http://www.nrtw.org/b/nr_198.htm
Tom Lehman
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> > 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