Laboring to reach out
Post-Janus battleground for union workers: texting, door knocking, educating
The responses came faster than ever before.
Pat Colangelo’s cellphone began to ding and light up with a deluge of notifications while she was still sending out a batch of 581 text messages on a laptop. The question was brief and direct: The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers had asked its members if they could march in the Labor Day parade.
But the messages were also starting conversations.
For those who responded affirmatively, Ms. Colangelo, a retired teacher, clicked an “RSVP – Yes” button that generated an automatic message: “Great!” it read, using a fist emoji, conveying digital solidarity. “How many people are you bringing? And will you require transportation from the PFT office?”
In about an hour, Ms. Colangelo, along with five other people sitting with laptops and phones around a conference table at the union’s South Side headquarters, had contacted nearly 3,100 people and collected dozens of responses.
After five days, 148 members and retirees had signed up to go to the parade Sept. 3, many of them promising to bring family members.
It was one of the union’s first tests of a texting platform called Hustle, an effort by the Washington, D.C.-based American Federation of Teachers to help local chapters reach members. Traditional tools, such as physical mailers and notices on union bulletin boards, are increasingly viewed as outdated and passive.
The platform is also a powerful mobilization tool in a world where union workers in the public sector can now decide to withhold fees if they feel the union isn’t working for them.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that unions representing people such as teachers, firefighters and state agency
workers can no longer require fees from nonmembers, overturning 40 years of precedent.
The decision has set off a kind of arms race in messaging between labor unions and the conservative groups now trying to break unions’ grip on workplaces. A survey conducted in April found nearly half of American teachers had heard nothing about the Janus case, leaving an opening for competing messages.
Getting teachers to drop out
“What you’re going to see is the multimillion-dollar, monolithic, well-funded war machine,” said Keith Williams, Pennsylvania director of outreach for Americans for Fair Treatment, a Harrisburg nonprofit affiliated with the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Mr. Williams, a teacher in central Pennsylvania for 21 years, recently quit to focus his time on traveling the state and meeting with teachers who, he said, feel intimidated and coerced, their anti-union views drowned out by peer pressure.
He directs teachers to Americans for Fair Treatment’s website, which, among other things, publishes statistics showing percentage of dues money that goes to political activities and generates a letter that teachers can send to their union in order to drop out.
This week, he was planning to meet in Beaver Falls with about a half-dozen teachers in the Pittsburgh region and talk strategy, including campaigns to decertify unions and break the union’s authority to represent every person in a workplace — which the Commonwealth Foundation explored in an op-ed earlier this month.
“The common theme is people feel very alone,” Mr. Williams said of the teachers who have reached out to him.
Some of the things he has heard: “We really have not seen the value in our union, and now they’re coming to us and want to do business with us, but the last 10 years, we haven’t heard a lick … We didn’t get what we paid for, and now they’re going to come crawling to us.”
A need to try harder
Unions argue that efforts encouraging members to leave are funded by politically motivated right-wing groups and large corporations that want to weaken organized labor’s ability to negotiate higher wages.
“If you want an organization that fights for you to exist, you have to pay for it — it’s as simple as that,” said Gabe Morgan, vice president for SEIU 32BJ, which represents 25,000 building janitors, security guards and other property services workers in Pennsylvania.
Yet the rollout of new communication tools comes as some labor groups face potentially steep losses, and some acknowledge a need to try harder to reach everyone.
“Almost all of our communications with the members are things we’re trying to accomplish in bargaining,” Mr. Morgan said. “Now we do have to devote a certain amount of time and effort educating people about what we do.”
As of the June 27 ruling, Pennsylvania stopped collecting fees from 24,000 state employees in union workplaces who are not members — including PennDOT workers, health inspectors, state troopers, corrections officers and others. That represents more than 2 in 5 state workers who are represented by a union.
The fees added up to $6.6 million last year, a spokesman with the Pennsylvania’s Office of Administration confirmed.
Teachers unions could fare better.
The Pennsylvania State Education Association, which represents about 181,000 educators and staff statewide, asked more than 700 school districts to stop collecting fees on behalf of the union’s 6,500 nonmembers.
The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers has about 85 percent of its membership recommitted, according to Chris George, director of organizing for the union. This summer, the union sent teams on about 150 house visits to encourage members and nonmembers to sign the recommit cards, which yielded 35 signed pledges as of early August.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Christy Baraff, a third-grade teacher in Carrick, and Brenda Marks, a parent-educator at Pittsburgh Arsenal 6-8, spent about four hours of their summer vacations driving a gold Volkswagen Passat through Beechview and Brookline knocking on doors.
While they got some cards signed, they also encountered one person who refused to sign although she invited them into her living room for a discussion that lasted a half-hour.
“It was a long conversation, as they often are,” Ms. Baraff said afterward. “They have a lot of personal experiences to share. Talking through that helps them feel more connected to the union.”
New tools to communicate
Going forward, the union hopes a texting platform like Hustle will distribute information immediately and start conversations. As union members sent out Labor Day promotions, Mr. George, the organizing director, showed off the system to Ms. Colangelo, a retired teacher who taught for 30 years in Brookline.
If someone said they will go to the parade, she clicked “RSVP – yes” and that person’s name and responses went into a spreadsheet.
If someone responded “no” to the union’s Labor Day text, she clicked an “RSVP – no” button that generated a message: “OK, I understand. Enjoy the rest of your summer.”
If someone seemed to be on the fence, Mr. George said members should use discretion and craft their own message. With several, Ms. Colangelo added her own personalized note, pointing out it’s “big news” that the teachers will be in the first group to march in the parade.
“Hope you can make it,” she wrote. “One of the few times teachers get cheered by crowds of people.”
Ahead of last year’s Labor Day parade, members came into the union office and made phone calls, going down the list of 3,000 people, said Jennifer Mazzocco, a teacher at Allderdice High School who co-chairs the union’s political action committee.
Over two weeks, they tried to get people to either pick up — which is happening less amid suspicion of telemarketers — or to call back, an even less likely outcome. Still, more than 600 union members attended last year’s parade, she said, a higher turnout than previous years.
With texting, people can more easily respond when it’s convenient. The union can monitor responses any time of the day through a mobile app.
“In a year that should’ve been scary and depressing, it was invigorating. I learned more than in any other year ever,” said Nina EspositoVisgitis, the union’s president.