Volunteer organizers help build the union

Winning Southern organizing campaign expands reach

In 2003, the AFT launched a new organizing effort in five Southern states, one that epitomized the “outside-the-box” thinking that has become a union trademark for successful membership building. Back then, 50 AFT member-volunteers from New York City, Chicago and West Virginia spent two weeks in key Southern school districts, helping affiliates in those districts recruit new members and connect with educators at the building level.

So successful were these volunteers in putting a human face on labor, and helping to dispel misconceptions about unions so common to the region, that the program was renewed in 2004. This time, the summer organizing effort encompassed almost 70 volunteers and six states stretching from Georgia to New Mexico. And by all accounts, the return engagement was a huge success.

Following the 2004 visits, “I had a teacher who has been in the system for 29 years come up to me and ask to sign up” for AFT membership, reports Alfreda Goldwire, president of the AFT local in Savannah, Ga. “Things are definitely moving forward here.”

Many of the same elements that made the debut campaign successful were still in place. It still emphasized one-to-one union building and affiliate cooperation across state lines. But this time, there was even more extensive previsit training for union volunteers, many of whom hailed from newly participating locals such as Philadelphia and Cleveland as well as several New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) locals.

Consider the source

Philadelphia teacher Connie Jackson, part of the six-person delegation that visited all school buildings in Savannah this past August, says she came in prepared to talk about all the advantages her local, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, had negotiated over the years on bread-and-butter issues. But what teachers in Savannah really wanted to hear about, she discovered, was how some of the AFT’s most successful locals had become a vehicle for professionalism.

“I explained to them that the AFT speaks with a clear voice for teachers on everything from class size to professional development to standards,” says the special education teacher at Philadelphia’s Muriel Dobbins High School. “There’s no conflict of interest,” she adds.

It’s a message the teachers in Savannah had heard before, but one that really resonated this time coming from a colleague. “People really connected with the fact that ‘this is a teacher just like me,’” she remembers. “It was easy for those of us who came from Philly to talk to them.”

In the weeks following the visits, the Savannah Federation of Teachers has been signing up members, fielding follow-up requests for information and working steadily toward the local’s ultimate goal of collective bargaining. Jackson believes the goal is well within reach and leaves no doubt about her plans for next summer if the local needs a final push to achieve its goal. “If that happens—we’re there.”

Professional issues also topped the agenda when Marci Miller, a middle school teacher and AFT activist in Charleston, W.Va., volunteered to help the local in East Baton Rouge, La., build its membership. A lot of the things that many locals fought for and won, such as regular planning periods and duty-free lunches, were missing for many of the teachers in East Baton Rouge, particularly at the elementary school level.

“It’s in the [state] law that they’re supposed to have planning time, but they don’t observe it a lot of times,” explains Miller. She talked extensively with teachers about the watchdog role that strong unions play when laws are passed by legislatures—but later ignored by districts. “The union can help with enforcement. When one person objects, not much is done. But when 10, 20 or a hundred people object, you get heard.”

The cause that refreshes

In mid-September, retired university professor Fred R. Miller was going door to door in Milwaukee, Wis., talking with voters about the critical issues involved in the current presidential race. Just a few weeks earlier, this NYSUT member was traveling to schools in the Gallup, N.M., school district, talking to teachers about the benefits of belonging to a strong union.

You might think that after a two-week stint in a membership-building project in Gallup— a massive school district in the northwest corner of the state where schools are separated by hundreds of miles—Miller would ease back from his union involvement.

You’d be wrong.

Working on projects like the summer organizing effort “gives you a sense of purpose,” explains Miller, whose bags had barely cooled from the Gallup trip before the New Yorker was off to Wisconsin as part of NYSUT’s political action effort to engage voters in a one-on-one basis in key battleground states. One activity reinforces the other, he explains. “I think people need a union in order to accomplish their professional goals. I think people need a president of the United States who can help them accomplish their personal and social goals.”

And, unlike a “cheap dues” union, an excellent union like the AFT will always recognize that success in both arenas is important to its members.

This was one of the great successes of the summer organizing campaign, one that was only recognized after the start of the project, observes AFT organizing director Phil Kugler. Volunteers come out of the effort not sapped from their duties but reinvigorated by them— ready and eager to take on new challenges in their locals back home.