Public Employee Press

Garrido tells activists:
Focus on the community

Organized labor is the enemy - or so right-wing media and politicians like Fox News and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker tell us. The public and private-sector workers are inundated with misinformation about unions being greedy, self-serving organizations that cause cities like Detroit to fall into financial ruin.

How do we change this distorted image of public-service employee unions? DC 37 Associate Director Henry Garrido provided important advice May 8 at "The Attack on Public Workers," a panel discussion hosted by the New York Labor History Association.

"We need to stop talking about ourselves and start talking about the community," Garrido said. He pointed out that the labor movement has been at its strongest when it fought to better society as a whole, such as during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, when unions marched side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and were essential partners in the battle for racial and economic justice.

Panel moderator Gene Carroll, co-director of the New York State AFL-CIO/Cornell University Union Leadership Institute, brought up the example of the 1919 strike by Boston police officers who were fed up with unjust treatment that included stagnant wages for 60 years and seven-day, 98-hour work weeks. Without community support, the strikers lost their jobs to scabs, while the replacement workers got the higher pay and time off that the strikers demanded.

Garrido cited the 2012 Chicago teachers' strike, which succeeded because the union reached out to parents and made teachers' issues - such as evaluations based on student performance - community concerns.

"Private-sector workers buy into the lies because they don't have the pensions or health benefits that they are told we selfishly demand," said panelist Emil Pietromonaco, secretary of the United Federation of Teachers. "But they would not have weekends off or eight-hour workdays if it wasn't for organized labor winning those rights decades ago."

Learning from the past is essential to labor's future. "The best way to celebrate a history is to go back to the principles that started that history," Garrido said.