Day 11 – Bill Gillespie’s Road Trip Diary

Today’s entry is the last entry in our Road Trip Diary.

It’s been 11 days since Anna Jover Royo, Jason Alward, Aura Aberback and I jumped into our rented Dodge Caravan in Toronto and headed for the U.S.A.

If you have been clicking on our daily written and video blogs, you will already know our assignment was to investigate how the anti-union Right to Work laws, that a growing number of conservative politicians are now promoting for Canada, actually work in practice.

Right to Work is an insidiously misleading slogan. It suggests it’s about the right to a job but it’s not. It’s a law that allows a union member to stop paying dues but still get the benefits of the collective agreement negotiated by the union and its dues-paying members. I hesitate to use the phrase but that idea sounds a little un-Canadian to me.

We headed first for Michigan where we met high school science teacher Dan Dennis. In 1999 Dennis left his teaching job in non-Right to Work Michigan and moved to Right to Work North Carolina. Immediately his salary dropped 25%, his workload increased, his prep time disappeared, his pension plan was dumbed-down and so was his medical coverage.

In Columbus Ohio I interviewed mathematician Darrell Minor. Minor crunched the numbers and found that far from ushering in prosperity, workers in Right to Work states suffer higher unemployment rates, pay more for health insurance and have shorter life expectancies than in non-Right to Work states.

South Carolina was even more disturbing. It adopted its Right to Work law in 1954. The prosperity? With the 4th highest unemployment rate and the 45th lowest person income in the U.S., folks are still waiting for that.

You can see some of the inspiring people we interviewed in South Carolina on the video blog. People such as Democratic state congresswoman Gilda Cobb-Hunter or the head of the International Longshoremen’s Association Ken Riley.

But the daily blog wasn’t our main assignment. Our primary task is to create a documentary putting the rhetoric of the Right to Work boosters to the test. We gathered firsthand interviews, facts and video. When we get back to Toronto we will start writing and editing.

I want to say however, what a pleasure it has been to work and travel with the three fine OPSEU professionals assigned to this project.

Jason Alward who, in his normal working life, is a graphic artist. Jason was our driver. He got us where we had to go on time and safely. He has an odd habit of backing into every parking space but never backs into a conversation. The Maritimer that he is, he is able to chat up anyone and immediately put them at ease – a real asset when you are strangers in a strange land.

Aura Aberback was our logistics wagon master - meaning she was in charge of just about every aspect of our lives for the 11 days from finding the lowest-cost union hotels, to meals, to editing my writing. She also kept disappearing (Where’s Aura?) to take about 10,000 photographs (some of which you can see by clicking on the photo tab).

Videographer Anna Jover Royo worked harder than any of us. During the day she shot interviews, road signs, fireworks, crowd scenes, the Charleston docks, the Michigan state legislature – the list seems endless. At night she stayed up late editing the video blog. Our workdays ranged from 10 to 15 hours and Anna was always up the latest.

The final member of the team wasn’t with us in the van. Cynthia Clayton was back in Toronto. Cynthia is OPSEU’s web specialist. She stayed up late at night and got up early in the morning and on weekends to take our written and video dispatches from the field and put them up on the website. No matter how many demands we put on her, she was always positive and helpful from start to finish. The blog would not have happened without her.

Ok. Now for the big questions.

Did you get on each other’s nerves? Did you have any big fights? Any small fights? After all, you were packed into that van together for almost two weeks.

The answer is we got along famously.

Ok, we did have to listen to Jason’s boring CBC Radio Three music. But he had to listen to mine and Anna’s annoying country music (go Zac Brown Band). Sadly, Aura could not find a radio station that played her two favourite artists – Burt Bacharach and Supertramp.

So thanks for clicking on the blog.

If we learned anything from our American friends it is we should take the threat of Right to Work legislation very seriously. They told us it is just a first step. Once RTW passed in their state, more anti-labour legislation followed.

Their message was “don’t think it can’t happen to you”. As Democratic congresswoman Gilda Cobb-Hunter put it “you DO NOT want to become South Carolina!”

You’ve read and seen the blog. Get ready for the movie to be released this fall.

Day 10 – Bill Gillespie’s Road Trip Diary

Americans know fireworks.

So on the 4th of July the OPSEU road crew headed down to Patriots Point in Charleston South Carolina to watch the fun. We also were there to ask folks how they felt about unions.

Unions are about as rare as snowflakes down here. Not surprising, considering the state Government passed an anti-union Right to Work law 59 years ago. Today, less than five percent of South Carolina’s workers are union members.

One of the questions OPSEU’s Randy Robinson was keen for me to ask was whether Americans now think unions are un-American. A good question, given there is so much anti-union blather emanating from Fox News these days you might expect middle and working class Americans are buying into the messaging.

That wasn’t what we found while chatting with people waiting for the fireworks to start.

Otto Wilson is a crane operator and self-described workingman. Wilson has nothing against unions. But he says it’s not something he and his co-workers ever talk about.

Like many folks we talked to, Wilson didn’t dislike unions. In fact, many thought unions are okay. It’s just that there are so few unions here they barely register on the TV news agenda. The exception is the International Longshoremen’s Association.

Charleston is the point of entry to the Southern U.S. for goods coming from Europe. That gives the ILA economic leverage, which they have used until today – a longshoreman on the top of the pay scale makes $32 an hour.

Ken Riley is president of ILA local 1422. He invited us to the Riley family 4th of July barbeque. He and his brother Leonard cooked up a storm. There was chicken, blue crab (who knew?), thick steaks, hot dogs, the best ribs we’d ever tasted and loads of Southern hospitality.

Riley has spent much of his life butting heads with anti-union politicians and powerful corporations. Even so, this is the 4th of July and he is still a loyal American. Despite the powerful interest lined up against him, he is part of an organizing effort he believes will succeed one day in repairing the damage Right to Work laws have done to working people. He has a lot of work to do.

His friends Harriet and Sharon were at the barbeque. They told about their jobs at TMSi Parcelite Solutions.

Harriet and Sharon make $11 an hour working on an assembly line from 7:30 in the morning until 6:30 or 7:30 at night, depending on when the last truck gets in. Harriet says in summer the temperature in the sorting room often reaches 120 degrees fahrenheit or more. TMSi employees get two sick days a year! However, the sick days and discipline issues are tied to an ‘8 points and you’re out’ system.

Harriet says if you are one minute late for work you get a quarter of a point. If you actually take one of your two sick days or have to leave work for an emergency, you are given a full point. Sharon told us that one of her co-workers once had a heart attack at work and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. She was given a point for leaving work.

There are many transgressions, real and imagined, that can earn workers at TMSi a point. And once an employee accumulates 8 points, they are automatically fired. There is no grievance procedure.

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You can see the fireworks and meet Otto Wilson, Ken Riley, Harriet, and Sharon and see a spontaneous rendering of The Star-Spangled Banner by clicking on the video tab.

Tomorrow we head for home and in my final diary entry I’ll tell you how Anna ate a whole package of JuJu jelly fish all by herself and what her face looked like when Jason told her that gelatin is made from ground up cow bones.

Day 9 - Bill Gillespie’s Road Trip Diary.

Ken Riley didn’t know what hit him.

When he regained consciousness moments later, he learned he’d been whacked between the eyes by a baton-wielding Swat Cop dispatched by South Carolina’s politically ambitious state Attorney General, Charlie Condon.

Riley is president of Local 1422 of the International Longshoremen’s Association. The ILA is one of a handful of unions still in existence in anti-union South Carolina, a state that passed Right to Work legislation in 1954. The RTW law achieved what its proponents intended. Today less than five percent of South Carolina workers are union members.

On January 19, 2000, about 150 ILA members were peacefully picketing the Danish freighter Nordana. The Nordana’s owners were using cheap non-union labour to unload. It was getting close to midnight when Riley noticed a small army of heavily armed police forming up on a darkened side street.

Minutes later the police charged. Flak-jacketed snipers on nearby rooftops began firing rubber bullets, picking off picketers one by one as an estimated 600 police surged forward whacking heads as the went.

Riley says he was trying to get his members to run for cover when he was suddenly struck by a police baton almost between the eyes. He recalls seeing a bright light and feeling a rush of warm blood down his face before losing consciousness. It took Emergency Room doctors twelve stiches to close the cut.

Attorney General Condon compared the longshoremen to the terrorists that had attacked the World Trade Centre. Riley believes Condon had ordered the police attack in order to manufacture an incident that would boost his political ambition to run for Governor.

If so, it backfired.

The violence of the police attack on peaceful, mostly black longshoremen, sparked a public backlash against Condon and sympathy for the union. And to the delight of the longshoremen, Condon’s political ambitions were flushed into Charleston harbor. He never became Governor and Riley claims he couldn’t get elected dog catcher today. He has returned to his private law practice.

The ILA succeeded in forcing the Danish shipping company Nordana to use union labour. If it hadn’t won that battle, Riley thinks unions would have become extinct in Right to Work South Carolina. He sees hope for resurgence but having been battered for so long admits there’s a long hard road ahead.

The passing of the Right to Work law in 1954 was the thin edge of the wedge. Later, successive state administrations passed more anti-union laws including making it illegal for public servants to join a union, bargain collectively or strike.

Today, says Riley, Corporations view the American south as a Third World country where they can hire cheap labour to increase their profit margins. Not a fate Ontario should aspire to.

Contrary to what Right to Work fans claim, Riley says he’s seen that Right to Work laws haven’t brought prosperity to South Carolina. They’ve brought lower wages –non-union jobs that have hurt the economy by shrinking the middle class. A recent study by the Washington based Economic Policy Institute backs him up.

The EPI found that the declining union membership in Right to Work states triggers a race to the bottom of the wage ladder. Without unions to negotiate decent wage rates, average annual wages in Right to Work states are now $1500 a year lower than in non Right to Work states.

Nonetheless, Right to Work is creeping on to the political agenda in Canada.

In Alberta, the Wildrose Party made Right to Work legislation part of its 2012 election platform. In Saskatchewan, Premier Brad Wall has asked a committee to study RTW and other “reforms” to Saskatchewan’s labour legislation.

In Ottawa, Tory MP Pierre Poilievre is pushing “workers freedom” legislation for federal employees that would let union members opt out of paying union dues while still enjoying the benefits of the union contract.

Like other political and union activists I have interviewed here in South Carolina, Ken Riley’s message to Canadians is do NOT think that what has happened in the U.S. can’t happen to “you’all” in Canada.

Right to Work laws weakening the ability of unions to job security gain decent wages and working conditions he says, are always followed by other anti-union laws and actions.

He has a long scar on his forehead to prove it.

Bill Gillespie's Road Diary: Day 8

"Take this seriously. Otherwise, you're going to be just like us. And that ain't what you want."

Gilda Cobb-Hunter has a warning for Ontario Unions.

Don’t think it can’t happen to you.

Cobb-Hunter is the deputy leader of the Democratic Party in the South Carolina legislature. She is a former social worker, the director of a domestic abuse centre and an opponent of anti-labour Right to Work laws.

South Carolina is a conservative southern state. Its young men enlisted in the Confederate army and fought and died in the American civil war against the Yankee north. Today the Confederate flag still flies at the State Legislature in the capitol, Columbia.

Like many southern states, South Carolina didn’t take well to liberal innovations from the north - such as union-friendly labour laws.

So in 1954 the state became one of the first to pass a so-called Right to Work law.

Right to Work Law boosters insist weaker unions are a key to creating a business-friendly Ontario that will usher in a new era of prosperity.

But Gilda Cobb-Hunter says South Carolina has had a Right to Work Law for 59  years and folks are still waiting for the prosperity.

There is no shortage of negative markers in South Carolina. The fourth highest unemployment rate of the 50 United States. The highest percentage of mobile home ownership. The highest violent crime rate. The 47th lowest percentage of children that graduate from high school.

Cobb-Hunter blames much of it on anti-union laws adopted by conservative Republican and Democratic Government over the years. The laws have been very effective in reducing the numbers and influence of unions. Today less than five percent of workers in South Carolina are union members.

As union jobs with decent pay began to decline, the middle class began to shrink.

Amongst the worst off are public employees.

Over the past 20 years Cobb-Hunter says the state of South Carolina has cut the number of state employees from 80,000 to 56,000. During the same period the population of South Carolina increased by about a million to 4.7 million citizens.

She says state employees are woefully underpaid and overworked. In addition, it is against state law for state employees to form a union and bargain collectively. Cobb-Hunter says since it was first passed 59 years ago, the scope of the Right to Work law has been expanded to give employers the right to fire a worker almost without cause. Many state employees have come to her she says, telling her they want to form a union but are afraid if they are heard even discussing the possibility they will be fired. Their fears are well-founded she says.

Cobb-Hunter says what she has seen in South Carolina is that a Right to Work law is just the thin edge of the wedge. Other anti-union laws follow.

And she has a warning for Ontarians. Don’t think this can’t happen to you. It can. The ideologues that are pushing Right to Work laws are lavishly financed and relentless. If those backing this agenda succeed, Cobb-Hunter says Ontario will be on its way to becoming South Carolina.

And she says you DO NOT want to be South Carolina.

If you want to see the force of nature that is Gilda Cobb-Hunter (and her amazing black and yellow robe and headdress) click on the video link and catch a few of her comments.

Today is the fourth of July here in the U.S. A longshoreman has invited us over for a BBQ. After we’ll go down to the waterfront to catch the fireworks and ask the folks we meet how they feel about unions.

 

Bill Gillespie's Road Diary: Day 7

The South Carolina State Employees Association (SCSEA) is doing the best it can.

Its local chapters lobby State politicians for better labour laws. It runs a retirement benefit program for ex-employees. What it cannot do however, is strike or bargain collectively.

In South Carolina collective bargaining for public employees is against the law.

It is not surprising therefore, that South Carolina is one of the oldest Right to Work (RTW) states in the United States. A Right to Work law, like the one Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is vowing to bring to Ontario, was enacted in 1954. Since then other laws designed to weaken unions and give Corporations a freer hand to run the economy – also part of Tim Hudak’s American style vision for Ontario – were passed.

So if a Right to Work law really does bring prosperity, as Mr. Hudak claims it will, by this time it should be working in South Carolina. After all, the state has had Right to Work for 59 years.

How’s it going?

Carleton Washington is the executive director of the South Carolina State Employees Association. He says anti-union laws such as Right Work have saddled state employees in South Carolina with some of the lowest wages and poorest working conditions in the U.S.

Annual wages for the vast majority of South Carolina State employees he says, range from $15,000 for highway workers and school support staff to $35,000 for middle managers. Employees with professional qualifications are paid more. Even so, they earn 20% to 40% less than professionals in the private sector.

Many have left their jobs in the public service but these days it isn’t that easy to leave. Sixty-six years after passing a Right to Work law, South Carolina has the 46^th highest unemployment rate in the U.S.

In addition, during the past 20 years successive state Governments have slashed the number of public employees from 80,000 to 56,000 today. The result says Washington, is that public employees are now saddled with crushing workloads. Take social workers for example.

The national average caseload for a U.S. Social Worker is 270 cases. The average caseload for a social worker in South Carolina is 920! That means burnout and after several punishing years on the job many state employees quit. The state lose the benefit of their experience and taxpayers have to pay the extra costs of training replacements.

Washington and the Association are doing the best they can but in four of the last five years South Carolina state employees received a zero pay increase.

The Association lobbies state legislators for better labour laws but Washington says the Republican Government has ceded control over much of the economy to Corporations and that is where real power now lies.

Today less than five percent of workers in South Carolina are union members. And Washington says over-worked public employees are paying a high price in their personal lives and South Carolinians are experiencing a sharp decline in public service standards.

Tomorrow we’ll interview one of the last bona fide union leaders. Occupy supporter and longshoreman, Ken Riley.

Day 6 - Road Trip - Our Day Off

Hope you all had a wonderful Canada Day.

Your Road Warriors are in Columbia, South Carolina where we took the day off to celebrate (it just wasn't the same, though). We'll be back on the website tomorrow with interviews from one of the oldest Right to Work states in the USA where public employees have just been told that for the 4th year in the last five they will be getting a 0% wage increase and where it is illegal for public employees to bargain collectively.

Day 5 – Bill Gillespie’s Road Diary

Dan Dennis teaches science at West Ottawa High School in Holland Michigan.

On the “Rate My Teacher” website his students give him the highest marks for his teaching moxie and exceptional dedication. He’s the kind of natural-born-teacher any parent would like their kid to have.

When Dennis began his teaching career he was skeptical about the value of being in a union. That is, until 1999 when his wife earned a fellowship at a university in North Carolina.

So the couple sold their house and moved from Michigan – a non-Right to Work State – to a Right to Work state – North Carolina. And all of a sudden the monthly dues he paid to the Michigan teachers’ union began looking like a bargain.

Even though Dennis was teaching the same grades he’d taught in Michigan, he took an immediate 25% pay cut in Right to Work North Carolina.

In addition, his medical insurance no longer covered as many drugs or medical conditions and his wife was no longer covered at all. His pension plan was

dumbed-down and his workload increased.

He no longer had paid time to prepare his classes. He says teachers were badly over-worked. They were so poorly paid some had to take second jobs in sporting goods stores or fast food outlets to make ends meet.

Like many teachers in Michigan, Dennis believes the union-busting Right to Work law passed by the Republican controlled Michigan legislature earlier this year is just a first - albeit big - step. The ultimate goal they say is to privatize the education system.

Moreover, Dennis says ever since the Republicans took control of the Michigan Senate and Legislature, the Government has been chipping away at the teachers’ collective agreement.

Judging by his promise/threat to bring a Right to Work law to Ontario, Conservative leader Tim Hudak appears to have looked south of the border to Tea Party ideologues for inspiration and perhaps that is not so surprising.

When Hudak decided to do a graduate degree in economics, he choose to do it at an American university. When he graduated, his first job was at Wal-Mart. Today Hudak uses the same code words US Tea Party Republicans use when launching stealth attacks on unions – “right to work”, “modernizing” the labour laws, “workers choice”. 

Dan Dennis says until it actually happened last March, teachers never believed Michigan would pass Right to Work legislation. But it did.

Right wing foundations funded by Tea Party billionaires financed a lavish advertising campaign and hired scores of paid lobbyists to pressure legislators of both parties.

Even then he says the teachers couldn’t believe Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, would pass such a blatant anti-union piece of legislation.

Dennis warns if public employees in Ontario think what happened in Michigan can’t happen to them, they should think again.