Why Union Democracy?
The question of contesting for power in a local union is bound up with the question of democracy.
In a democratic local, power is something that everyone and anyone has a chance to go for. Challengers need only to convince the members that they will do a better job of leading than the incumbents.
In an undemocratic local, though, challengers must fight for both democracy and power simultaneously. They need democracy so they have a chance to win power, and they need power so that they can institute democratic reforms that will last.
What’s so important about union democracy? Does it matter whether a union is internally democratic, as long as the leaders can deliver the goods for the members?
One of the underlying premises of this book is that union democracy is important not only because the members have the right to control their own organization, but also because democratic unions are more effective and more practical in achieving the goals of the labor movement.
A democratic union makes it possible to use the collective intelligence of the members to develop plans to deal with the employer. A democratic labor movement, through open debate among different viewpoints, makes it possible for the membership to make informed choices about union elections, contracts, strikes, social issues, and political endorsements. A union which gives the members voice and vote is more successful at mobilizing them.
Thus democratic unions will fight more intelligently, with more energy, and with a deeper commitment than undemocratic unions.

Formal and Informal Democracy
But what is union democracy? This is a complex issue.
First there is what might be called “formal democracy.” Formal democracy means the members’ rights under the rules that govern the union, the constitution and by-laws. The fullest formal democracy would include, among other things, the right to elect all officers, business agents, stewards, and other union representatives; the right to vote on all contracts and union policies; votes decided by a simple majority of 50 percent plus 1.
Formal democracy includes protection of the rights of minority groups within the union, whether of a particular race, sex, religion or national origin. And it protects the right to minority opinion: members should be free to advocate their views within the union, even if they are unpopular.
In addition to “formal democracy” there is also what we might call “informal democracy,” the political environment of the union. If the union formally allows members to voice their opinions and run for office, but in reality creates an atmosphere which discourages dissent, that stifling atmosphere may be more important than the seeming democratic rights. It is a difficult thing to ask incumbent officers to encourage their critics and competitors, but it is essential to a genuine democracy.

Participation Does not Equal Democracy
As important as membership participation is, by itself it does not make a union democratic. A democratic union will allow and encourage the full participation of the membership in meetings, committees, elections, and other activities. However, if those committees and meetings merely make reports and offer advice, while a few leaders make all the decisions, then the participation of the members may create only the illusion of democracy.
Most unionists see the existence of paid union officials and union staff as real achievements of the labor movement. Because they are paid by the union, the officials cannot be fired by the boss when they speak out against injustice and they can work full-time for the labor movement.
However, it often happens that a worker changes when he leaves the workplace and goes down to the union hall. No longer sharing the day-to-day existence of his fellow workers, perhaps drawing a much higher salary than theirs, the worker can become a union bureaucrat.
Many would agree that at least some of the union’s top officers should be working members on the shop floor, and that union officials’ salaries should be tied to the wage of the workers they represent. (See John Clout’s Stewards Corner article at the end of Chapter 3.) If these measures will not insure democracy, they will at least help discourage bureaucracy.

Free Flow of Information and Opinion
A final key to a democratic union is transmission of information. The members must have the facts on the union, the industry, the economy, and the political situation which allow them to make informed decisions. Except perhaps in a very small local where everything can be done face to face, union democracy is not possible without union reports and newspapers and union meetings at the department, plant, and local union level. These should be open to minority opinion so that the facts can be interpreted by other lights and challenged by other voices.
Democracy then is all of these things: the union’s formal constitution and by-laws; the union’s informal traditions and customs; the involvement of the members; the members’ access to information and right to question that information; and finally the members’ control over the number of full-time officials and their salaries.

Taking Power In Your Local
To carry out most of the tactics and campaigns outlined in the previous chapters, you need local union leaders who are willing to carry them out. How do you get such leaders into power if they’re not there now?
This chapter is for union members who are dissatisfied with their local union leaders and think they could do a better job. But take note: the tactics described here are not just about running for office, but about strengthening shop floor organization as you build the strength of your caucus. These tactics are based on the premise that the way to get elected is to organize the members against management as if you were already in power – not just to organize against the incumbents. The groups described here see themselves as organizing against management first, and running for office as a logical extension of their shop floor activities.
The chapter will cover forming a caucus, fighting for a by-laws change, creating a campaign organization, running in union elections, and putting out rank and file newsletters.

Beginning a Local Caucus
One of the organizations with most experience in fighting for union democracy and running for local office is Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the reform party in the Teamsters union. Founded in 1976, TDU has fought against Mafia control of the 1.6 million-member International union and for a more militant posture toward the employers. Over the last 14 years TDU has gained a wealth of experience in organizing at the local level.
Rick Smith, now an organizer for IBT Local 728 in Atlanta, was at the time of this interview a member of the TDU national staff. He often advised Teamster members on their rights and on the strategies of running an election campaign. Typically these Teamsters are in medium or large local unions (2,000 to 10,000 members); such locals usually have scores or hundreds of employers over a large metropolitan area or even a state.
In helping these workers, Smith asked the kind of questions that any group of local union members might ask of themselves if they are considering running for office. Bear in mind, however, that in many ways what Smith is describing is a “worst case scenario”: one where the incumbents do not hesitate to use dirty tricks against challengers; where they collaborate with the employers against the challengers; where neither incumbents nor employers hesitate to violate federal law on union elections; where through graft or through bloated salaries incumbents have plenty of money to maintain themselves in office. Fortunately, most readers of this book will not face such an extreme situation. In addition, Smith is describing a spread-out workforce rather than one contained in one plant or office building. Keeping these cautions in mind, however, the lessons should still be applicable.

Analyzing the Power in the Local
“The first thing I would do,” says Smith, “is try to get a feel for the local. How many people are in it? Where’s the clout in the local? Is the clout at a big freight barn? Is it at UPS? Is it at a factory? What’s your steward system like? Are they elected or appointed? How much political weight do you have at your shop and in your local? How many people attend union meetings? Do you have a copy of your by-laws? Do you have a copy of your International Constitution?
“I’m trying to get at two things with these questions. One, their knowledge of their local union and the International processes. And two, to get people to think about where they stand as a potential political force in their local. In other words, if three people show up, none of them are stewards, they don’t have any influence with the stewards, they have little influence except in their shop of eight people, then you have to tell them that at this point they have no political weight.”
Usually, says Smith, the situation will have more potential. In either case, the would-be reformers will need to reach out to other members. Smith attempts to guide them through a series of steps which will first make them into organizers and, if that succeeds, then into candidates.

Intervening in a Local Union Meeting
“The very first thing they should do,” says Smith, “is intervene in a local union meeting. If a group of union members can’t do that, then they probably can’t do anything else.
“Number one, get some people to go to the meeting. Put some resolution on the floor, it may be a petition, it may address some problem at work or in the union. For example, they might put forward a motion limiting officers’ salaries.
“In most Teamster locals – and this would apply, I imagine, to other unions – union meeting attendance is less than five percent. So a group of thirty or forty people can either have a gigantic impact at a meeting or actually control a vote.
“To reach other workplaces, they would have to develop a flyer, have a distribution system to get it out, and make a splash at the union meeting. They probably wouldn’t want to put it on the floor of that first meeting, but they would want to raise the issue, and they would have to have some people speak from the floor.
“Then, almost inevitably, other people would come up to them after the meeting, and say, ‘Wow, where’d you guys come from? We’ve never seen you here. You had some guts standing up saying that.’ Then you start taking names, you’re making more contacts. You’ve made a political impact at a local union where you probably had never done that before. So they come away with more confidence.
“Hopefully through that process they’ve reached other influential people, because the influential people do go to the union meetings. They’ve reached other barns, they’ve made contacts over there. They get a meeting set up with those people and explain what their objectives are, be it limiting officers’ salaries, be it running for office. They’ve made a splash in the local, the word starts spreading around.”
Already these workers have gone through four steps in an organizing process: First, they analyzed their situation. Second, they mobilized workers from their own and other workplaces to go to the union meeting. Third, at the meeting they made contact with other union activists. Fourth, through those activists, they set up meetings at other workplaces.
“At this point,” says Smith, “it’s time for some more formal type organization. We’re definitely into forming a TDU chapter.”
In other unions workers might want to form a local caucus.

A By-Laws Campaign
As the reformers organize, they will want to test their strength and the strength of the incumbents. One way to do that, says Smith, is by proposing by-laws reform. For example, TDU advocates that members should have the right to elect their own stewards, rather than have them appointed by top officers. A by-laws change can be put forward by getting the required number of signatures. “Depending on your local by-laws,” says Smith, “you are required to get anywhere from ten signatures to as many as 10 percent of the membership in order to have your proposed by-laws read at the union meeting.” The reformers may simply want to get the ten signatures they need, or they may want to use the collection of signatures as another technique for mobilization, and pass petitions throughout the local.
“You send the by-law and the signatures to the executive board by certified mail and formally ask for them to be on the agenda,” says Smith. “In most locals in the Teamsters you can only introduce by-laws in January. They’re read at that meeting in January, they’re read again in February, and the vote is in March.” Other unions have similar two- or three-step procedures.
“The first month you want to get a show of strength there. So you put out a flyer telling what the by-law change is, giving the actual wording of it, and explaining why you are doing it. Get that distributed throughout the local and ask people to come to the union meeting to hear what it’s about.
“Then you’re into significant debate. You’ve got to be prepared for people to get up and try to amend it, so you’ve got to have a pretty good grasp of parliamentary procedure. The second month reading is kind of unimportant, you want your main people there, but don’t make a big push. You want to save that for the third reading and the vote. At that third meeting you’ve got to go full steam ahead, with flyers, with carpooling if possible to get your forces to the meeting.
“How does this relate to election campaigns? Many times we’ve done this as a test of strength. Because the local on a by-law campaign will bring out their loyal supporters. So if you see 200 of their people there, you know that’s their core. You can gauge how strong they are and then run a political campaign against them.”

Preparing for the Election
The next step will be campaigning for office.
Union officials will sometimes try to deny the challengers a list of the different workplaces where the local’s members are employed. Any union member has a legal right to this information, however. TDU distributes a “Colpo kit” (named after the lawsuit which established this right), which is a packet of step-by-step instructions, sample letters and the like for getting this information from local union officials.
TDU usually recommends that candidates take their vacation during the campaign period and use that time to campaign. Or they may want to seek an unpaid leave of absence from the employer. Candidates will also have to put up some of their own money.
A good union election campaign will require one or more standard leaflets dealing with the issues and the candidate; in a multi-site workplace there will need to be one or more mailings to the membership. “In our leaflets,” Smith explains, “we concentrate heavily on the platform rather than the candidates, but you put in your little biographical sketch: Joe’s in such and such church, was in the army for nine years, and experience in the union, education, and so on. But we put most emphasis on the platform.”
There will also be campaign rallies, says Smith. “We do the typical thing that anybody does, hot dogs and beer. We’re also at the plant gates and the barns, passing out literature and collecting money. One neat little trick is that if the company won’t let you on the property you go across the street, set up a table, and you get a bullhorn. People come then, it’s something new, something different.” If the company allows the incumbents on the property, or allows the business agent to campaign while he is on the property but refuses to allow the challengers on, then it is important to demand equal time. “We just have people go there anyway, and force them to call the police and throw them out – which they rarely do. It’s good politics.”

The Campaign Organization
A well-run campaign will have a team assisting the candidates, says Smith. The ideal team would include: 1) a campaign manager, 2) a person in charge of all union and Labor Department protests, 3) a fundraiser, 4) a person in charge of getting literature printed and distributed.
“The campaign manager coordinates the campaign and the election observers,” Smith explains, “and takes care of all the details, so that the candidates can spend their time talking to the members. The person in charge of handling protests must be very dependable and conscientious, because all protests and appeal must be filed on time or they won’t be considered.
“The one essential key thing you need is a fundraiser, somebody to keep the money coming in, and it’s the last thing people think of. But your campaign is going to stall right in the middle if you don’t have the money.”
Finally, says Smith, the candidates themselves will probably play a large role in developing the platform and writing the literature, but they should not be burdened with dealing with typesetters, printers or mailing companies.

Election Rules and Observers
In the Teamsters union the local executive boards determine all election rules. “We always make motions at union meetings,” says Smith, “that we would like an elected election committee and we would like democratic rules governing the election. Of course, they always refuse. But we win political points on that. We can then say, ‘Look, they’re not even democratic, they want to run the whole show themselves.’”
It is important to remember that union members are entitled to observe the election process at every point, beginning with the printing and mailing of ballots. “Anything to do with ballots you can have your observers there,” Smith emphasizes. Having observers present at the earliest stages of the process is not only a way to prevent or to detect hanky-panky, but also a way to mobilize and test the observers and make sure that they are reliable on election day.
Red-baiting and ‘inexperience’
“In the actual campaign and politicking, our candidates face all kinds of charges,” says Smith, “and probably any dissident candidate faces them. One is red-baiting, but the one which usually has the most bite is that our candidates are inexperienced or wild. The incumbents say, ‘We’ve been in office for twenty years, these guys don’t know anything.’
Smith says that in dealing with the charge of red-baiting, “We kind of do the ju-jitsu on them. We ask, Why are they saying these things? Why are they so scared? One typical piece we hand out is a quote from Walter Reuther, arguing that union people have always been called Communists. We explain that this is a smokescreen, that they’re not willing to deal with the real issues.”
In dealing with the charge of inexperience, says Smith, “We say, ‘Let’s give you an example of what their “experienced” team has done in the past year.’ And then you list the crimes and sins of the past administration. We also talk about what it takes to be a good union official: guts, knowledge of the contract, and honesty, which we have much of. We argue, ‘Look, if we need an expert, we can hire an expert. What you’re getting with us is rank and file people who are going to be tough, honest and live up to the contract, and build this union.’”

The Big Push
The campaign should build for the mailing of the ballots or the vote in the hall, depending upon procedures in the local. “If it’s a mail ballot,” says Smith, “your campaign push is immediately preceding the mailing of the ballots, and a few days after. You want your literature to go out at about the same time as the ballots. You want to do your heaviest campaigning in that time, because after three days records prove that most people have voted.
“If the vote is a walk-in, then you’re hitting all the barns a week before and you hit your crescendo right when the vote is going on.”
However, because you may have to file election protests and seek a new election, you do not want your campaign organization to collapse when the election is over. You want your supporters to be prepared to continue the campaign if necessary, and that should be discussed in advance.

Protests and Appeals
The general rule for election protests and appeals is that first one exhausts the internal union procedures, and then one goes to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“Under the Teamster by-laws, for example,” says Smith, “you’ve got 48 hours to make a pre-election protest, which our people are well schooled in. You have 48 hours from the point of occurrence of a violation – so you’ve got to be right on top of it. Then you’ve got 72 hours after the election. And if you’re not in on time, you’re not going nowhere, because the Department of Labor very rarely bends on these time limits. So people have got to know their constitutions.
“Then there’s an appeal procedure. In the Teamsters it’s to the Joint Council and then to the International. Officially, you can’t go to the Labor Department either till that’s over or for three months, whichever comes first. But we recommend that when the election is over, the candidates contact the Department of Labor and tell them, ‘We know you can’t get involved in this yet, but we would like to just sit down with you and talk to you about the case.’ In that way you establish a human relationship with the Labor Department officials. Then at your 90th day you’re back, they’re already aware of things, you’ve made the bureaucrat’s job easier and they like you more.
“One other very important thing. If in fact you lost, and you’re going to the Department of Labor, you’ve got some more campaigning to do. In other words, keep the membership updated on what the legal steps are. Tell them what you’re going through at this point. Because you’re gearing up for another election. If you just go away and nobody hears about it until you do get a re-election and you’re back campaigning, you will have lost momentum.”

Opening Up the Local
The side effect of elections, by-laws campaigns, even motions at union meetings, says Smith, is to enhance the informal aspects of union democracy, to create a more open atmosphere. “When your TDU chapter gets started the local has to respond one way or another, which creates some excitement and creates some openness. Now there is political debate, and there isn’t just one side within the local.
“This is why I am always concentrating on union meetings. People say, ‘Why go to the union meetings? Nothing can be done. Nothing ever happens there.’ So we go and stir things up. We go and put something controversial on the floor. Then you get debate, discussion – maybe for the first time ever. The next union meeting, almost inevitably, more people come, because they say, ‘Wow, there’s going to be something going on here.’ And that just encourages that there is a political life within the local.
“The union meetings are real keys to changing everything, and a lot of times we show people that it is possible. Yes, there can be discussion, there can be debate, just come down and see it.”

Organizing a Caucus
In many local unions elections have become very depoliticized affairs, with the candidates explaining very little about the differences between them and why the members should vote for one group over another.

Voting levels are generally low.
For the type of democracy and debate that Rick Smith describes to flourish, the membership needs a real choice among candidates. Do they want a bargaining chairperson who opposes concessions or supports them? Do they want a president who will appoint all the stewards or one who will back a by-laws change for elected stewards? Do they want the local to contact other unions in the industry or to go it alone?
In general, the best way to promote debate and provide this choice is through an organized caucus. But in many local unions caucuses have a bad name. They are seen as cliques, people who band together solely at election time to share the costs of campaigning. Some locals have a tradition of two caucuses who regularly trade places as the “ins” and the “outs,” while the membership yawns.
A caucus should be based not on personalities or convenience, but on ideas about how the union should be run and how it should deal with management. A caucus can be a kind of political party operating within the union, based on a coherent set of principles. It is an on-going organization, not something which surfaces only at election time. Although in some small workplaces it may seem overly formal to organize a caucus, in most the advantage is that a caucus can adopt a long-term strategy, train members, and provide the membership with a real alternative.
Naomi Allen, a member of the Hell on Wheels group in Transport Workers Union Local 100, says, “There are definitely advantages in organizing a caucus. You can’t just appear at election time and say, ‘We have a better program for the union than the leadership does.’ You have to demonstrate in practice over months and years, and people have to realize by hearing you and seeing you in practice that you have a different orientation for the union, and that it’s practical to fight back.”
We are including the stories of two union caucuses here, each of them chosen because they demonstrate the importance of a long-term perspective. These groups are far more than slates; they engage in a whole range of activities every day of the year to get their viewpoint across and mobilize the membership. They take on responsibilities that the local union leadership should be carrying out.
The other point about these two groups is that they are both operating under very difficult circumstances: huge locals with hundreds of workplaces spread out across a city, and no union meetings to speak of. For these reasons a local-wide newsletter put out by the caucus has been essential. If our first story we will concentrate more on the newsletter itself and in the second on the caucus’s other activities.
Ringing the Bell for Democracy
For over ten years a group of members in Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1101 in New York City has been working to democratize their local. The Bell Wringer caucus has not won major offices, but they believe they have strengthened the union by giving members information, a way to be involved, and ways to fight management.
Ilene Winkler and Dave Newman are stewards and switching technicians for New York Telephone. Their local has 11,000 members in several hundred different workplaces in Manhattan and the Bronx. Winkler describes CWA 1101 as she sees it: “The local has an entrenched, very bureaucratic leadership that has not held one membership meeting in four months of being on strike. [This interview took place during the 1989 strike described in Chapter 9.] It is very distant from the membership. Virtually all of the officers have been full-time union officials for over 15 years. They are very conservative politically and socially, and they are all white with one exception.
“The workforce, on the other hand, is very mixed. The clericals are mostly Black women, with a very small Hispanic and Asian membership. The top crafts are mostly white men, although some sections are better integrated than that. There’s a very sizeable Black membership, but the structure of the union is very white, very male.”
The Bell Wringer group came about after a long court fight to get Dave Newman reinstated as a steward. He had been removed by the local leadership for criticizing their policies. Newman won in federal court and “as a result of that victory,” he says, “in June of 1979 a number of people who had been active in that campaign decided to put out a newsletter, and that was the beginning of the Bell Wringer.” Most of this group of about ten people were stewards.
The group identified several of the union’s weaknesses. First, there were really no union meetings. “We have them twice a year,” says Newman, “and they last about 10 minutes.” Second, while the union published a newspaper, it was not informative.
“We knew we wanted to do a newspaper,” Newman recalls, “because that was the only vehicle that we could conceive of that could reach people and possibly involve people as well. We wanted to stimulate people and to provide information. None of that was being done by the union, in our opinion.
“So we discussed, who are we going to reach? Are we going to reach the stewards? Are we going to reach the members? How is it going to be distributed? Why are we doing it? What kind of things do we want it to include? And we decided real early on that we wanted the focus of the paper to be against the company rather than the union. We would not ever shy away from criticizing the union or offering suggestions or analysis, but the main focus should be the company.
“Then we wanted it to be very open. In fact, the newspaper is called The Bell Wringer, but the subhead is ‘An Open Forum for Telephone Workers.’ As much as possible, we would encourage other members to write about what is happening in their shop or garage or office. Or letters criticizing the company or the union or criticizing us. We have no censorship whatsoever – except if something is racist or sexist.
“The paper is open to anybody. We invited people on the executive board to write. We do get a steady stream of letters, all of which we print. People can write with or without their names.
“We decided the paper needed a gossipy page, which we call ‘Here and There.’ It’s made up of little blurbs from around the local. We might have anywhere from ten to forty little paragraphs, two or three sentences each about what happened in this garage, what happened with this grievance, a lot of stuff that comes down real heavy on foremen. That’s probably our most popular feature. People usually get the paper and turn right to that page.”
“The ‘Here and There’ page gives people a chance to really participate in the paper,” says Winkler, “to tell about stupid things that management does. And whenever there is any kind of a shop floor action we publicize it, and we give people an alternative, membership-centered way of looking at what’s going on in the union and the company.”
Another regular feature of the paper is a “Know Your Rights Column” dealing with a worker’s legal and contractual rights on the job.
Bell Wringer has exposed secret agreements between the national union and the company on automation and changes in the work process. And more than simply reporting on events, the group has drafted its own proposals for strengthening the local, from how to win strikes to democratization. “We’ve examined the union books and published how they used the money,” says Newman. “We took that information and formulated it into a proposal for reworking the budget and forming a local defense [strike] fund.”
Trying to unify the membership by dealing with both racism and sexism has been one of Bell Wringer’s more controversial topics. “We get race-baited a lot,” says Winkler. “What’s brought the race-baiting on us is that we’ve really tried to give a voice to the Black members and to talk about the company’s discrimination. We have written articles about racial attacks and about South Africa and about hospital closings in the city. Some of us worked on the Jackson campaign, we formed a separate group called Telephone Workers for Jesse Jackson.
“The group is half Black, half white, so we get baited among the racist white element. There is no way to deal with that besides talking about the unity of the local. It’s very difficult to deal with race-baiting on that kind of individual basis, because it’s never said to our faces.
“We’ve also tried to deal with women’s rights, who are also very unrepresented in the local. We’ve had articles on cases of sexual harassment in the paper. And discrimination in promotions is a big issue, because there is still an enormous job segregation between what the women do and what the men do. Several years ago we put out a pregnancy fact sheet which we’ve updated a couple of times, which has been the only source of information on maternity benefits. That helped build us up.
“We did a lot of agitation to get a women’s committee in the local. There was a rank and file grassroots women’s committee which struggled for a long time to get recognition from the local. They finally got it, and then discovered they had been replaced by a four-person appointed committee. When the local would only pay for their four hand-picked women to go to a women’s conference, we raised money to send rank and filers.”

Distributing the Paper
The Bell Wringer prints about 4,500 copies of each issue. “It works like concentric circles,” says Newman. “We have a core group that’s relatively small, about 10 people that are the most active, and we all distribute it openly at our buildings and in front of other buildings. We have to do this before or after work. Then there’s another concentric circle, a larger number of people that distribute it openly, but only where they work. Then there’s another group of people that take a bundle and leave it around the locker room or pass it one on one but don’t stand in front of their building and do it, because they are afraid. There’s a lot of fear in our local. We also have several hundred subscribers that just get a single copy, or maybe two or three, in the mail.”
The group has an answering machine with taped announcements. Winkler explains, “There’s a custom in telephone locals to have tape announcement machines, and so we also have one, only ours gives much better information than the local does, and we can take messages on ours. That’s turned out to be tremendously successful. We get about 70 or 100 messages a day, and it gives people a way to communicate with us directly.”

From a Pressure Group to a Caucus
When the Bell Wringer group was first formed, they saw themselves as simply providing information, rather than being a caucus. Over the years, however, that conception has changed.
“Initially we saw ourselves as a pressure group,” says Newman. “We wanted to expose certain things in the union and the company, and hopefully the union would act upon these issues. And hopefully the membership would pressure the union for more democratic elections or to stop layoffs, or whatever. We saw ourselves as gadflies. We were not running for union office.
“Rather than take over the union, our hope was to open it up, so that we could play more of a role and that other people could play more of a role as well.
“Over the first few years we pretty much had that notion knocked out of us, because we found that it was absolutely impossible. Because the more we published, the more antagonistic the union officials became to us. It became incredibly frustrating to try and reform the union to make it more effective against the company – you never even get to deal with the company, because you are continually butting heads against the union hierarchy.
“We were successful in making a lot of members think, and in getting a lot of respect, but we weren’t successful in getting fair and open steward elections throughout the whole local. We weren’t successful in doing anything that it takes power to do. We decided that what’s missing is power, and we have to take power. And most of us as individuals weren’t really interested in doing that. I don’t really want to be union president, it seems like a kind of cruddy job. But it seemed like a lot of members were counting on us for things that we couldn’t produce, and that the only way to produce it was to take on that additional fight.
“So eventually we decided that we did have to run for office. We came to the realization that we’re not journalists, we’re not into publishing The New York Times for Local 1101. We’re into democratizing and reforming the union, so we had to become a political party contesting for power.”
Running Slates
In the next several years, the Bell Wringer caucus supported several slates for union office. On their first try they got 25 percent of the vote, on the second they got 37 percent, and on their third try they were disqualified from running on a technicality.
“The first time we ran was in 1984,” says Newman, “when we had been publishing for five years. We didn’t run as Bell Wringer, we adopted a new name, ‘Members for a Democratic Union.’ And we made a real attempt to draw in people who had not been active around Bell Wringer, and we succeeded.
“We had incredible discussions. It was really grueling, but it was great. It was the first time we ever sat down and talked about every single issue in the union. The composition of our slate was really important: it had to be Black and white and Latin, male and female, and it had to be diverse in terms of job title, with particular emphasis on the lower job titles. We succeeded in putting together an ethnically and sexually diverse slate for the first time ever in the local.
“The platform was mostly centered on union democracy issues: direct election of chief stewards, regular membership meetings, open committees that members can participate in. We tried to make it clear that democracy wasn’t the be-all and end-all, but that it was a prerequisite of having a union that could effectively take on the company. And a key emphasis was the free flow of information and ideas.
“We were a little naïve; we thought that we could win. And of course in retrospect, at that point we had no chance of winning.
“But there is nothing like an election campaign to give you access to the membership and to legitimize your going around and proselytizing. It’s the American tradition. It’s so legitimate that they can’t knock you. I mean they can knock you 365 days a year when there’s not an election. They can say you’re a commie, they can say you’re a fascist, they can say you’re an opportunist, they can say you’re a company stooge. But in an election you have a certain legitimacy, you’re a candidate and you have a right to go out to the members and the members have a right to listen to you, and the company has to take a little bit of a back seat as well.”
Over the last 10 years the Bell Wringer has been immensely successful, but it has not brought about the reform of the union which the Bell wringer group initially hoped for.
“We have a fantastic newspaper,” says Newman. “We have an incredible amount of respect totally out of proportion to our numbers. Most people view us as the union newspaper. We function, in a sense, as a miniature union, but we don’t have power. We’re not anywhere near achieving power, and part of our dilemma is how to translate all this respect and support that we have into something concrete.”
In the fall of 1989 the CWA was on strike against NYNEX. The local union was not providing much information, but the Bell Wringer was.
“I think that the support for the paper goes way beyond the people who vote for us,” says Winkler. “People have been grabbing up the leaflets we’ve been handing out on the picket lines because it’s the only information they can get. The executive board will change the rules for the strike fund, and then not bother to tell people.

A Center
“In this kind of spread-out local it’s really important for there to be a center that functions. The Bell Wringer has provided a center where there wasn’t one. We’ve provided a way that people who are in different isolated work locations can find out what’s going on.
“In a lot of ways we’ve held this local together. If it was strictly up to the leadership, most people would have no idea of what’s going on and would not feel any sense of belonging to a union at all. They do feel a sense of there being a union because of what we have done, and even if we never get past this point that’s very important.”

Putting the Union on Track
The Hell on Wheels group is active in Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 in New York City. In 1988-89, in coalition with others in the New Directions Slate, the group made a breakthrough by winning some important local elections and convention delegates.
Local 100 has about 35,000 members who work on the bus and subway system. It is by far the largest local in the TWU, which has about 100,000 members. It is organized into several divisions, each of which has its own executive board. There are many different ethnic groups working in the transit system, and there is a history of ethnic fraternal organizations, clubs of Irish, Jewish, Latino and Black transit workers. Between 10 and 15 percent of the members are women, concentrated among the clerks, with small percentages of women bus drivers and conductors.
Three Hell on Wheels activists, Steve Downs, Tim Schermerhorn and Naomi Allen, tell us about their caucus and what made its recent breakthroughs possible. Downs and Schermerhorn are train operators and Allen is a car inspector.
“It makes sense to start with the newsletter; that made everything else possible,” says Steve Downs. “We’ve been producing Hell on Wheels for a little over five years now. We originally came together in response to a local referendum on binding arbitration. A number of people opposed the idea of binding arbitration, and we met to see if we could coordinate our efforts, and not always have to start from scratch every time some issue came up.”
From the beginning the group had both men and women and included Black, Latino and white members; today it is a majority Black and Latino group. The group decided that they had to have a newsletter because of the spread-out nature of the transit system.
“The workforce is very spread out both geographically and in terms of shifts,” says Downs. “The local as a whole never meets.
“We hoped to use the newsletter to find other people who were interested in doing something about the conditions in the union and on the job.”
“You can’t get everyone to write an article,” says Naomi Allen. “But you can get most people to read them. There is a core of writers who do most of the writing, and we bring the articles to a Hell on Wheels meeting and everyone reads them and we discuss them. Should this article go in? Should this one be different? You just have to rely on the people you can get to write to do the writing, and then you get everyone else to be the editorial board.”

Running for Office
Having worked for by-laws reform and on a pressure campaign to improve the contract, and on various rallies and demonstrations, the group now turned for the first time to local elections. “In 1988 we decided to run in the local election, to challenge the president and as many of the top officers as we could, as well as run for executive board in several of the divisions,” Downs explains. “We had no hope of winning the top offices, just some positions in the divisions. But we felt it was important that we give a higher visibility to the issues we were trying to raise and not allow the incumbents to walk in unopposed.”
The Nubian Society, a fraternal organization of Black transit workers, had also opposed the contract that year, and several of its officers and some independents joined with the Hell on Wheels group to form the New Directions Slate. “We had a slate of seven people for the 10 top offices and we ran for executive board positions in three divisions,” says Downs.
There were some offices, however, they did not run for. “Each division has what’s called a division committee, which are essentially the chief stewards,” Downs explains. “In my division there is not an effective shop stewards program. There are five people to represent 3,500 people. We chose not to run for the committee in my division, though we could have won, because we did not want to be in the position of administering a bad contract. Nobody else in the union hierarchy could be touched if people got pissed off.
“So we thought we would avoid those positions and continue to press for an elected shop steward system, and then we would look again at the possibility of running for those positions. There were differences over this. There were quite a few people who felt we should have run for those offices, but that was the position we arrived at.”
Tim Schermerhorn was the New Directions candidate for president. He learned that “talking to people in small groups and ones and twos is a lot more important than going into a crew room and standing up on a table and giving a speech. Talking to individuals is a lot slower and a lot harder but it’s a lot better way to talk about your overall perspective and how that ties in with their particular concerns. And secondly – and this was a surprise to some people – it’s more important to run on the issues than to say ‘we’re better than those guys.’
“We put forward the platform more than the individuals we had running, because people focus enough on individuals. Some of the popular points we talked about were elected shop stewards with power. We talked about local-wide meetings, which our union never has. We talked about childcare at union meetings. We had a position against binding arbitration. We talked about seeing the contract before you vote on it, which we’ve never done. We called for elected safety representatives with the power to shut down unsafe work. We called for a solidarity committee.”
“The election pretty much did everything we wanted it to do,” says Steve Downs. “It involved a number of people in a much more regular way with us, people were very active in campaigning. We produced 10,000 pieces of our main campaign flyer and got them out in every division of the local, and presented a fairly comprehensive challenge to the policies of the leadership. Our candidate for president got 23 percent of the vote. In our division, rapid transit, the subway operating crews, all of our candidates won, which meant we got three seats on the executive board. And it was the first time an incumbent president had lost a division in probably over 40 years.”

Organizing for the Convention
In 1989 there were convention delegate elections and again New Directions put forward candidates. “We ran a similar platform to that we had used in the local elections,” says Schermerhorn, “modified to deal with changing the rules inside the union itself. We called for an International strike fund.”
“We ran slates of delegates in three divisions under the label of New Directions and then supported others who were running without that label,” says Downs. “We did well. We swept the rapid transit division, we elected our entire slate, and we came just short of 50 percent in the conductors division. And in the subway maintenance facilities we got about thirty percent. We were quite pleased with the result there.” In all New Directions sent 10 delegates to the TWU convention.
The group went on to win more victories. The train operators won the right to elect stewards. In January 1990 Naomi Allen won a special election for a seat on the overall local executive board. Her election was even more notable because her division is predominantly men. In July New Directions won a second local executive board seat, this time representing the conductors division.
“What we said,” explains Allen, “and what we’ve been saying all along, is that it’s possible to fight back instead of giving in to management, and that the union should reorganize itself in order to fight back and stop giving back the gains that we’ve won over fifty years. Most people don’t feel that it’s possible, they feel that the union leadership is so strong, and they as individuals are so weak, that they just have to go along with whatever is proposed, whatever is done to them. And our attitude is, No, if we organize we can make a difference and we can change the way that management treats us.
“The important thing is just consistency over a long period of time, and demonstrating in action that this kind of work can be done, as well as making an example of yourself. You have to show that you’re consistent in what you stand for, and that you’re not going to lead the others into some kind of disaster. The newsletter has been very good, and people have come to trust it and trust the people associated with it.”

Action Questions
Although winning power in your local is much more than a question of simply running for office, the following questions concentrate on the election process itself.
It is hard to think about power in the union without understanding the union’s relationship to the employers. So begin by asking: What is the state of your company? Who runs things in the company? Who in management is in regular touch with your union? What is their relationship? Strict labor-management relations? Buddy-buddy? Corrupt? Company union? If it is a mob-dominated local, we strongly recommend outside help.
List all the offices and officers of your union. Do you know their salaries? (See Appendix B on Research.)
Are there members who do not hold office but who play an important political role in running the union? Are there International or district officials who play a role in your local? Retired officials? What about an out-of-office caucus or clique? Are there even politicians, mobsters or employers who play a role?
Have you sat down and talked to the important individuals and groups in your union (both the formal and the informal ones)? Do you really know what makes them tick? They are going to be your allies or your opponents if you try to take over the union. You had better understand them.
Take a large piece of paper and draw a flowchart showing the power relations in the union. Put the most powerful figures in the center and draw lines showing how power, money, information, and other resources flow.
What are the most important issues on the minds of the union’s members? Contract issues? Shop floor issues? Issues affecting the whole industry? Discrimination? Lack of union democracy? Do all the members care about the same things? What are the three most important issues? Write up these issues as if you were going to put out a leaflet to the membership about why you are running for office.
Have you talked to workers in all departments? Have you talked to both women and men? To workers of all racial and ethnic group? Do you need to conduct a survey to find out what people think?
How does your union function? Do you have a copy of the International constitution and the local bylaws? (See Appendix B.) When are union meetings held? How many members go to them? What happens at them? What important individuals, cliques or caucuses are at the meetings? Does the union publish a newspaper? Is it open to anyone?
What are the rules governing union elections? Who is eligible to run for office? What is the time frame for filing? What is the procedure for nomination? Do you need to get petition signatures or have seconds for nominations? (Besides your by-laws, get someone with previous experience in the union to help you.)
Is running for union office the best way to achieve your goals at this time? Would it be better to work in some other way, such as on a union committee? Or should you form a caucus to build a base and think about union elections in a year or two?
If you are going to run for office, should you form a slate (that is, a temporary grouping of allies running for office on a common ticket) or should you form a caucus (a formal grouping, like a political party in the union, committed not only to running candidates but to long-term political goals)?
How will you go about choosing candidates for office? Will individuals simply say they want to run for this or that office, or will the slate or caucus collectively decide who would make the best candidates? How will you make sure that your slate fairly represents both men and women, the different ethnic, language and racial groups, different departments and job classifications? Will you want to make an agreement with another slate or individual not to compete against each other for certain offices?
Make a list of ways in which you can raise money for your campaign. How much will you need? Who will be the fundraiser? Who will be the treasurer?
What personal sacrifices will have to be made? How much money will candidates and supporters donate? Will the candidates have to take vacation time or leaves of absence? Could people who declare for office be disciplined or fired? Has all of this been discussed with spouses and families? Should spouses be asked to become part of the core campaign group?
How will you publicize your campaign? Make up a list of media you want to contact. Do you have a union printer lined up? Do you also need a union mailing company? (Consult your by-laws, the union’s election committee and your lawyer.)
Who will be the campaign manager?
Make up a tentative timeline for the period until the election, showing what you plan to do
How can you ensure that the election will be honest? Is there an elections committee that your supporters can run for? Check your by-laws to become thoroughly knowledgeable about election procedures. Who will you recruit as observers?
What will be the first thing you will have to do when you take office? Are there negotiations to prepare for? Will you need to make new committee appointments? Is the local’s financial house in order?
If this is your first run for office, it is likely that you will lose. How will you prepare for losing? Will you want to appeal or to call in the Labor Department if you think the election is stolen? (If so you will want to contact them before the election.) Will you want to put out a leaflet announcing that your caucus will continue to work to strengthen the union?

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