Finds coalition-building in Texas successful

...Consequently, we get stuck on the coasts or in small liberal pocket communities where we seldom engage in discussion with people who don't think like us...

...Where SEIU has been active, similar victories in Texas have also taken place...

...Still, there is reason to hope, and the last few years have demonstrated that organizing in the South is not only possible, it is imperative...

...102 n DISSENT / Spring 2008...

...For example, in San Antonio, a majority of the eleven city council members are now pro-union...

...Suddenly, politicians who had refused to return our calls wanted to come and meet with workers...

...JONAH LALAS worked for SEIU for five years and was the organizing director of HOPE...

...This is true even when the union members in question had little contact with union leaders...

...After all, King died while in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers...

...Some went to San Antonio...

...Finally, another strange kinship was forged in Houston between SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the leading unions of the Change to Win Coalition and the AFLCIO, respectively...

...One year later, those janitors went out on strike, mass arrests took place, they won major raises...

...She was also not as well funded as her opponent, Jay Aiyer, a lawyer and probusiness Democrat...

...Workers quickly saw that in order to get a good contract, they'd NOTEBOOK need a pro-union city council to pass it...

...Then, soon after our arrival, an unexpected boon came when Republican governor Rick Perry signed a law allowing collective bargaining for municipal employees in Houston...

...Another year after the janitor victory, the union succeeded in getting one of its own members elected to city council office...

...And if SEIU's foray across the Mason-Dixon Line isn't victorious, who's to say a member backlash won't result...

...If we build the union well, we may be able to change the state laws to favor unions instead of big business, thus undoing decades of conservative legislation enacted to counter the New Deal benefits generations of union workers fought for...

...In addition to galvanizing city workers for the union, the law also helped spur their interest in the fall 2005 city council elections...

...The City of Houston is trying to get by with a paltry raise, and so workers are escalating their pressure on City Hall...

...Clearly, this "Southern hospitality" doesn't extend into the field of labor relations...

...In Houston, in the private sector, around the time of Lovell's victory, 5,000 janitors succeeded in gaining recognition of their union with SEIU...

...A Houston Chronicle headline declared, "Union Makes a Statement in One City Council Race" and opened with the line, "Labor is back in Houston politics...

...Leaders of both unions meet frequently to review progress, discuss strategy, and implement courses of action...

...The local newspaper declared it, "labor's largest gain in Houston in the past 25 years...

...And rather than stopping in for lunch at a plantation, as a union organizer I knocked on doors in suburban developments looking for leaders who could help unite their co-workers and fight the boss...

...and now they have health insurance...

...It is noon...

...If it succeeds, HOPE may serve as a model that may help reconcile the differences between the two umbrella organizations...

...And so the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the union I came with to Texas, made a bold move to start shifting a huge bulk of its resources from the coasts, where most of the union's members reside, to what it calls the SouthSouthwest region, the seventeen southernmost states that stretching from Nevada to Virginia...

...One stereotypically masculine male worker summed it up at Lovell's victory party in the Montrose neighborhood— the heart of Houston's gay community: "I don't support gay marriage...

...But the workers proved me wrong when Lovell won by 579 votes...

...They held the biggest rally of city workers in a generation in November...

...All those stories about the Alamo weren't far from my mind when I made the drive from California to Texas in early 2005...

...As progressives, we too often find comfort in living with communities of people who think like us, read the same literature, and drink coffee at the same independent book stores we frequent...

...Still, when Texas workers lamented their low wages and rising health care costs, I was quickly reminded how this "hospitality" masks the harsh realities workers face in the South...

...When workers join unions, they usually expect their dues to be put back into their own cities, where they can see it winning concrete—and local—improvements...

...At first, our team was assigned to organize in several different cities...

...The gentleman of the house sees his approach and is ready upon the steps...

...But at our heavily attended candidate forum, Lovell made a passionate prounion speech and, after her interviews with the worker-political committee, the workers voted to support her...

...But while we retreated to union islands like New York and California, the nonunion sea kept rising around us and we grew more and more isolated from workers . . . who so desperately needed our help...

...This sea brought waves of anti-union legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, right-to-work laws, and state constitutions that banned basic rights like collective bargaining for public employees...

...Already, 41 percent of Americans live in these seventeen states, seven of which are among the ten fastest growing in the nation...

...Except instead of riding a horse, I drove a Honda Civic...

...If city officials don't come around, they're preparing an even bigger and more aggressive action in April on the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination...

...Aiyer, the opponent, said, "I've never seen any organization put this much into a race...

...DISSENT / Spring 2008 • 99 NOTEBOOK Facing this hostility, most unions have long steered clear of the South, contenting themselves to operate where more favorable political conditions exist, primarily on the east and west coasts...

...Laws here are vehemently antilabor, and so are most politicians...

...This jointly funded local has helped to quell worker disunity and propelled management to the bargaining table, where a committee of workers now sits to engage proposals with city administration in the hopes of negotiating the first contract for civilian public employees in Texas...

...Without hesitation he rides to the door...

...Find white males who were union members, however, and they voted 100 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 for Al Gore by a similar margin...

...The night of the election, as returns showed an unbearably close race, I wondered whether we had taken an unwarranted risk, if we should have just gone for the establishment candidate...

...Jacob Abbott, 1835 ALTHOUGH Jacob Abbott traveled the South in the nineteenth century, my experience in twenty-first-century Texas was eerily similar...

...A statewide initiative outlawing gay marriage was also on the ballot...

...With that small margin, our role in her victory did not go unnoticed...

...Though some fire fighters and police officers had negotiated contracts in the state, the new law marked the first chance for civilian employees in Texas to bargain for raises, health insurance, and other issues that hitherto were decided solely by city administrators...

...But how could workers in a business-dominated city like Houston show they had any political muscle...

...My team quickly moved to Houston, where we started reaching out to the city's 13,000 public employees...

...But if she supports me getting a raise, I don't care if she's gay or not, I'm backing her...

...Though Lovell had been active in Democratic Party circles, she had never held political office...

...As Eliseo Medina, SEIU's leader in the South-Southwest, has written, "For too long, most of us in the labor movement acted as if the Mason-Dixon Line was a border we could not cross...

...All polls indicated it would pass, and we worried that Lovell's sexual orientation might doom her candidacy...

...BUT SEIU's Southern strategy is risky...

...I spoke to some of our members who voted for Lovell and against gay marriage...

...And if we get too complacent, the South will become the graveyard of the left...

...But in 2004, as George W Bush prolonged his disastrous presidency by carrying every Southern state, it became clear that unions would never be able to enact positive changes for working families without gaining a foothold in the South...

...There were times, however, when we had our doubts...

...We had shown that union workers in the South, as elsewhere, can make a difference in who gets into office...

...Indeed, as this non-union sea kept rising, so did the conservative forces that crushed labor's growth...

...A stranger is riding on horseback through Virginia or Carolina...

...And Southern hospitality will never stray beyond the superficial, "Good morning, ma'am...

...Others went farther south to McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley...

...Just being in a union evidently changes the way a person looks at politics . . . . Here values matter almost least of all, while economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern...

...My reception in Texas stood in stark contrast to the incredulity, profanity, and door slams I sometimes encountered during house visits back in Los Angeles...

...One need only look at the numbers to see why the South is crucial to building political strength...

...It's no coincidence that these labor-light states are deep red while almost all of the blue states are union states as well...

...In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank made a keen observation about the relationship between union participation and political participation: Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin...

...He sees a plantation, surrounded with trees, a little distance from the road...

...But within this exploding region, only 5.7 percent of the population belongs to a union— less than half the national average...

...The same difference is repeated whatever the demographic category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on—when they are union members, their politics shift to the left...

...Too much organizing talent in labor is still stuck in the bookends—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, for instance...

...DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 101 NOTEBOOK BUT THE bargaining process so far is no cakewalk...

...Rather than relegating itself to the bookends of the country, the union movement needs to start focusing on the South, and in doing so change the perspective of voters and the candidates they elect...

...Although a gay candidate won a city council seat, the anti-gay marriage initiative passed overwhelmingly...

...AGOLDEN OPPORTUNITY came in the candidacy of a progressive underdog, an openly gay Democrat named Sue Lovell...

...Despite the international split in the labor movement, at the local level, both unions succeeded in putting the common interests of workers at the center to form the Houston Organization of Public Employees (HOPE...

...Imagine if we can use these local city victories and expand them to statewide legislative victories...

...But today, as in Abbott's time, the workers kindly let a complete stranger into their home, where we would sit down on the couch, drink iced tea, and talk union...

...He lives in Houston...

...But when resources are shifted to the South, it becomes harder for SEIU members in, say, California and New York to see the victories their dues are winning...

...This helped lead to a 5 percent pay raise and a freeze on health insurance costs for its 6,300 city workers...

...In the weeks before the election, more than two hundred city workers participated in the union's phone-banking and block-walking operation—considered by some local observers to be one of the most intensive get-out-the-vote efforts Houston had ever seen in a city council race...