In this fishbowl panel, labor journalist Sarah Jaffee talks with organizing directors at some of the country's most ambitious and creative unions: Cindy Estrada from the United Auto Workers, Emily Stewart from the Service Employees International Union, Tom Smith from the Communications Worker of America, and Jim Williams from the Union of Painters and Allied Trades. The panel explores how unions are wrestling with broken labor law, declining unionization rates, and the challenges and opportunities of organizing in this moment. 

 

What is the labor movement we need for the future we want?

Tom Smith: I've been trained that we begin with a power analysis. In the current moment, it's challenging to imagine just how much power we must build to win a future worthy of the description of "one we want," but this will certainly require a labor movement that is levels of magnitude greater than what we have today. A movement that's willing to dream the impossible and will that vision into being. A movement that thinks creatively about how we build doorways into our organizations for tens of millions of workers regardless of "legal" constraints.

For us in CWA, that means thinking big, running ambitious organizing in our core sectors, and visionary organizing in completely non-unionized industries at a time of major economic realignment. We see the merger of traditional media and telecom with big tech, and finance capital in the middle of it all. For example, we’re in the middle of a huge wave of organizing in newsrooms at print and digital publications.

In tech and video games, we've launched the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. We have won victories organizing the tech startup Glitch and saw video game developers make a first breakthrough, winning 78 percent pay increases after a 21-day strike of all LGBTQ, women, and non-binary game writers on the game Lovestruck.

To take on the power of finance capital, we continue our Committee for Better Banks campaign. Earlier this year, we successfully organized Beneficial State Bank. Prior to this win no private bank employees have successfully formed a union in over 40 years.  

 

Jim Williams: When I think of the labor movement that we need right now, I think of the IUPAT's "Free Hugo" campaign. In 2017, one of our members was arrested and detained by ICE. Hugo Mejia was held for months without trial for simply showing up to work. The IUPAT mobilized across the country and pressured politicians, legislatures, and the courts to free our union brother and to return him to his family and community while his asylum petition was heard. I think that campaign showed IUPAT, and the labor movement at large, at our best. The power workers have extends far beyond the job site to every level of society, and we used that power to show solidarity with one of our own. The IUPAT doesn't just fight for better wages and benefits, we fight for a just society that all workers deserve to live in."

 

 

 

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About Cindy Estrada

Cindy Estrada is serving her third four-year term as a UAW Vice President and currently heads the Fiat Chrysler, Independent Parts and Suppliers (IPS), Organizing, and Women’s Departments.

She earned a degree in education from the University of Michigan and had planned to become a teacher. After organizing with the United Farm Workers union on an internship, she was drawn to union organizing instead.

Estrada worked as a UAW Region 1A temporary organizer, successfully organizing a number of Parts suppliers. She helped organize workers at Mexican Industries in southwest Detroit in 1995, resulting in one of the UAW’s largest victories among Spanish-speaking manufacturing workers.

Estrada’s organizing ability was recognized by then UAW President Stephen P. Yokich, who appointed Estrada to the UAW International’s organizing staff in 2000.

She was soon appointed to Coordinator of Michigan organizing and ran the Michigan Organizing Center. In 2007, UAW Vice President Terry Thurman appointed her as the Administrative Assistant over the Organizing Department. After Terry Thurman’s retirement UAW President, Ron Gettlefinger appointed Estrada as the Director of the National Organizing Department.

She was first elected UAW Vice President in 2010 and assigned to direct the unions UAW Independents, Parts and Supplier/Competitive Shop Department; Public Sector and Health care servicing department and the UAW Women’s Department. While in that role she was the lead negotiator for over 17,000 UAW workers in the State of Michigan.

Estrada also led negotiations for the Michigan Coalition of State Employee Unions, providing historic agreements protecting health care and establishing vital programs addressing privatization and workplace democracy for over 35,000 state employees.

As director of UAW Independents, Parts and Suppliers/Competitive Shop Department, Estrada proudly honored the reason Walter Reuther urged the departments establishment in 1968: to use the UAW’s parts worker density to establish minimum industry-wide compensation standards in IPS contracts. This resulted in breakthrough agreements in seating and other major auto component part industries.

Four years later, she became the first woman and first Latina to lead the union’s General Motors Department.

The long-time organizer and activist is involved with many labor and community organizations. Estrada is a proud member of UAW Local 174, having worked at Impressions in Taylor, MI. She is the mother of twin 16-year-old sons, stepmother to four, and grandmother of six. She is the widow of the late UAW organizer and retired Administrative Assistant Frank White.

About Jim Williams

Mr. Williams began his career with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades in 1998 as a glazier with District Council 21 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was appointed as the Assistant to the General President in 2002 and served as the Regional Organizing Coordinator for the IUPAT Eastern Region. In 2011, he was appointed to the position of Organizing Director. In 2014, Mr. Williams was elected as the General Vice President at Large during the IUPAT’s 31st General Convention, and was re-elected at the 32nd General Convention in 2019. He resides in Pennsylvania with his wife, Maureen, and their three sons, Shaun, James, and Riley.

About Tom Smith

Tom Smith came into organizing in the wake of the 1999 WTO protest “Battle in Seattle.”  As the Global Justice Movement faded post-9/11, he became more involved with the labor movement. Tom worked as university staff in dormitory housekeeping and the campus library, where he was involved in early organizing efforts with the independent United Campus Workers union (UCW) at the University of Tennessee. Tom was one of the 26 original members of UCW who affiliated with CWA in 2002.  Even though collective bargaining is illegal in Tennessee, UCW-CWA has grown to 2300 members, and inspired thousands of higher education workers in other Southern, right-to-work-for-less states to build campus unions with CWA.

Prior to his promotion to CWA's National Organizing Director in June 2019, he was the District Organizing Coordinator for CWA's southeastern region District 3.  Formerly a lifelong Tennessean, he presently lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his wife and two children.

About Sarah Jaffe

Sarah Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which Robin D.G. Kelley called “The most compelling social and political portrait of our age.” She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

Sarah is currently at work on her next book, Work Won’t Love You Back, on the “labor of love”–how we all came to love our jobs, or at least to be forced to pretend to, and how this drains the security, bank accounts, and happiness of workers from restaurant servers to NFL players, nannies to nurses to Hollywood actors. It will be out in 2021 from Bold Type Books.

Sarah was formerly a staff writer at In These Times and the labor editor at AlterNet. She was a contributing editor on The 99%: How the Occupy Wall Street Movement is Changing America, from AlterNet books, as well as a contributor to the anthologies At the Tea Party and Tales of Two Cities, both from OR Books, and Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, from Picador. She was also the web director at GRITtv with Laura Flanders.

She was one of the first reporters to cover Great Ape-Snake War and the Fight for $15, has appeared on numerous radio and television programs to discuss topics ranging from electoral politics to Superstorm Sandy, from punk rock to public-sector unions.

She has a master’s degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia and a bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola University New Orleans. Sarah was born and raised in Massachusetts and has also lived in South Carolina, Louisiana, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, and currently calls Philadelphia home.

About Emily Stewart

Raised in West Virginia in a family of union organizers, Emily is the Organizing Director of SEIU, with thirty years experience leading campaigns organizing campaigns in the steel, retail, public, and health care sectors. 

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