It's Labor Day, a day to remember and fight for the working folks who make this country great. The cooks, teachers, bakers, truckers, janitors, community organizers... Community Organizers???
A few years back the SEIU, one of my favorite unions, launched a campaign called "Justice for Janitors!". Now janitors are important folks- when they go on strike our neat environs are within hours overtaken by garbage and sanitation seriously suffers. If an H1N1 flu epidemic strikes, the janitors will be as much on the front lines as the doctors and nurses. Yet janitors have been literally treated like dirt by corporate america, and thank god the SEIU is doing something about it!
Community organizers are vital too, and Obama owes his election to them. But during the campaign many organizers were grossly overworked and greatly underpaid. After the election they were forgotten. Is it any wonder that so few are responding to the call to come back and organize for Obama's health care plan?
Back in the spring of 2007 I applied for and was accepted as an intern in the Obama campaign. I have union organizing experience so they wanted me to be a labor liasson in Iowa. I'm retired on a pension and my house in Minneapolis and vehicles are paid for, so I don't need a paycheck. Most of Iowa's union membership is in eastern Iowa so I quickly ascertained that I'd be spending a lot of $$$ on motels and fuel for the tour of Iowa union halls the Obama campaign had planned for me. The Obama campaign promised they'd cover travel expenses, so I signed up for the next open Camp Obama training session. But as my date at Camp Obama approached, the promised travel expense reimbursement failed to materialize. Being a person of modest means, I was forced to drop out of Camp Obama and never was able to afford to become an Obama intern.
None the less, as my budget allowed I was able to make several day trips to northern Iowa to work on the Obama campaign. There I heard several stories of the hardships of under and unpaid Obama staffers and interns- living in homeless shelters, or spending the savings they needed for college on motels when the Obama campaign's housing assistance failed to materialize. I talked to interns who had to drop out of the campaign to take jobs so they could eat and pay rent who were still haranged by Obama campaign superiors for not making their contact numbers. I met interns who were sleeping in their cars because the Obama campaign hadn't given them any expense money. The paid staffers had it little better, living hand to mouth on the campaign trail only to be abandoned after the election. I still see these former Obama campaign staffers from time to time, and many are still unemployed and aren't even receiving unemployment compensation.
Today I was at an event where the Obama campaign DBA Organizing for America was trying to recruit volunteers for the upcoming campaign to pass Obama's health care bill. Is it no surprise they found few takers?
Janitors are essential workers that need to receive a living wage and health care so they can keep our society from devolving into a garbage dump. Community organizers are essential workers that build support for our democratic candidates and issues. Just like janitors, they can't be exploited then discarded to be replaced by the next bunch of enthusiastic young volunteers. The democratic party and it's candidates need to treat organizers fairly to build a corps of career professional organizers to lead us to future victories.
Toward that end I'm proposing this contract with organizers and demand that the democratic party and it's candidates adhere to it's principles:
Interns:
- Will be given a genuine educational experience and not be used as unpaid labor.
- Will be compensated for all travel and other expenses they might not have otherwise incurred.
- Will be promoted to paid organizer jobs before outside hire.
Paid Organizers:
Will receive all of the above protections, plus:
- The right to organize a union and have it recognized by majority card check.
- Be paid a living wage.
- Be provided health insurance
- Be given employee status, thus providing them Worker's Compensation if injured and unemployment compensation if laid off.
The democratic party and it's candidates spend a fortune on advertising and can afford to treat organizers, the lifeblood of our party, decently out of petty cash. It's high time our party that professes it's support of working folks puts it's money where it's mouth is.
And being union through and through, I'm going on strike and ain't doing nothing for the party until they do!