As I am sure you know, I get a lot of mileage out of the "worst organizer ever" bit I do. No one ever really accuses me of being the worst ever and those that come close are mostly playing off of me, but still I know that a lot of people view the "Oregon Model" with deep suspicion and believe that one day we are going to really get our asses handed to us. As always, I will acknowledge that this is certainly a possibility. Hell, any union organizer that doesn't acknowledge that it's possible to be defeated has not been paying attention.
On the other hand, we just keep racking up victories over here. I am told that my 80% membership number is because we make members come to the office to sign up for health care, so it doesn't count. I am told that we're all a bunch of hippies on the left coast, so the UO administration doesn't do us wrong like they do out there in the brutal Midwest. The softness explains how we settle grievances over a phone call and succeed at bargaining without striking (or rallying for that matter). Still, it could all be a fluke and we could get some real SOBs in the admin and the soft underbelly of the GTFF will be gutted.
Two things, though. We have a health care company out here that handles our insurance (der). The employees who work for the city of Eugene are thinking about switching over to our company and they called us to ask about our transgender benefit. They wanted the same coverage we have, but the health insurance company wanted to charge them $250,000 a year for it. The employees wanted to know how much our claims were. I got to explain to them that, while I didn't know about our experience, I did know that we got the health insurance company to give us the transgender benefit for free. Also in the insurance field, this past term the company was effing up some claims and not processing things very quickly or well. We complained. We just had a meeting with them where they apologized, agreed to come to our General Membership Meeting and apologize, and then offered to make a donation to a charity we are working with this term.
Again, it's possible I do everything wrong and the union is in for a hurting one of these days, but so far things seem to be going pretty damn good.
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2 comments:
Damn, you're a badass. (I know you're in a funk, so I will preemptively clarify: No, I am not being sarcastic.)
I'm in a place where my organizing mostly consists of reading books in philosophical logic and trying to use them as a wedge to understand postmodern theory, so I'm pretty sure you're doing better at the moment.
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