> Well, my time as an elected member of UC-Berkeley's grad local, one of the
> largest grad unions in the country, may not count in your mind, but given
> the time I spent as steward, exec board member and rep from the union
> in campus and community coalitions fighting cuts in education spending in
> the early 90s, I think I know of what I speak.
No you don't. You're talking about classic lobbying -- mobilizing coalitions, bending the ear of legislators, etc. That's fine, but what's new about the new union movement is that reps have to talk with *members themselves*, that you have direct accountability, massive information-flow, and members who, because they're informatic/service workers, actually demand that information. This isn't something which happens magically overnight; at the GTFF, it took almost a decade of struggle, with ups and downs, to get these basic structures in place. We still have a ways to go, of course, but the biggest change is understanding that organizing is not a once-a-decade kind of thing. It has to happen every day, in small, little ways, you have to build it into the very fabric of the union. Of course, the GTFF is one of the oldest grad unions, so we're probably ahead of the curve; the UC unions will likely go on to learn similar lessons.
-- Dennis