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Convention delegates say, 'Count Me In!'

‘Unions are built by activists and volunteers’

Stagnant wages, healthcare cost increases, pension raids, attacks on collective bargaining rights and infringements on civil liberties: These are just a few of the reasons AFT members should be outraged at the political establishment—and should turn their anger into action, says AFT president Edward J. McElroy. (See related story on sidebar.)

“Unions are built by activists and volunteers,” McElroy said in his keynote address to the nearly 3,500 delegates attending the union’s national convention in Boston. “I am counting on you to make this union, and this country, better and stronger.”

Are you being counted?

Wisconsin’s Wayne Mertens
Revenue agent Wayne Mertens is being counted. Mertens, who celebrated 25 years as a state employee in August, became active in his local, the Wisconsin Professional Employees Council, within the last two years as a member of the bargaining support team. Before, Mertens says, he didn’t go to union meetings or participate in other union activities, including lobbying for legislative approval of his collective bargaining agreement. “I saw who the leaders were. I thought they were doing fine and that they didn’t need me,” says Mertens. But now Mertens, a first-time delegate to the AFT national convention, realizes every body is needed. Mertens, who sees himself more as a trade unionist than a public employee unionist, says he will continue to be involved, particularly in political and legislative action activities. One “[doesn’t] necessarily have to be an active union leader” to write or visit a legislator, he said. “You can be an active union member to do that.”

North Dakota’s Mary Kate Ryan
“Count me in to help with all the political education that we need to do,” says Mary Kate Ryan, a first-time AFT national convention delegate from the North Dakota Public Employees Association. Since 2003, Ryan has been running North Dakota’s national register of historic places program. Although she’s been a union member since she took the job at the state historical society, Ryan didn’t become an active member until last year; and joining the local’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), Ryan says, “has been eye opening.”

Maybe that’s why she wants to help with the political education of other NDPEA members. “Our members don’t have to agree with what the union decides to support,” Ryan says. “In fact, I don’t always agree. But the union helps us stay informed about the options and how they affect us. For a lot of people, that is the key to getting involved. How does it affect me?”

New York’s Greg McBride
For a dozen years, Greg McBride has been active in his local, the New York State Public Employees Federation. McBride, an architectural designer for the state’s Office of General Services, says a local’s union leaders may be doing a fine job but “there are going to be times when the members’ voices need to be heard so we can send a unified message.” One of those times is now, McBride says, noting that decision makers at all levels of government are “out of touch” with the values of average Americans, ranging from affordable healthcare to quality public education for their children to secure employer-based pensions. Attacks on these values are often ideologically driven, he notes, saying that “the only way to stop these kinds of threats is to be involved in the effort to send the message to the powers that be that these are important and we will not allow you to take them away.” McBride adds that the labor movement isn’t just about a worker’s quality of life on the job but about the quality of workers’ lives.

The July 2006 AFT national convention marked McBride’s fourth as a delegate.

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'You are the power of
this union'
AFT president urges new
era of grass-roots activism

There are powerful interests at work in America today that aim to destroy every shred of economic, political and social decency won by working Americans over many decades, AFT president Edward J. McElroy warned in his keynote address to delegates to the AFT’s 79th national convention July 20–23 in Boston.

McElroy detailed many of the immediate and long-term threats facing each constituency of the union. The White House is pressuring the National Labor Relations Board to strip nurses’ union rights. Higher education is reeling from attacks on academic free speech.

Public employees have seen governors in Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri steal their rights to union representation. Paraprofessionals are vulnerable to budget attacks circulating through states that would force cuts in vital health, guidance and school services that teachers and students rely on.

And then there are the broad, overarching issues that put the AFT and labor in the crosshairs, McElroy stressed. The current administration’s economic policies “have led to a widening gulf between the very rich and the very poor—and they have left many in the middle class teetering toward the latter.” The White House also is behind plans to destabilize and privatize Social Security, and “now there is another threat to retirement security—the collapse of pension promises.”

These attacks can only be stopped, he said, if each and every union member is willing to stand up and be counted.

And they did.

McElroy called out the duties that individual union activists accept on a daily basis—from volunteer organizer to precinct walker in a political campaign. He asked the thousands of delegates gathered to stand up and be recognized if they had ever taken on these challenges for their union. One by one, groups of delegates rose to their feet until virtually every seat was empty and the hall was filled with standing, cheering AFT members.

“You and your colleagues who do this work each and every day, you are the power of this union,” McElroy told thousands of AFT members before him. “You fight the fights, you win the victories. We all need to go out and enlist more members into your kind of activism because so much depends on the members of their union saying, ‘Count Me In!’”

Broad, grass-roots activism shows the union’s true colors and exposes the bogus charge that labor is a self-interested group with a narrow agenda.

“Unions are built by activists and volunteers,” McElroy said. “Members get inspired by common values we believe in, a moral center, a cause.

“There are times when a union must act. This is one of those times.”

Volunteers and activists built the AFT’s past, and they still hold the key to the union’s future, McElroy stressed. He mentioned several projects started over the past two years that exemplify this spirit, including Activists for Congressional Education (ACE), which builds relationships between members and their Capitol Hill representatives; and the AFT e-Activist program, which uses technology to quickly connect members to Congress.

Although external threats abound, one of the biggest threats to the union’s future is entirely in our hands.

“Frankly we have lost some of that activism as we have relied less on members and volunteers and become bigger, more structured and dependent upon union staff. We have to make sure that members don’t look at union membership more as a service than as a way to be part of a cause.

“We are going to continue to develop this grass-roots political mobilization,” McElroy pledged. “There is no other way to achieve what our union needs to do.”

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