Fight Union busting at Greenpeace/sidelight on Pacifica Radio

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Wed Jan 12 12:06:17 PST 2000



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Michael Pugliese
>
> A sidelight on the pwoggie groups that outsource telemarketing to
> fundraise. A couple of years ago, a number of these groups working in the
> environmental movement universe, with offices here in the Bay Area, fired
their own
> telemarketing/fundraising staff, making under 10 bucks an hr. plus piddly
> incentives if they went beyond the targets, in favor of a firm specializing
> in findraising for pwoggie non-profits. When the staff at that firm did the
> NLRB get the cards signed and demand a union representation vote thing, the
> union busting law firms were sicced on them.

Many years ago (circa '89-'90) I worked as a fundraiser and supervisor for Public Interest Communications, a telefundraising firm owned by Roger Cravor (one of McGovern's main fundraiser and considered the leftwing Richard Vigurie of grassroots fundraising.) PIC did fundraising for groups ranging from the ACLU to the Audobon Society to Planned Parenthood.

At one point things had gotten bad for workers, less because of the line-level management, then that pay rates and work was being set so irregularly that worker pay became incredibly erratic. This inspired a union drive. The response by the main manager of PIC - who had worked for Miners for Democracy - was to bring in a union-busting firm and play the whole bag of union-busting tricks: documenting regular employment violations and firing union activists - pretty easy in the loose and irregular employment rules of fundraising, employee meetings, and other harsh pressures. But the nastiest tactic was to threaten the jobs of line supervisors, who all the callers were friends with. Under Taft-Hartley, supervisors are not proteted against firing for union activity so the threat was out there that whatever happened to anyone else, if unionization moved forward, the supervisors jobs were toast. That was extremely painful for me personally since I had been a supervisor and was only back as a caller after another job. With a little bit better coordination, we probably could have pulled off the campaign, although the problem (chronic in progressive fundraising like a lot of part-time jobs) was that a lot of people, including myself, were only there for a short period.

The only fundraising group among progressives that has ever welcomed unionization is the Citizen Action network of organizations. At Mass Fair Share when I was a field manager, there was a (relatively inactive) union that set basic work standards. But the Citizen Action groups were almost unique in welcoming unionization, although even they had spot troubles around the country.

But Greenpeace has always been notorious for union-busting. Reportedly whenever a door-to-door canvass unionized at Greenpeace, the whole city's canvass would be shutdown.

-- Nathan Newman



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