Unionists gather to discuss union democracy, meet LMRDA experts

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(Part Two of a $100 Plus Club News Special Report on a University of Illinois Forum on Union Democracy & Effective Union Leadership)

By Helena Worthen and Joe Berry

Helena Worthen and Joe Berry were coordinators of an event on Nov 14, 2009 designed especially for elected officers of labor unions. It was sponsored by the University of Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations Labor Education Program. Worthen and Berry are holding a similar event on March 13, 2010. Here is their perspective on the November forum.

Thirty to thirty-five participants came from Chicago, Danville, Evanston, Chatham, Niles, Allerton, Harvey, Park Forest, Dixon, Gerard, Mt. Zion, Sidney, Champaign and Urbana to an all-day program at the U of IL School of Labor and Employment Relations building, sponsored by the Labor Education Program. The session was put together in response to local leaders' requests. We organized the session to focus on how union democracy makes possible strong leadership and strong campaigns.

There was an hour set aside at the beginning to let people with long drives get there, during which we had reading materials, including AUD and Labor Notes literature, available. Barbara Harvey, AUD Board member and Detroit attorney specializing in the LMRDA, began the session with the story of the 1997 UPS strike, its roots in the IBT internal democracy effort, and its impact. We structured discussion around exercises drafted by Carl Biers, former Executive Director of AUD. We made this choice at the time because we didn't know what kinds of situations people would be bringing to the session and we didn't want to focus too much on individual cases - we wanted the overall content of the session to be a lesson in the connection between democracy and power, but also an honest picture of the kind of dedication and long-term internal organizing, caucusing and strategizing that it takes to sustain substantive democracy in a union, much less introduce it when it has been lacking. (Next time, we'd probably try to interview people ahead of time and develop a couple of good case studies out of what people would be bringing.)

After lunch, Mark Grba (from the Chicago Office of Labor Management Standards, US Department of Labor) represented the government's interest in enforcing the law and managed to do it with a sense of humor and general openness to questions and interaction with participants. He, or someone in his position, would be an important resource to have at a workshop like this. Grba's other great qualification was having been the lead investigator on an important LMRDA union reform case in Chicago.

Participants, of course, asked a lot of questions and the two experts engaged actively. At one point, Barbara Harvey told how she had taken a case in a state where there was no "little LRMDA" - no public sector state law that protected members like the LMRDA - and she was able to make a convincing case in the courtroom that the fundamentals of LMRDA were actually derived from common law, so you didn't have to have a separate law under which to argue them.

There were also activists from a number of very significant local union democracy struggles in the public and private sectors in Illinois who contributed a lot to the discussion. We charged $35 for the event, out of which we paid for a sandwich lunch and Barbara Harvey's travel expenses. She is willing to come again (if we cover her expenses) if we have another event like this one. She's a friendly, open, high-energy person and people liked her participation.