AFT teaches investigation skills every organizer needs

Comprehensive campaigns are becoming more valuable in healthcare organizing. Large employers represent the bulk of unorganized workplaces, and comprehensive campaigns are fast becoming the most effective way to organize these bargaining units. In June, AFT Healthcare organizers met in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to create comprehensive organizing campaigns and to enhance their research skills.

“Employers are getting smarter,” said Gary Stevenson, AFT’s director of organization for healthcare. “They’re learning how to stay just on this side of the line, so that workers are frustrated with working conditions and poor patient care but not angry enough to form a union. Coupled with ongoing union avoidance campaigns, this makes organizing extremely difficult.”

A comprehensive campaign is an organizing drive in which extensive research identifies leverage points to use against an employer. Although the AFT has not yet run a full-scale comprehensive campaign, Stevenson said, such campaigns will become common in the near future, and the AFT is beginning to build the expertise to run them.

The ability to conduct research is one of the most important skills an organizer has in any comprehensive campaign, presenters noted.

“We say that every member is an organizer,” Jeff Fiedler, president of the Food and Allied Services Trades (FAST) department of the AFL-CIO, told participants. “But it’s also true that every organizer is a researcher.”

“Organizers are always surprised to find just how much truly useful information is on the Web,” said FAST research director Rick Rehberg, who taught attendees how to research healthcare employers and their boards of directors online, as well as how to uncover the hidden value of civil and probate records.

The organizers researched healthcare employers and identified and evaluated leverage points that could be utilized in a real campaign. There is also a wealth of information that can  be obtained only by physically visiting your local courthouse or the secretary of state’s office, noted the presenters.

Dr. Fred Hyde, a CEO at two hospital systems and a clinical professor of health management at Columbia University, helped participants better understand hospital finances.

Hyde discussed how money flows in and out of hospitals, as well as basic measures of an institution’s financial health. He also answered questions about the role Medicare and Medicaid play in hospital finances, and the way governance structures affect a hospital’s day-to-day financial operations.

AFT Healthcare’s next organizing training will be for members who want to become internal or external organizers, and for local leaders who want to know more about how organizing works.  It is scheduled for Nov. 15-18 in Washington, D.C. Training for staff organizers is planned for January 2006.