By Barbara McKenna

For an institution the size and stature of Temple University, having to fight back the idea of a graduate employee union in 1998 must have seemed like a walk in the park. Temple, located in Philadelphia, has a reputation of playing hardball with unions, as the strike of the Temple Association of University Professors/AFT in the early 1990s can attest. Thus, when graduate assistants started agitating, the administration rapidly put into place mechanisms to quell their hopes for workplace democracy.

But after two years of slogging it out with the union, using some of the best union-busting lawyers on the East Coast and managers well-versed in the art of stalling, the university found that the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association (TUGSA) wouldn’t go away. In fact, it was just beginning to find its voice.

To press its case, TUGSA used an approach the AFL-CIO is urging all of its member unions to employ. Called "Voice@Work," it is a strategy that "turns organizing campaigns into community fights for justice," says Andy Levin, the AFL-CIO’s assistant director of field mobilization. "Instead of having the campaign take place behind closed doors," he says, Voice@Work illuminates the issues, educates the public and community leaders, and "lets the light shine on what really happens to workers when they try and organize."

TUGSA began planning its community outreach in summer 2000. In October, it led a town meeting to discuss Temple’s roles and responsibilities as an employer, as a neighbor and as a civic institution. The meeting also occasioned creation of the Workers Rights Board, a group of religious, academic and community leaders who had agreed to monitor and advocate on behalf of workers’ rights in Philadelphia. TUGSA would be their first cause.

In November, the union’s work really paid off, says TUGSA organizer and former graduate employee Rob Callahan. The Philadelphia City Council unanimously passed a resolution calling on Temple to recognize TUGSA as the bargaining agent for Temple’s graduate employees.

Over the winter, TUGSA’s reach became apparent again when the university president visited the state Legislature on a routine funding quest on behalf of the public university. He found himself having to answer questions on the specifics of using taxpayer dollars to purchase the pricey services of union busters.

When the Pennsylvania Employee Relations Board finally ruled in favor of the graduate employees, a coalition of community leaders appealed to the Temple president to respect the election outcome. In March 2001, the graduate employees voted 290-16 for the union. The university’s stalling maneuvers have continued, however. It is appealing the board’s decision to allow the election and also demanding that the union agree to limit the scope of bargaining before the administration will sit down to negotiate a contract.

Undaunted, TUGSA has continued to rely on the relationships it has developed to keep the pressure on the university. Thus, the city council passed another resolution condemning Temple in May. A group of ministers, the Philadelphia Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, wrote to Temple’s president asking that he meet with them. Most recently, TUGSA participated in a vigil marking the administration’s 100-day delay in beginning bargaining. The vigil was sponsored by the Interfaith Committee, TUGSA, the Workers Rights Board and Philadelphia Jobs With Justice.

"This was the first time in Philadelphia that we had this kind of orchestration of the community to get support for an organizing campaign," says Callahan. "It has been a critical component of our success."

"Our strategy is not that John Sweeney or Sandra Feldman calls a local religious leader and asks for a favor," says the AFL-CIO’s Levin, who has been pushing the campaign for about two years. "That would involve a power exchange. We ask workers to go to their own pastors, their own representatives and describe what’s happening in the workers’ worlds. It’s a personal approach, and leaders respond to their constituents."

The approach is being used across the country. In Kansas City, Mo., the AFT Healthcare division has used a broad community outreach program to bolster support for Nurses United, a union organizing around the idea of ensuring quality patient care. AFT health care organizing director Gary Stevenson notes that the religious community has played a special role in the campaign to organize 14 hospitals in the Health Midwest hospital system. Religious leaders have formed a monitoring group that first asks a hospital’s CEO to allow a free and fair election. Lacking that assurance, the monitoring group will step in to observe on its own.

The AFT and the Michigan Federation of Teachers and School Related Personnel also used the community organizing approach with great success in the Michigan State University Graduate Employees Union campaign last spring. By the time graduate employees voted 662-192 for the union, the MSU president had heard from six Michigan members of Congress, four state senators and 22 state representatives urging him to drop MSU’s anti-union campaign. "We’re hoping it will have residual effects when we negotiate the contract," says David Hecker, MFT&SRP secretary-treasurer.

Whenever unions seek to organize and management responds by hiring bad union busters, says Stevenson, an antagonistic environment is created. More and more, contract negotiations are becoming struggles where a comprehensive campaign has to be mounted to achieve a contract that is fair and equitable.

"These leaders are active in the social conscience movement," he adds. "They are active on the question of workers’ rights being human rights."