“We are the union, the mighty mighty union!”

I hear the chants in my head.  When I need them, they come to me.

This line is especially true right now for the former members of United Healthcare Workers-West.   We are the union.  A week and a half ago, many of my sisters and brothers and I slept in our union hall, before the hostile takeover by our International, SEIU.  As we held our hall, my sisters and I worked to maintain our union.  We fended off anyone SEIU sent to weasel their way in without warrants.  We planned how we’d move forward during an imminent occupation:  how we’d communicate with each other; how we would reach deep into our membership to take our union back.  

It occurred to me that night hunched over the bare desks in the communication department office, the union solidarity posters hanging behind me, that though we had been member leaders up to that point, stewards and activists for union democracy, something had changed.  This was a sort of matriculation, graduation day.  

This was not the sort of matriculation I wanted, but in this moment of crisis, while SEIU was preparing to take our hall, after they’d put us into trusteeship for refusing to go along with their undemocratic processes, in this moment when our staff, some of the smartest, most committed, best people I know, were told by SEIU to leave the Hall and were preparing for their “interviews”  (interrogations), our elected officers had been fired for being too strong and too empowered, too unified.  In this dark and outrageous moment in the life of our union and the history of the labor movement, I sensed a quiet determination, a victory.

When I became an active member-leader in the Kaiser Medical Social Work chapter, I learned the skills of organizing and noticed that they were the same as those of social work.  The focus is not on giving answers but empowering people to ask the right questions.  The central tenets of both social work and organizing involve listening and beginning where the person is:  giving them the tools:  knowledge of the contract, worker’s rights, the Kaiser labor management partnership, and engendering confidence in the real source of power:  their sisters and brothers.

I have, in the social worker style of tiresome self-analysis, become my own case study for this transformation from un-empowered, un-unified, social worker to empowered leader.  I watched myself in the last year and a half, learn the skills of organizing, begin to use them in small ways, from shadowing my mentor to leading negotiations in one short year, from being anxious about speaking to small groups of workers to speaking comfortably to groups of 300.   There were many small steps along the way, but what amazed me most was the rare combination of talented and dedicated UHW staff and elected members whose vision and integrity permeated all levels of the Union and the impact that this environment had on me and my sisters and brothers.

Any good social worker knows that the main goal of our interventions is to render ourselves redundant:  to help people learn to help themselves so well that we are no longer needed.  A good organizer’s goal is the same:  to empower workers and worksite leaders so that they no longer need the organizer/representative to solve their problems.  

I drank another cup of stale coffee and planned with my sister in the union hall until the middle of the night during the hostile takeover of one of SEIU’s strongest and most effective locals, my local.   As our elected leaders and staff leaders were being fired, we stepped into their places.  Since we could no longer talk to our staff leaders in exile, we turned to each other.  We called up the words of leaders who have said:  “in every interaction we should be thinking ‘how does this build the union?'”  SEIU would do well to consider that question, rather than the question of how to disassemble my union.  

We are moving to decertify from SEIU, to form our own Union, to maintain our current union.  When we leave our autocratic International for the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), it’ll be a historic day for the labor movement.  But that moment will be only one of the significant moments that happen everyday within the former UHW.  One of them was in that Union Hall that night, when we turned to each other, embodying all that UHW stood for.  

In this dark moment when SEIU appears to have taken what we have built, we know that they can take the hall, but they can’t take us.  We are the union. We will be the union.  We’ll be the most democratic, strongest union because of this moment and all of the moments still to come.   We are the union, the mighty mighty union.  SEIU, who are you?  Whoever you claim to be or to represent, you have not built the union.  You have tried to dismember it.   We are building the union right now.  You’ve lost already, and we’ve already won.