One-point-one million reasons motivated Robert Jackson to file a class action lawsuit in 1993 against the state of New York--the 1.1 million New York City schoolchildren who attend the city's 11,000 public schools. That lawsuit made national headlines this January when state Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse issued a landmark decision, validating Jackson's claims that the state's school funding system violates both the New York Constitution and the Civil Rights Reform Act of 1964.

Since the decision, city officials and children's rights advocates have hailed Jackson, director of field services for the AFT's Public Employees Federation (PEF), as a hero. But in his view, Jackson was only doing what he has always done in response to an injustice. He organized.

"It is all about working with each other to do better for our communities and our families," says Jackson, who organized his first campaign in 1968 when he led a student protest against chains on the doors that barred exit from his East Harlem high school.

When the chains were removed, Jackson experienced firsthand what individuals can accomplish through collective action, and he hasn't shied away from a challenge ever since. He organized a tenants' association strike that compelled the owner to install a new boiler. He organized a community basketball club for indoor play December to April. He organized members of his PEF local where he served as a leader while he worked for the state as an unemployment insurance fraud investigator before joining the PEF staff in 1980. But his successful bid for the District 6 community school board in 1986 marked the beginning of his largest organizing campaign--fighting a state education funding system that grossly underfinanced New York City public schools.

By 1992, after six years on the school board, Jackson, then board president, realized the city schools were in financial straits. Classes were bloated systemwide with 30-plus students to one teacher. In his northern Manhattan community, students were bused to schools in other areas of the city, some as close as neighboring Harlem, others on the other side of the Hudson River and into the south Bronx.

"Enough was enough," Jackson recalls. It was time to organize. It was time to sue the state. Jackson turned to District 6 school board lawyer Michael Rebell who then formed the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a nonprofit organization; hired another lawyer, Robert Hughes; and filed the class action suit in 1993 naming Jackson as the lead litigant.

While Jackson is encouraged by DeGrasse's decision, he says "the battle is over, but the war is not won." With Gov. George Pataki promising an appeal, Jackson equates the lawsuit to a relay race. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity has passed the baton to the New York Legislature, which "has to bring the bacon home," he says.

Meanwhile, Jackson has entered another race--for a seat on the New York City Council--where his efforts to organize supporters is as essential to his successful bid as it has been to the outcomes of his other endeavors.

"I have been involved in every facet of our community from housing to education to the electoral process," says Jackson. "I think [the city council] is a natural progression as far as the type of work I have done in the community."

It's never too late to change the world

Although a latecomer to the labor movement, today Linda Cushing is making up for lost time. Cushing is president of Adjunct Faculty United/AFT, which represents 1,400 part-time faculty members at Fullerton College, Cypress College and North Orange County Community College School of Continuing Education. On Feb. 14, she stood with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, executive vice president Linda Chavez-Thompson and secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka at a news conference in Los Angeles to help introduce the "new face" of labor. As Cushing spoke, her words at one point elicited an involuntary shudder from Sweeney:

"I'm somewhat surprised to find myself as the president of a union local," she confessed. "Before going into teaching, I ran businesses in the private sector, and I fought the unions. I stand before you now as a Republican who has seen the light, because I learned firsthand what happens to professionals when there is no representation and no hope."

When she first entered the work world in the late 1960s, Cushing was a troubleshooter for a large corporation that ran tennis and country clubs. When the clubs were losing money, Cushing was called in to turn them around. That experience taught her to love the challenge of confronting a problem because the solution eventually will surface. From the day she started this job until the day she left, she says with regret, she was fighting the unions.

Next, she ran her own ad agency and graphic design studio. "As a small business owner," she recalls, "my mindset was that I saw no value to unions whatsoever." Her business slowly failed during the recession of the early 1990s. So Cushing, a figurative painter, went back to school and got two degrees--a master of arts and a master of fine arts.

Diplomas in hand, she began to teach part-time, temporary positions, while she waited for the real job to open up. Then it dawned on her: This was all she was going to find. The colleges weren't creating new jobs. The institutions had a huge pool of part-timers they could use to replace every retiree. "I loved teaching. I looked around at my colleagues--isolated, angry, morose and sour. ‘I'm not going to become that,' I said. One day at Fullerton, I started organizing.

"I've never been more angry in my life than since I've been trying to do something to remedy the abuse of part-time faculty," says Cushing, whose voice and energy belie the dark characterization. Now, her 18-hour days are filled with negotiating a first contract for Adjunct Faculty United, teaching one course a semester, mobilizing students to support the faculty negotiations (the students love to wear the union's "Just Say Yes" pins, meaning "just say yes to health benefits, adequate pay" and so on) and organizing other part-timers in the region. The union's most recent victory was at Palomar Community College in San Diego County last December.

Cushing says her background provides a great entree to both skeptical and beleaguered faculty and legislators. With colleagues, part-time and full-time alike, she shares the frustration that the institutions they teach in "are not what we bargained for. We didn't expect the cronyism, the overriding politics of the place. The mission of teaching, which is to ennoble people, has been lost." The union brings people a voice, amplified a thousand times over--and hope, she says.

The union leader retains her Republican registration, despite the fact that her philosophy and political views have changed. "I remember thinking 15 years ago--I was tremendously arrogant--how lucky I was to have discovered that I understood my roots and had the correct political philosophy. It's exciting now to me to understand that a lot of my previous assumptions were not correct. I can use this as a vehicle for change," Cushing notes.