Why Organize?

When did it all really begin? Where did this fire in my heart for fighting for the rights of low wage workers come from? As I drove down the street one early morning on the way to track practice my sophomore year of college, I passed the local temp agency, it was 4:30 in the morning and I didn't know anyone could possibly wake up that early in the morning unless it was mandated upon them. As I drove past that temp agency on 38^th St in Indianapolis and saw the line for jobs wrapped around the side of the building, it was if my brain had been slapped with a vision of the reality, as a newborn would seeing light for the first time. Where had I been for all the time before that, how did I develop such a skewed and simple belief that if we just worked hard enough that the world was at our doorstep, that the factors of races, privilege and poverty did not exist? Was the quest bringing good to this crooked world really for me to do? Like Joah, I didn't want the job at first, after all, there were better paying ways of providing for my life than this, but just as Joah could not escape the belly of the whale, I could not escape my destiny in the struggle for the rights of low wage workers.

With great power comes great responsibility said Spiderman's mentor, God blessed me with an upbringing of privilege, growing up in a family that loved me dearly and had the means to help me get through college. With my education came my liberation, liberation from the confined and overly simplistic understandings that had once been my rock. It seems the structures of power and inequality seemed to only rear their ugly head when examined, this examination is always a choice that we have to make. As I drove by, looking into the glazed; half awoken eyes of the single mother in line hoping that a possible job today would yeald the means to turn the lights back on, I knew this would be my destiny. The only meaning my life that would be worth it would be to be the advocate for that line.

As I graduated from college and followed through with this fire, I knew that the root of justice was fundamentally based on economics, when you don't have a job that gives you enough to put food in your children's mouth, when the hell are you ever going to “save” up the money to go to the doctor? If your working two jobs just to make ends meet, when are you ever gonna have the time to be a parent and make sure the kids don't get involved in gangs. When the economy fails and your job is first to go, how are you going to make it? Do illegal options seem the best choice?

Economic justice is the not simply an aspect of the foundation for fighting for justice, it is the foundation.

The work started at Interfaith Worker Justice with the Labor in the Pulpits program organizing clergy to discuss issues of worker justice as they related to their faith on Labor Day Sunday. In 2007, about 100 congregations in the Milwaukee area talked about the importance of fighting for the rights of low wage workers, parishioners were challenged to think about poor folk in new ways, many these parishioners now are in similar situations now as recession and factory closures lead to more unemployed. Maybe at some point we will realize that were all in this together and that we rise and fall as one...

After that summer with IWJ it happened, the rubber hit the road, I kept the job with Faith Community for Worker Justice for a full year and the situation at Capital Returns crept up, Capital Returns (now Genco Pharmaceuticals) was a pharmaceutical recycling plant on the northwest side of Milwaukee which inventoried and disposed of unused and degrading drugs from places like Walgreen's and CVS. When the stories got out about what was going down at the plant something had to be done, the employees of Capital Returns had a plan and that plan was to organize a union. As I began to meet with the employees of Capital Returns with the United Steelworkers an organizing drive was created.

The situation down at the plant was bad, most of the workers were coming from the Welfare to Work (W2) program, a failed attempt to put people to work; however the jobs that were provided were as horrible as the program that had placed them there in the first place. Workers at Capital Returns were handling all sorts of dangerous drugs, pregnant women were grabbing raw old birth control pills out of boxes with no protection to their hands but food service gloves, an issue that may have lead to a number of miscarriages at the plant, as we heard the stories, the injustices seemed to creep up faster than pestering dandy lions in the middle of spring

Changes needed to be made, that was evident and the workers began to organize, after all this was their workplace, and if they couldn't be the ones to take the power back who would? They talked to their friends, brought back union cards, dug through the trash to find documents needed to detail workplace atrocities, distributed union literature and the in the organizing terms “leaders were developed.” Meanwhile, we worked on organizing the community outside of Capital Returns, we brought the situations that workers faced to churches, universities and local unions, and as the larger community became invested in the campaign workers felt that the power was theres, to win or to lose.

As the United Steelworkers received enough cards to file for an election we had a big vote yes rally. The workers called upon their friends and family, and with it college students, clergy and union fok gathered outside of the plant gates only as Milwaukee winters are, with 4 feet of snow on the ground and 15 degree temperatures, we got 100 people standing outside the gates of that wrenched place; the message was clear “Vote Yes!”

The feeling for the workers was monumental, once folks who had been broken down and beat up for their entire lives actually had a say in what was going on, although attempts to organize Capital Returns eventually broke down as a result of union busters running high dollar campaign, people from the plant began to have a sense of their own power to change the forces that seemed to ultimately govern their lives.

The feeling for me was similar, I once thought an organizer had to be the leader, but in the end it was never about me being the leader, it was about workers taking control of the forces which they at one point thought were unattainable. I am confident that at some point, Capital Returns will have the voice of the workers in charge.

As I continued organizing we worked on the Paid Sick Day referendum, where every worker in the City of Milwaukee would have Paid Sick Days through their employer, in an effort concerted with 9to5, the Working Womens Association, the referendum passed this past November by a landslide, this monumental reform has now made Milwaukee the 3^rd city in the country to offer this important benefit.

Finally, I ended up working with AFT Healthcare which is where I stand now, organizing nurses to fight for the very same reasons that the workers at Capital Returns did, to have a voice that could shape the course of their lives, to be the voices of change in their workplace. As we stand now we are working on trying to get a neutrality agreement with the hospital so that nurses can freely and fairly organize their union so that they can be advocates for themselves.

Through faith, optimism and a never ceasing belief that a better world is possible will I continue the work of justice in our world because to not do so would be turning my back on the sanctity of everyday life. So to all the students and young idealists out there keep dreaming and keep fighting because its our world to live for and we rise and fall only as one.  

Balance of Sprituality

I hope that you liked that Carl Lewis youtube video posted below, maybe we can use his words of motivation to go on and fight out the next few years of organizing work that we have to do! 

Anyway, I went to Church yesterday and had some really good reflections.  The sermon that Pastor Tim spoke about was the balance of spirituality and the need for each and every one of us to have encompass two different forms to be truly whole. 

The first being to be in deep communion with God, this means spending time in meditation and prayer. This can come through a number of different ways. The first being the tradition of the Quakers.

The Quaker tradition empathizes being quiet and knowing that God is speaking.  So much of the time that we spend in prayer it is simply us speaking, talking to God, but never keeping our mouths shut enough to listen to God's reply.  The Quaker tradition does this through silent communal meditation  where we allow God to speak to us, whatever is relevant and important in our lives at the moment, the Quaker tradition teaches us the importance of listening as well as speaking.

Furthermore, I believe that deep communion with God can also be found within the tradition of Catholicism and although I have never been Catholic the traditions of ritual and transcendence that are so ever popular in the Catholic traditions allow us to transcend the everyday to a place of holy reverence.  The space that many Catholic churches encompass with elaborate decor and imagery take us out of the everyday as we enter the place of God, there is nowhere in my opinion that allows us to feel in a haven of God more than in a Catholic Church. With this combination of steadfast tradition and time spent in deep prayer as well as the physical space that we enter in a Catholic church, I find that I am able to attend to a sense of yearning for God that doesn't come out of my own tradition.

There however, I think is a balance of spirituality amongst the personal and the social and when it comes to the social context of my faith, I feel that it can be best attained in my own tradition: United Methodist. 

When I enter Memorial United Methodist on any given Sunday I feel the great attention to community that is played out in the space, a deep commitment to others who have attended there for so long and a sense that the Kingdom of God cannot be found within ones self mutually.  The strong commitment to social justice and the poor, our work within our neighborhoods and communities is so ever important in the United Methodist Church.  At Memorial we take time out in the service to spend children's time with the kids so they too feel apart of the community.  When Pastor Tim says its time to peace, we may never know when he'll be able to wrangle everyone back together to get back to the service. 

In order to fulfill the complete commitment to Christ as Christians, we must be able to attend to all aspects of our faith, to the spiritual and to the social.  All of the traditions that I mentioned are all doing degrees of both.

While the Quakers spend time in silent mediation with God on Sundays, they are also highly active in the anti-war movement and anti poverty measures, the commitment that the Friends have to social justice is fantastic.

The Catholics while also having a very deep understanding and commitment to ritual and tradition, they to are active in their communities through the running of one of the largest social outreach programs in the city through the facilitation of food pantries, prison and drug ministries. They also have created one of the largest documents of any faith on social commentary called Catholic Social Teaching. This teaching was largely responsible for the liberation theology that spawned up in Central and South America when the poor realized that God had preferential treatment for the poor which gave them the power to build the uprising against hyper capitalist regimes in the Reagan era.  

The United Methodist Church while also attending to the community of Christ, will also hold breakout sessions on how to walk the Labyrinth, how to understand God more fully and personally, and spends significant time trying to develop the spiritual side of its members. 

For if we are to be Christians that can hold onto our foundations, we must have a solid grounding in both the sacred and secular aspects of our life and live them out in a Christ-like way.  All of our traditions attempt to figure out that negotiation in very positive ways, we just need to be accessible to them.

Just thought I'd post this as well

An Open Letter to the Left; It ain't over yet!

As we watched the election results pour in on that fateful November evening, each and everyone of us must have been thinking something different, all with intense feelings a paradigm shift for our country and our world.  Could this be the end of a disastrous era of an American hegemony that has strangled the world of its children, ideas and resources?  Can we have really after 8 years of struggle really be as King said "free at last!"? 

So much emotion, so much happiness but what does it mean? Could the world that we have been fighting for be at our footsteps with the election of a President that stands for change, one that organized workers on the decaying post-industrial streets of South Chicago?

What Obama and the left needs now is to not be complacent. We know now that our work has only began and we certainly can't count on allowing our elected officials to be the change that President Obama campaigned on.  It is even more important now, as our neighborhoods suffer from economic crisis and fear that we organize.  More than any time now, America is ready for things to be different than the way that they have been, and though this we have the unique opportunity to unite as one people and address the problems that are facing all of us throughout our global communion.

We have an amazing opportunity right now to be the change in which we wish to see in the world, but being the change is a challenge of unprecedented proportions.  A new president will help, but we must not let us become complacent and lazy in our work towards social change.

So lets go out and organize!

What in the world are we doing here?

As I open a new page in my life and transition from one job to the next there's quite a bit of a paradigm shift from what I've done to what I am doing now.

In short I took a job as a bicycle messenger and quit my job as an organizer (although I stiil put in a few hours when I can to assist in the religious organizing aspect of the campaign that I was working on with nurses wanting to organize at one of the area hospitals.

It was a difficult decision for me to make in the end.. I've always thought that there are two very important aspects to any job; most important at least in my opinion is to make sure that my occupation is doing something to progress and alleviate the pain and suffering of others around me... After all, if your not doing anything that is helping others what the impotence for doing it in the first place?

I think this belief stems from my belief in the fact that the times in which I feel the most spiritually connected and ultimately happy are the moments when am in direct union and solidaridity with the people that need it most. Having a job that fulfills that solidarity is crucial to the creation of a better society and world, but also it puts your mind and body to work for good!  

However, my decision to become a bicycle messenger has largely challenged these assumptions that I once had. Why afterall did I have this intense longing to preform this job instead of the one as a labor organizer after all? Now I deliver packages from law firm to  law firm which contents may be for the most part questionable in moral standards at best.

Through it though I have found myself instensly happy and fulfilled, afterall I get paid to rode my bike and I don't even have to race if I don't want too!

So in the end what to make of this decision? A feeling of an unfulfilled dream, a job that wasn't nearly as stressful, a yearning to get out of the office? Or maybe a feeling that happiness and the capability to help others in ways that didn't seem so direct, that there are people at your job who you can be in solidarity with, that there when you are happy with what your doing, you can show your happiness and spread it to others by doing great things outside your job... that maybe in order to be able to help others the greatest involves you being the happiest that you can be, that when others are hurting and suffering it requires you to be on top of yourself to be able to effectively help! 

Since I took this job last week I have found that I am much happier and in the end I can actually do more to help others... I guess in the end the moral is to do what you love no matter what and the byproduct will allow us to be the sunshine in all the lives of others that we touch!  :)

A letter to Sarah Palin on Community Organizing

Last night, like many other Americans, I was really interested to see what Gov. Palin would say in her acceptance speech, and although I have never had any plans on voting for the Republican ticket, Palin did seem like a good one in my mind and to a certain extent I liked Palin, her husband was a United Steelworker and seemed to understand the importance of building working class power.

Then she had to say it, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities." The attack that she made was obviously centered at Obama who spent his time in between undergrad and law school organizing displaced Steelworkers. Then I was pissed, and I was offended as hell as someone who works to improve our community.

Palin might have just as well have given every community organization, non-profit and grassroots organization the bird. We as community organizers have been the people on the ground in the face of the flood of economic destruction caused by big politicians and people like herself that have no regard for the people at the bottom; who care so much for America and its people that they are willing to take jobs that don't pay the big bucks, but instead empower the people who are most marginalized. When public funding is cut for programs that help alleviate poverty that many Republicans are notorious for, they simply think that the problems disappear, I can assure you that they don't and its the community organizers that then step in to help empower folks in poverty and help them build a voice.

Let me give you a little history lesson Ms. Palin, it was the community organizers that were the ones that overcame and eventually got rid of segregation laws in the civil rights movement, it was the community organizers that fought for workers to get the 8 hour workday, it was the community organizers who founded the inner city food pantries, homeless shelters, it is the community organizers in Milwaukee and Ohio that collected the signatures necessary to get a Paid Sick Day referendum on the ballot that would guarantee a standard for workers getting Paid Sick Days with their jobs to take care of their kids, and yes, it was even the organizers that built Mr. Palin's union that you seem so proud of.

Since you probably don't know what a community organizer is let me explain it to you very clearly. The main objective of a community organizer or any organizer is to build power amongst people who have none, to inspire new leaders in the community to stand up for the issues that they believe in, to get people to believe that they are worth more and have more power to fix the issues facing their local community than they believe they do, community organizers job is to empower their communities to get involved, to join "PTA" and change the way that things are going.

Ms. Palin, democracy is a government of the people by the people for the people, political leaders like yourself are the people that we elect to do what we want done. But community organizers are us, whether by profession or not, we attempt to make a difference in their communities.

Ms. Palin, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about and obviously don't have the experience to lead this country. And the more you try to separate yourself from everyday people involved in our community, the more your going to get your ass kicked in this election. We are taking back this country, and as we do it you might begin to understand the power of community organizing and the importance and responsibility that it holds in making positive social change.

A long time coming

Oh Boy! How long it has been since I have written my last blog post! Over a whole season of the year! My apologies to all who have read my blog in the past.

So much has happened since my last blog post. The Capuchin Volunteer Corp, the program that I was apart of that allowed me to work at Faith Community for Worker Justice finished up in mid July and left me in a place where I really had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. Dreams of heading out to the mythical and idealistic American West were thwarted by an all consuming and overriding college debt that keeps me one step away from pure freedom.

I must say that I have never been a financial guy; you know one that kept meticulous count over how much money you have in the bank and whatnot, but what I have found is that debt might as well be a form of slavery, because it has the ability to build a wall between you and the dreams that you have for yourself. So my determination on the matter is that if debt is the wall between true freedom and involuntary servitude, it must be broken down.

So I have to say I have come to accept a new financial practice. Simply no debt! May be harder than it sounds but I'm going to give it a whirl.

So I got a job working with the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, a union organizing position working on area hospitals to get them union representation. This does a number of things, it allows me to work for positive social change in our health care system while simultaneously making enough to hack down on some of this debt.

What else has been going on? Elizabeth moved to Detroit a few weeks ago where she got a job working with an organization that provides IT and other computer related stuff to area non-profits and C(4)'s on stuff related to the elections. From what I can gather, she really likes the job, Detroit however, is providing an interesting experience for her. Living in the City of Detroit has got to be a hell of a trial by fire. It is certainly a testament to the troubles of globalization and disappearance of unions in a formerly economically viable urban center.

The house that she's living in is a mansion! Originally it was set up to be a single family house, but her and her roommate Molly (a former Cap Corp volunteer) have the top floor and I must say that the house is absolutely astounding! The intricacies of the woodwork and molding in the structural frame of the house is certain evidence of high class housing before the jobs left the city.

Its definitely difficult not having her here in Milwaukee like she was. Adjusting to a long distance relationship has certainly been difficult for both of us. But I think were going to cope in the end and pull it though. Were certainly a great match for one another and I guess they say that love conquers all. (I assume that includes distance as well).

I moved back into the neighborhood that I was originally living in when I originally moved to Milwaukee. Its an area called Riverwest, which sort of serves as the fringe arts and culturally beautiful neighborhood of Milwaukee's north side. I moved in with a friend of mine from mNSC http://www.milwaukeenetworkforsocialchange.org/ (the group that puts on the free vans and markets) and a friend who I did some organizing with at UWM with SDS and the Student Labor group they have going on there.

Anyway, that's really whats going on in my life right now. I will keep you posted on the way that organizing goes with the nurses at our next project in Milwaukee.