Jane McAlevey - Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)

RAISING EXPECTATIONS

(AND RAISING HELL)

My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement

Jane McAlevey withBob Ostertag

This book is dedicated to the thousands of working people
with whom I worked, whose courage and sacrifice and hopes
and fears are, in the end, the only reason this story matters.

Contents

Prologue: Florida,
November 2000

T he message hit my pager about midnight. I was watching the 2000 presidential election returns on my neighbors TV. (I didnt own a TV; I hate those things.) The men with the weird toupees who feed television news to the nation had called Florida for Al Gore. Then for George Bush. Thats when my pager went off.

dont call DC, dont call headquarters, get next plane to Palm Beach airport. immediately. dont call us. rent car, go to Hilton.

I had never seen a page quite like that and dont believe I ever will again. I looked at the pager, then at the TV, where confounded anchors were stammering about Florida, then back at the pager. Then I put the pager down, picked up the phone, and booked the next flight to Palm Beach. Before the sun was up I was on my way.

The place I was leaving was Stamford, Connecticut, where I was running a pilot organizing project for the AFL-CIO. When you work as national staff for either the AFL-CIO or one of its member unions, you can expect to periodically get pulled from whatever merely urgent thing you are doing to some other thing that is actually dire. The practice can be overused by people buried in Washington offices who are convinced that everything on their desk is of utmost importance and who have forgotten how disruptive it is to real organizing of flesh-and-blood workers. But in this case, there wasnt anything more important anywhere; the presidential election was on the line.

The West Palm Beach Hilton was all hustle and bustle, jacked-up adrenaline, and frayed nerves. All the senior organizers from the AFL-CIO were converging on the place, which became the union command center in the battle for Florida. We were the Special Ops: people who knew how to hit the ground running, how to turn on a dime from one task to another, how to press the pedal to the metal and also how to waitto zig and zag, in organizer shop talk. The first person I saw there was Kirk Adams, head of the AFL-CIO National Organizing Department.

Hey, McAlevey, no, I dont know the assignment yet, dont talk to me, I am too busy trying to figure it out, be ready to roll when I do.

Palm Beach County was the land of the butterfly ballot and the hanging chad. Butterfly ballots were punch card ballots with the candidates and issues displayed on both sides of a single line of numbered voting marksan arrangement especially liable to misinterpretation by people with poor vision, such as the elderly. Hanging chads were tiny bits of paper that should have fallen out of the ballots when voters punched in their choice of candidate but hadnt, leaving a trail of ambiguity that could be used to obscure the intent of the voter. Thousands of ballots were being discounted or contested due to this rather archaic paper voting system.

Finally, our plan took shape. Each of the senior staff would be given a team of organizers and we would start knocking on doors and collecting affidavits from people who would swear under oath that they had meant to vote for Gore but, confused by the butterfly ballot, had accidentally voted for Bush or Pat Buchanan. Other teams were dispatched to grocery stores, and some were sent to a candlelight protest vigil. I was given a team of organizers, an attorney or two, a van, and a stack of maps indicating our assigned condominium complexes, mostly inhabited by senior citizens, and we raced off to collect affidavits.

It was like shooting fish in a barrel. From the first complex we hit until we were pulled off the assignment a few days later, it was hard to find an elderly voter who hadnt screwed up the ballot or didnt want to make a sworn statement. These places were full of funny, highly educated, cranky New York Jews. I was a New Yorker myself, with a partly Jewish upbringing, and these people felt like home to me. I adored them. And they were really pissed off, especially the ones who thought they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan (the SS guard, they called him). There were holocaust survivors, and sons and daughters of holocaust survivors. Whats more, many of these folks had been union members in the Northeast before retiring. You would knock on their door and it was as if they had been sitting there impatiently wondering when the union would finally show up. Soon there were long lines in the community rooms, because we hadnt anticipated such an outpouring. These folks could hardly stand up, there were walkers all around, but no one was leaving until theyd all met the lawyer, told their stories, and filled in the affidavits. And they were ready to do much more than that. Affidavits? Lawyers? Hell, these people were furious.

I reported this every morning and evening at the debrief meetings for lead organizers. So when can we actually mobilize them, put these wonderful angry senior citizens into the streets and on camera? I would ask. But we didnt do anything of the sort. Instead, we did a candlelight vigil, which was an awful, badly organized affair, just the kind of event that makes me crazy. First, because it could have been huge, and second, because everyone who came was boreda good recipe for how to get motivated, angry people to stay home the next time they get a flyer. But it got worse. Big-shot politicians from across the land were starting to show up, and they all came to the vigil to calm people down. It was a mind-blowing thing to watch. Were these guys idiots, did they want to lose, or what?

I heard someone from the press mention that Jesse Jackson was coming in two days to do his own rally and march. Hmm. Why hadnt we heard of that? Then, later that night, during the regular debriefing on legal updates on the recount and the next days assignments, a higher-up said, Jesse Jackson is coming to do a big march. We wont be participating in it.

I thought I had heard him wrong: Um, sorry, can you repeat that?

The Gore campaign has made the decision that this is not the image they want. They dont want to protest. They dont want to rock the boat. They dont want to seem like they dont have faith in the legal system. And they definitely dont want to possibly alienate the Jewsyou know, its Jacksonso we are not mobilizing for it.

While my heart was sinking my head was exploding. The American electoral process is breaking up like the Titanic and we dont want to rock the boat?

Im sorry, something doesnt seem quite right here. As the person leading a field team in largely Jewish senior complexes, and, frankly, as someone raised by Jews, I can tell you that we need to take people into the streets. We need to let them express their anger. Republicans are starting to hold little rallies demanding that Democrats not be allowed to steal the election. We need to either support this rally or do our own or both.

I also knew that to turn them out would require some resources, beginning with transportation from each condo complex. Most of these people didnt drive or didnt like to drive, which was why they lived in the condos, but that also meant they were generally home where we could find them. We had an instant mobilization in waiting; we could have 30,000 people in the streets in two days. I knew that the only outfit in Florida with the money, staff and experience to make this happen was organized labor.

What was on the table here was more than a rally. It was a question of what sort of power was going to be brought to bear on a defining national crisis. The Gore people not only wanted to project a nice image, they wanted to be nice. They wanted everyone to go home and hand everything over to something called the legal process. This was ridiculous, because when and how and where this went to court was deeply political. Al Gore himself appeared to actually believe that if he could politely demonstrate that more Floridians had voted for him than for Bush, the democratic system would award him the election. Gore was right in the sense that he had won the state. There were other Democratic Party honchos who were not so nave, but they lived in a world where you deal with these things behind closed doors. They were completely unprepared for the hypercharged political street theater exploding in Florida, and couldnt understand the difference between a narrowly conceived legal strategy and a mass mobilization direct action strategy. They thought there was no difference.