I have been struggling to get beyond the insults slung by the Republicans two nights ago, but it’s been hard. Before I was a college grad or a law student or a college teacher, I was a community organizer. Not just through volunteering and provision of service sense, but also through the mobilizing people for political action and agitating for resources. Like most people who do this kind of work, organizing is more than just a task or a strategy, its an integral part of my sense of how people in a community address serious problems and get governments and corporations to be responsive to our needs.
I want to tell you a story about the last time I worked as a community organizer. Seven years ago, I was a volunteer organizer with my graduate student union. There was nothing particularly special about my role: I didn’t hold an elected office in the union, I wasn’t on the bargaining team, and I wasn’t one of the two paid organizers. I was a member, a steward, and a volunteer. During the last year I was in grad school, our contract came up for renewal, as it did every three years. Ours was an old union, established in the 1970s, and as such had secured decent wages, tuition remission, and health coverage for most of the people in its bargaining unit. We were going to have to build a bargaining platform around less standard issues, those that pushed the envelope in terms of contractually-guaranteed union benefits: dental care and health care for part-time workers, paid job training, and child care. Of all of these, subsidized child care was the piece that seemed the most dicey; the administration was extremely hostile to the idea and while there were a lot of graduate student parents in the bargaining unit, they were among the least involved as union members, no doubt because of the additional demands on their time and energy.
I can clearly remember when the union decided to take on the child care issue. Several of us went up to family housing on a weekend afternoon and went door to door in order to find out whether graduate student parents would be willing to get behind the union pushing for subsidized child care. Of the many conversations I had that day, one stands out. I ended up at the house of a woman I already knew, a friend of a friend of mine in law school and someone who had been fairly vocally opposed to the union in the past. I’m pretty sure that if she didn’t know me as a friend of another grad student parent she trusted, I never would have gotten in the door. She did invite me in, though, and we talked about the union and about child care, and she said to me, ‘I would love it if the union got us child care, but it’s been on the platform before and they’ve given it up during bargaining. Those of us who are parents have worked our butts off for this in the past, only to have it taken off the table in exchange for other things, and I’ve told people not to trust the union because of that experience. If you can tell me that the union is not going to ditch us at the last minute, I will work for you on this issue.‘ I looked her in the eye and I told her that things would be different this time around: if she would mobilize graduate student parents to support us, we would not let her down.
Like I said, I was not an officer of the union. I wasn’t in charge of the platform. Arguably, I had no ability to make promises on behalf of the union. However, I could make a commitment of my own, and the commitment I made was to take up the role given to me, to work with union leadership to make child care an integral part of the platform, which we did. I can’t take credit for the mobilization of graduate student parents; there were other organizers who worked exclusively on this issue during the months to follow and numerous parents who made calls and distributed fliers and attended bargaining meetings. I certainly didn’t do it all, but I did my part, the part that hinged upon demonstrating that the union could be held to its word, and that I as an organizer would do everything I could to earn that trust. I went to meetings. I made signs. I backed up those in the union who insisted that the child care platform stay on the table until the very end. And at the very end — in the middle of the night, in a conference room at the university, with an exhausted bargaining team, a stonewalling administration, and nothing left on the table but child care — I helped the other organizers call those same parents to come to campus, leaving their sleeping kids at home, so that we all would know who we were really accountable to. Those parents were the community we purported to represent, and when the administration team saw that we would sit there all night before we would go back on our promise to fight for them, they caucused and came back with an offer for child care subsidies that we accepted.
That’s one part of what it means to be an organizer, the part that involves building the trust that allows you to call on someone in the middle of the night to come out and fight for the things that are important to the community. Another part of being a community organizer is more personal and harder to quantify. During that same campaign, political tensions were running high. The World Trade Center had been attacked, the United States had invaded Afghanistan, and Arab-American communities in nearby Dearborn were being targeted with violence. While we were working to unify our community around the bargaining platform we were also enduring bitter arguments between members about responses to the war. One of our most outspoken union members was a guy on the political right who was also a parent. I hadn’t met him in person, only communicated with him over email, when I ended up at an organizing event to which parents brought their children to make posters for one of our large membership meetings. As it happened, I came to be working on a poster with this guy’s young son. As we were working, he started to talk about the World Trade Center, about hearing that people had been hurt and died. And then he asked me a series of questions: Why did the building fall? Were any children hurt? Could that happen again? There I was, with not just someone else’s child but the child of a person I knew did not at all share my ideology, having no idea what had already been said in their household. I didn’t want to contradict anything he’d been told, but I didn’t want to leave his questions just hanging out there. So I told him that the building collapsing was very unusual. Most buildings didn’t collapse, even when things like earthquakes happened. He didn’t need to worry about this building, or any of the buildings he was in. They were all very safe and very well-built. Sometimes bad things just happen, and it’s really sad when people get hurt and when people die, and I didn’t think that any children had been hurt. He listened intently, agreed with me that it was a sad thing, and we moved on to finish the task at hand.
When I got home late that night, I emailed his father. I told him that his son had asked me these questions, and what I had said. I told him that I tried to assure his son that there was no risk of other buildings falling down, that I hoped I did not overstep my role in that situation, and that I had not wanted to simply say nothing. About ten minutes after I sent the email, my phone rang (graduate students don’t sleep!). It was him, thanking me through tears for talking with his son. He was a structural engineer, he told me (I didn’t know that), and he had been crying a lot at their house (I didn’t know that), grieving not just for the loss of life but also out of shock at the destruction involved in the collapse of the buildings themselves. He hadn’t known that his son had picked up on the sense that buildings weren’t supposed to do that, or that he had been hearing about the deaths outside of their home. We talked for maybe 20 minutes that night, but it was the first time we had had a real conversation, and it wasn’t about the union: it was about life. In the weeks that followed, he became the steward of his department and organized more engineers to support us. Three months later, he was one of the parents who showed up late at night to shore up our presence at the bargaining table. Not because we persuaded him to a particular political view — although I’d be curious to know what he makes of today’s politics — but because I and the other organizers demonstrated through all of our actions that we were committed to improving the lives of our members.
I am confident that every organizer in this country has stories like mine. Every organizer goes out on a limb at one point or another, commits to something they’re not sure they can deliver, and then works to make it happen. Every organizer makes connections based on our shared life experiences and not just on our political views. When people can see that you genuinely care about their well-being — their families, their children — that’s when they know they can trust you to fight on their behalf. That trust is what makes all the difference.
