MyOwnStoryPartII

My Own Story - Part II

Organizing a Labor Union Single handedly

I decided the first order of business for myself was to contact the local office of the Union, which is referred to as "The Local". I met with the Local president and he explained to me the steps involved in organizing a labor movement to unionize the bottling plant. The first step was to approach each and every employee of the factory and give them a Union membership application card. It was required that 30% of the workforce fill out an application card, then a mandatory secret ballot vote could take place at the factory. If the secret ballot vote resulted in at least 51% of the voting workforce voting in favor of Union representation then I would be victorious in my attempt and we would then become unionized and represented by The Teamsters.

Also, by National Labor Relations Board regulations, from the time the plant workers filled out their union application cards to the time of the secret ballot vote, all that elapsed time would be retroactive Union Represented work time meaning that we would get retro active Union scale wages from that point forward.

So I took about 50 Union application cards with me to work the next day and began approaching as many co-workers as I could informing them of the benefits in becoming unionized. Obviously, I could not approach the Foreman's brown-nosing, bootlicking cronies, so I concentrated on the rest of the work force who like me, simply wanted to do their day's work and go home to their families. The problem was, the plant had about 50 employees at the time and they were pretty much equally divided, half cronies, half honest working men. My job was to get 51% of that workforce to vote Yes for the Union.

The very first thing I learned when I began campaigning was that although I could not be fired for my Union activities, I most certainly could be demoted, picked on and harassed during my time I was on the clock. I was also informed I could not do any Union campaigning during business hours, so I had to reserve my campaigning for after work hours. I was demoted to the most menial of tasks in retaliation for my Union activities. Although I was only one of many employees who had long hair, I was made to wear my hair in a tight hair net. My pay was cut to entry level minimum and every move I made was watched very closely in hopes to find a justifiable cause to legitimately fire me.

I complained to the Local president but he told me that until the Union was voted in and implemented, there was no regulations that the company had to conform to concerning equal or fair treatment of it's employees. He simply told me to be sure I complied with whatever Terry the asshole told me to do because if they could find a legitimate reason to fire me not related to my Union activity, they most certainly would. In due time I succeeded in getting 30% of the workers to fill out an application card. This now insured me of having a mandated vote.

The next problem I discovered was that the inner workings of an organization drive is every bit as bureaucratic as the U.S. Government, and for very good reason. The entire voting implementation process of private industry voting in a Union is overseen by The National Labor Relations Board which is, of course, a U.S. Government office. This resulted in over a year waiting period for the election to take place. During that year I was forced to work under humiliating conditions at bare minimum wage and had to watch every single move I made as not to give Terry the asshole a legitimate reason to have me fired.

My light at the end of the tunnel was that if the Voting resulted in a victory, the plant management would immediately have to conform to Union fairness acts and I personally would immediately be reinstated to my original job as a fork lift driver. In addition, all pay scales for every employee would jump to Union scale wages (approx $2.00/hr) retroactively from the time they filled out their union application cards, which was over a year earlier so we all were to gain a year's worth of retroactive differential pay of $2.00/hr. resulting in over $4,000.00 per employee in a lump sum. And that was 1977 dollars!

As a workforce, we would also enjoy job promotions awarded to those with seniority and qualification skills, not the traditional brown nosing and boot licking. And everyone would receive a much better medical benefit plan and a pension retirement plan to boot.

That was a very hard year for me, both physically and psychologically. I had to campaign on my off duty hours and as hard as I campaigned for the Union, Terry the asshole was doing his own campaigning against the Union, doing his best to convince the gullible workforce that the Teamsters Union was corrupt and that we'd all have to pay high monthly dues and that I was nothing more than a hippie renegade troublemaker who was "jeopardizing" their jobs. So from day to day I had won people over only to lose their support the next day.

The National Labor Relation Board law stipulates that employees are not mandated to vote. The percentage needed for victory was 51% of the voting employees. So my hopes were that if there were any employees that wouldn't vote, they would be Terry the asshole's cronies, not the people who I thought might vote yes in a secret ballot. And that was one of the biggest fears of much of the work force. They had to be convinced that the voting was a secret ballot because they feared if the Union was not voted in and it was found out that they had voted for the Union, then they'd be fired. That was a significant element of my campaigning.

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