January, 1999
Labor Party Press
Conversation with
Brenda Stokely
'We Tried to Be Respectful'
Brenda Stokely is president of AFSCME Local 215
in New York City. She is the co-vice chair of the Labor Party in New York State, and a
member of the Labor Party National Council. She was elected to chair the convention’s
Resolutions Committee. We talked with her after the convention about her experience.
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| Photo ©Michael Kaufman, Impact Visuals |
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I thought the convention was very exciting. I got to work with a lot of
good people. It’s good to feel like you’re not working in isolation.
I know it can all be a little confusing to people on the floor of the
convention — understanding about the committees that are reporting out and where
they’re coming from. I wouldn’t know how it works either, except the Coalition
of Black Trade Unionists does some of this, and so does my union, AFSCME. The resolutions
come to a committee and the committee reports them out. But if you haven’t gone
through that process, you don’t have a clue.
When my committee first met, on Wednesday morning before the convention,
we were given all the resolutions that were submitted on time, plus a handful that came in
after the deadline. There were about 120 resolutions. Some of them dealt with campaigns,
so we sent them to the Organizing Committee to see if the ideas could be incorporated into
what that committee was doing. Some resolutions called for constitutional changes, and we
sent those to the Constitution Committee for them to incorporate. Resolutions related to
the electoral proposal we sent to the Electoral Committee.
I think one of the most important things we did was incorporate the
resolutions that we concurred with into work documents. That’s very different from
what happens in most organizations. They should be incorporated, but they usually
aren’t, they just sit there separately. But what a convention should be about is
coming up with a direction, a work plan. This way, people leave with working documents
they can use to go out and do something.
People kept bringing us more resolutions during the convention, and we had
to struggle over how we were going to deal with that. We decided we would consider any
resolutions that came out of a caucus, because they hadn’t had a chance to meet
beforehand.
There was a lot of good debate, I think, on some issues on the floor.
Unfortunately we ran out of time. One problem is that you have some workers — I know
this is true in my own union — who work very hard every day, but who don’t come
out of a culture of sitting in meetings and debating and debating. And they get very
impatient with those kinds of issues, especially when people are repeating themselves or
running their own organizational line. They just don’t have tolerance for that. So I
think you have to balance it out to keep from losing those people. There should be a forum
in the Labor Party to debate almost anything, but I do think people also need to be
conscious of how they engage in debate and make sure the main points get out and try to
get some kind of consensus if we can. A lot of people raise issues just to attack and
expose.
Some people feel we sometimes have too many speakers, and maybe if you cut
back on the speeches some, then you can have more time for people to sit down and look at
particular topics in smaller meetings. For instance, in the women’s caucus, people
talked a lot about the abortion issue. And in the black caucus, we talked about a number
of issues, including the U.S. and Iraq.
I know the union delegations spoke up less at the convention than some of
the chapter folks. I think what happens is that people have a different culture, a
different discipline. In the unions, a lot of times, we’ve already had the discussion
among ourselves. My delegation had decided already how they wanted to vote. I told the
members of my delegation that they should feel free to get up and speak on something if
they wanted to. Also, many people who are speaking from chapters are representing
themselves, while the people from unions are representing groups of people. And so when
you get up and speak, you have to be careful to speak well for a body of people.
The people on my committee were very thoughtful. We didn’t always
agree, but we were able to work it through until we came to a consensus — there was
no minority report. On one issue there could have been a minority report, but people came
back to the issue and listened, and everybody changed their position to allow for that
thought. There was a group of resolutions that we even set up a subcommittee to work on,
so they could write up some substitute language.
Everyone on the committee was very respectful that people had taken time
to submit their resolutions, and wanted to give them the proper due, in terms of reading
them, reviewing them, and voicing their opinions about them. It was a very good process, I
thought.
On the resolution about Mumia Abu
Jamal, we talked about how we could put out this resolution so that it would be
instructive and educational. We wanted it to be something that people could take back to
their constituency and say, "I want you to support this, and this is what this issue
is about."
We were worried about whether we would have the time to discuss each
resolution that had been submitted. I argued against lumping them together and considering
them as a piece — I thought some people would view it as railroading.
We decided we would do our best to go through them one by one — and
at one point we were talking about proposing to extend the convention to have this
discussion. But then one delegate got up and called for considering the rest of the
proposals in one group, and his proposal passed. That had not been our intention.
I’ve been at conventions where they set people up at the mike to call the question so
that there won’t be any debate, but that’s not what happened here.
My local is affiliated with the Labor Party. We have about 5000 members
— a broad range of social service employees in nonprofit agencies that get government
funding. We’ve had a Labor Party strategic planning meeting in the local, we showed
the "Mouseland" film and a slide presentation about the Labor Party. All the
officers of my district council came to the convention as observers.
The next thing we’re planning to do is set up a Labor Party committee
within the local that can then branch out and try to get more members and carry out the
campaigns. We know Just Healthcare will be very important to our members, as well as the
28th Amendment Campaign. And Social Security too.
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