« Introducing: The Low Carb Apple Cinnamon Pizza! | Main | Fancy Dinner With Mom »
January 28, 2006
What Exactly Do You Do?
I remember the first time I ever heard Liz Phair's "Extraordinary," from which the line that is our headline is lifted. I was in the car driving back from lunch at the Mexican place with my best friend. I thought about how much I wished the song had been around back when I was engaged in a long-term low-level stalking project. The seven year quest that had begun my senior year in college had come to an end when the object of my affections, the remarkable Saint Francis, student labor leader, son of an ex-priest and ex-nun, long-haired hippie freak who looked a lot like depictions of Jesus as a white guy, had discovered that he was crazy about me after all and demanded that I cancel my planned trip to the Dominican Republic with a dude I was seeing off and on to fly out to California and visit him. I did... and paid off the dude I dumped in the process. $2000 total for the cost of both trips -- major relationship exit fee. Anyhow, I had been chasing Francis for seven years, ever since his belief in me gave me the courage to become a union organizer. We were involved together in the monumental Yale strike of 1996 -- I had been a student dining hall worker, Francis was just a kid from a working class background who got it. He taught me much of what I know about organizing, in long arguments standing outside in the cold after Student Labor Action Coalition meetings. He led us in the most successful action I have ever seen pulled off -- a student sit-in in the Yale president's office. I just found the t-shirt my friend Jon Z made me commemorating the day: on the back was written the speech I had said over and over again as lead spokesperson. I don't remember exactly when I fell for Francis, but it was somewhere between watching him plan the sit-in with meticulous attention to detail, hearing him speak to a crowd of students with his hair flying in the wind and his eyes shining like he might just be nuts, and praying with him over a supper of collard greens, rice and beans (I have always had a thing for men who can combine food and religion.) Alas, Francis had a girlfriend. I knew that he would never cheat on her, nor would I have wanted him to... I wanted Francis all to myself. When it became clear that pursuing him could only lead to disaster and dissent in our small group of radicals, I hopped on a train for Boston to drown myself in MIT computer geeks and crash out on my old roommate's couch. (In times of great stress, I have always found myself on a train to Boston.)
During all the events, a recruiter from the Organizing Institute of the AFL-CIO gave me a call and asked me to interview for the program that trained organizers. I thought myself unworthy, but with Francis cheering me on, I set out on a quest to become a great organizer, organize thousands of workers, slay dragons and capture the heart of the handsome prince.
Oddly enough, this strategy worked. I started out organizing in the South: first, construction workers in West Palm Beach, Florida (Imagine me in a hard hat. When you stop laughing, please continue to read.) Then people who took phone calls for UPS, people who made hospital gowns, cotton mill workers, people who made ziplock bags (I will never look at a baggie the same way again.) The first year was miserable. Driving from house to house, visiting workers for twelve or more hours a day, most of whom slammed the door in my face, yelled curses, or worse. Anti-union attitudes are so embedded in the American consciousness that people making minimum wage with no benefits and no job security, people working in dangerous environments where the management skirts safety laws, people who have lost multiple fingers on the job, still would rather go on like they are than join with their co-workers to do something about it. Not a happy sight, day after day.
And the exhaustion was unbelievable. I went six months with no days off except for one weekend off when I flew back to New Haven to see Francis -- who was still with his girlfriend. I had fantasies of being a normal girl, working at the Gap and going on dates and having fun. I missed cooking, since I was living in hotels with no kitchen. I did well with the workers, but the staff people on my internship didn't like me, one woman in particular (whom I later found out tried to get rid of several other young women I knew, all of whom became kick-ass organizers) told me that I had no business being in the labor movement.
I sat in my car every night and cried. The work ethic out there on the road is that you work until you put yourself in danger of crashing your car, then you go drink yourself into oblivion or do drugs or sleep with random people to kill the pain. I did none of the above, though I did almost fall asleep at the wheel one early morning on the way to a construction site. I've always been too scared of drugs to try them (I figure my grip on reality is tenuous enough as it is!) and I hadn't yet figured out how to drink much. Sleeping with random folk was out of the question... none of the guys were skinny enough for me, and I was too scared of being perceived as a slut to take any chances. Out on the road, that kind of lifestyle is called dedication and hard work... in the real world, it's called insanity.
Finally, on Labor Day of 1997, I was saved. I got a call at 8 am in my hotel room in Jacksonville, Illinois, telling me that I was laid off. We had lost a big election at a cotton mill, so all the newer staff were being let go with two days notice. Yup, laid off from a labor union on Labor Day. Do I win a prize?
Apparently, I did. It was just a couple of days before I had job offers from all over. This one guy from a nurses' union in New Jersey kept calling me... we hit it off immediately on the phone, talking about ways to organize that involved the workers actually doing something (like setting up meetings in their homes) instead of just banging on the doors of people who don't want to talk to us all day. I wasn't that interested in organizing nurses... still suffering from the juvenille delusion that it is more important to organize poor people... but I liked this guy, Larry, a lot, and the job would get me off the road, and into a place of my own.
I met Larry in early October of 1997, and for six years we didn't go a day without talking, except for the two weeks he took a vacation in England. We became close friends as well as boss and employee, and I set about organizing nurses.
Larry gave me tons of freedom to do whatever I thought best, and he was extremely supportive of young women, which many senior men in the labor movement were not. I met nurses in diners all over New Jersey, before shift, after shift, at all hours of the day and night, weekday and weekend. I worked all the time, but I was happy. The process of organizing unions is difficult and bordering on impossible because management has the right to lie to employees 24 hours a day, and while they can force employees to attend anti-union meetings, be subjected to one-on-one harassment from their direct supervisors, and watch films about coal miners' strikes in West Virginia, employees have to meet with us on their own time. Organizing is the process of convincing people that they have power, then pushing them to do something with the power. Anyone who has tried to talk to another person about changing their diet and met with tons of resistance has had a glimpse of the difficulty of what I do every day. But imagine that twelve hours a day, the people you're trying to get to eat healthier are served Dunkin Donuts and cheeseburgers and are afraid they'll lose their jobs if they don't eat them. Then you've got what I'm up against. Only the strongest survive.
The pressure that workers are under during an organizing campaign is unbelievable until you've been there. Management hires consultants who specialize in union busting, and these consultants sit down with each front line supervisor and go over each nurse's employee file in depth, looking for a way to persuade her to be against the union. For example, I worked with one nurse who was active in the union campaign, but had a child who was very ill and had to re-arrange her work schedule frequently to take him to his doctor's appointments. Her supervisor was told to tell her that if they organized the union, management would no longer be flexible with her schedule so she couldn't take her son to the doctor. Is that true? Of course not! It's just silliness -- if management really thought it would somehow be easier to do bad things to employees if they organized the union, then why are they spending millions to fight the organizing campaign? But they'll say and do anything to stop workers from getting a voice on the job, including stooping to trying to make a nurse choose between a voice on her job and her child.
Why, you may ask, does management fight so hard? Well, here in the US, workers have very few rights. All management has to do is pay minimum wage and not discriminate on the race, religion, national origin and sex grounds. Even those are hard to prove. Workers have no right to vacation, holidays, sick time. Workers can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with no notice. Management can cut salaries, change hours, take away pension contributions... and the worker's only recourse is to leave. Or to fight the battle to organize a union. By organizing and winning guarantees in a legally binding contract, workers can protect the salaries and benefits they have, guarantee their right to speak up for the quality of care without being fired, and be sure that they will get a fair slice of the pie, not just the crumbs. Our culture has trained the ruling class to be greedy, so alas, most employers (and there are exceptions!) aren't fair to workers until the workers force them to be. This is particularly scary in the case of nurses, where critically ill human beings depend on the work that nurses do, and not having enough nurses can be the difference between life and death.
My work is not glamorous. Most of what I do takes place in diners or in nurse's suburban homes, talking new groups of nurses through the process of realizing that by joining together, they can have the power to change things for themselves and their patients. It involves confronting people's class prejudices and stereotypes at every turn. No one in this country wants to think of themselves as working class, and they associate unions with uneducated blue collar workers. Showing nurses that joining together with other nurses to stand up for themselves and their patients (these days, the main issue is staffing -- just having enough nurses there to make sure that when you need life-saving care, someone is available to give it to you) is the most professional thing they can possibly do is never easy. But over the years I have seen the power of organized health care professionals. I've seen nurses secure nurse to patient ratios, that holy grail of nurse organizing, in a first contract. I've seen health care professionals win domestic partner benefits so that their partners could have health insurance. I've was there when nurses at our largest hospital won the best pensions for health care workers in Pennsylvania. While unorganized nurses see their pensions cut, their raises delayed, and their sick time taken away (do you really want your nurse to come to work sick because she fears she'll lose her job if she stays home with the flu?), organized nurses can protect what they have and win even better.
Organizing nurses is the intersection of labor organizing, health care reform, and women's rights. Most nurses are still women (and I don't expect them to get a sex-change any time soon), and many are single parents. Your nurse is the one who advocates for you when you're in the hospital, and if she's tired, stressed, or afraid that she'll be fired if she speaks up against unsafe practices, you're as good as dead. Professionals are the new forefront of labor organizing. They are the people who vote, the people who have leadership roles in their communities. When they become radicalized at the workplace, it changes the way they look at everything. Much like the experience of taking control of your health through CR changes the way you look at everything, taking control at work changes relationships to all power structures.
I fell in love with organizing nurses, won some big campaigns, lost a small one, and built a life based on caring for those who care for others. Problem was, I didn't spend much time caring for me. By the time I heard Liz Phair's song that afternoon, I was firmly entrenched in the lifestyle of meeting nurses at the hospital at 6:30 am as they were going into work, working all day as Director of Organizing, and then being on the phone with nurses until 9 at night or out at meetings with nurses coming off the 7 am - 7:30 pm shift until as late at 10. Due to the demands on their time and the essential importance of meeting everyone in person and almost constant follow-up by phone or in person, we have to be available 24/7. So that was my life... loving my work, loving working for an independent nurse's union founded by some of the strongest women on earth, but not taking time to eat right, consuming way too many bagels, coffees with cream and sugar, and once we were finally done with work, eating nachos and washing them down with a margarita. We were understaffed in my union for a lot of the time... even though we had the money to hire, it's very, very difficult to find good people. So I did all the work myself, and once I finally had VLC the work expanded so we both worked all the time!
After my big win at the largest hospital in Vermont in 2002, Francis had the epiphany I had waited seven years for... and I flew to California for a great weekend. But we quickly realized that we were better off as friends than as lovers, and we continue to be close friends to this day. In fact, he gave me some of the best advice about MR in the days when I couldn't figure out what was going on! Trust one genius boy to be able to decode the bizarre behavior of another.
So by the time I heard Liz Phair's "Extraordinary," my quest was done, and I was working myself into oblivion trying to do everything I could to bring about the day when the nurses in my major metro area would be ready to organize. (Only 15% of nurses in the US are organized.) And I thought to myself, "Ah, for a quest..."
About a week later I subscribed to the CR Society list, sent email to the CR Study, got a cute message back from a frequent poster whose writing I loved, and became one of the many list-girls with a crush on MR. I thought of the Liz Phair song because one of my dear readers (readersmu?) asked me what exactly do I do because that's a line from the song!
I've blogged many times about how CR helped me find greater life balance, and I think I am an even better organizer now that I have things in my life other than just work. I am better able to distance myself from the emotional side of the work to make good decisions. I am better able to absorb the anger, frustration and turmoil that the workers inevitably throw at us as they're under fire from their bosses. That's why I'm so good at absorbing large amounts of negatiity -- it's my job! Most organizers burn out because they never figure out a way to live with all the pain they have to absorb from the workers as they fight their way free. And the disappointment when you lose is devastating, especially when you have nothing else in your life.
My daily life consists of meeting health care professionals near their hospitals or in their homes, talking with them about how they can organize a union, and then following up with them to get them to do the hard work of talking to their co-workers and getting more and more people involved and committed. Most of the time there are National Labor Relations Board elections where the workers vote "yes" or "no." Management fights hard for a no vote, and spends millions on anti-union consultants. They even give big raises, figuring they can buy off the workers once and not have to worry about the workers having power in the long term. It's more about control than money, and anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship knows how hard the abusers fight when they think they're losing control.
Some days I hand out flyers to nurses as they walk into work... lately, we've gotten some calls from a system of hospitals where the nurses' just had their pensions cut by 40%! Sick time slashed, and raises delayed too. Of course, they're too scared at first to do much about it... but we build hope gradually, and from hope springs power. They have the example of several strong groups of nurses and other health care professionals in our city to inspire them.
Tomorrow morning at 8 I'm meeting with some nurses who want to organize as they come off the night shift. We work weekends, holidays, whenever. My hours can be crazy, and while I've tried to make space in my life now that I have a relationship, there are times when I'm not around much. Remember the months of Denny's shift change meetings? I'm trying to learn greater balance, and to train my staff so that I don't have to do absolutely everything. But there are times when I have to run out at 6 on Saturday morning on short notice to meet some nurses coming off of work, and times when I work 14 hour days for weeks on end. My Orange One is extremely supportive, and very self-sufficient... he is just fine with doing his work, cooking his tatta, and feeding the cats while I'm away.
I remember one early morning a few years ago when I met a nurse at 6:15 and she said, "You're not married are you?" I checked the ring finger of my left hand to be sure, and said, "No, I'm not." "I didn't think so," she said, "No man would put up with your schedule!" Well, MR has proven her wrong!
I love my work... I couldn't leave it if I tried. I actually did try once, and failed! I can't stay away from the thing that I know really makes a difference. And the friends I've made through this work are like sisters and brothers to me. Comrades, even. :)
It's a little weird, I know. But what did you expect? Most people who do CR aren't the last word in normality. And if I was, the blog would be pretty boring, now wouldn't it?
Well, you asked...
Posted by april at January 28, 2006 12:11 PM
Comments
While you quote Liz Phair, your personal story brings to mind Cake's song "Short Skirt, Long Jacket." Especially this part (as sung by MR): "I want a girl who gets up early; I want a girl who stays up late; I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity, Who uses a machete, to cut through red tape. With fingernails that shine like justice, and a voice that is dark like tainted glass. She is fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack. She’s touring the facilities and picking up the slack. I want a girl with a short skirt and a long, long jacket."
You go girl!
Posted by: Sam at January 28, 2006 2:09 PM
Wow! That's an amazing story! I knew union organization involved some degree of dedication but I wouldn't have guessed the amount of it... Still, looks like your job gives you a lot of satisfaction which is the most important.
I wish we had a kick-ass organizer like you at our paper who could make us journalists get off their lazy asses and do something about the funny 5% raise we got in 3 years for example.
Thanks. Now I know exactly what you do.
Posted by: zeynep at January 28, 2006 3:39 PM