John, 

This week, our Political, Legislative, and Organizing Director, Joe Murphy, and I, as an officer of the Executive Committee, attended the Grace Carroll Rocky Mountain Labor School, which took place in Butte, Montana, this year. This institution, one of the last of its kind, offers the most comprehensive and dynamic training program for labor leadership development. Whatever role you play in your local union, you are able to develop personal skills as a labor activist, learn about labor issues, and share personal experiences with your counterparts in order to build the labor movement.

Joe Murphy, who has over a decade of experience in labor and political organizing, wrote this week's Labor Dispatch about the long-term effects of sharing our stories and standing in solidarity.

 

"They made solidarity illegal?" JC asked me quizzically.

That was one way to put it.

We’d just been talking about an incident when he was a second-year apprentice. An awards show in Los Angeles was coming up, and a hotel was getting ready for it. His union was doing the work, and management was putting pressure on them to finish faster.

With days left to go, the hotel’s housekeepers went on strike and threw up a picket line for reasons we’re all familiar with – low pay, long hours, lack of staff, lack of respect.

JC had shown up at the jobsite first and didn’t know what he was allowed to do. When his foreman arrived (late), he disappeared to make a phone call, then had his crew enter the hotel from the alley, through a service entrance, and use a cargo elevator. Years later, JC had just told me that he wouldn’t have called his foreman; he’d have called his union hall, his business agent, his steward, or anyone else because he didn’t want to cross that picket line.

That led to a brief discussion between us about how and why solidarity strikes were made illegal in a law that was passed nearly a century ago and how that law was the beginning of the decline in union membership in America.

We’ve been in Butte, Montana, for a week, attending classes at Montana Technical University as part of the Grace Carroll Rocky Mountain Labor School. Labor History 1 and 2 are popular classes, but Contract Costing, Grievance & Arbitration, and Collective Bargaining are where skills that unionists are used to learning (and teaching) on the fly are presented in a classroom setting by professional teachers. The class JC and I were just finishing up was turning out to be popular, informative, and useful: Political Engagement for Union Members, being taught by my Political Director counterparts from Idaho and Montana, Jason Hudson and Amanda Frickle.

Contrary to what JC asked me, solidarity hasn’t been made illegal, even though they’ve tried. We’re on the fifth day of GCRMLS, and you can tell that the effects of a week of learning, socializing, and walking at a high altitude are finally overcoming the caffeine, adrenaline, and solidarity that we’ve all been living on. Ideas and experiences are being shared as freely as union memorabilia among the students here, along with invitations to barbecues wherever back home is and commitments to follow up to find out more about a successful organizing or political plan.

In two years, Arizona will host the Grace Carroll Rocky Mountain Labor School. By then, we may not have made solidarity strikes legal (which passing the PRO Act would do), but we will definitely continue to express solidarity in our actions.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS & ACTIONS

 

OPINION

 

NATIONAL NEWS

 

LOCAL NEWS

 

Pride at Work Meeting- AZ Chapter

 

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