affiliates. We are also looking at ways to reach our own members, within UNITE. And
we’re reaching out to more community organizations.
Awhile back, Tony Mazzocchi came out to speak to about 60 trade unionists
from 14 locals in the Chicago area. We spent about four hours discussing what Tony had
said, and how these unionists saw the Labor Party playing out in their locals. It was a
frank discussion. And some of them said, "Look, I can go get a resolution passed
supporting the Labor Party, but that won’t mean much." So we talked about ways
to do educational work in these locals. And some of them are very key locals.
Our chapter went door-to door with the 28th Amendment Campaign and the
response was really good. Our problem was that even when we did find interested people, it
was hard to figure out how to bring them in. What we need to do, I think, is to encourage
people to hold very local meetings of people who have joined the Labor Party in their
neighborhood — and then to link up with the affiliated locals in their area.
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