Progressive Heroes: Javier Morillo-Alicea
All progressive heroes are not preserved in black-n-white -- some are fighting today in living color. One such hero is Javier Morillo-Alicea. Born "dirt poor," educated at Yale, former college professor. He decided to do more than just talk about it.
Dave Beal did a nice piece on Morillo-Alicea in the 10/9/05 Sunday edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Check comments for full article.
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DAVE BEAL
A surprise awaited Javier Morillo-Alicea after he settled in as an undergraduate at Yale University.
Before arriving on the campus, he had seen little of the economic and cultural chasms that many now view as an unsettling aspect of the American experience. Then he began to sense that his life was very different from that of his dormitory neighbor, a member of the well-to-do Pillsbury clan. "Mostly, I was just plain unexposed to class and superwealth in the U.S.," he says, adding his parents were "dirt poor."
Thus began the journey that six months ago catapulted Morillo-Alicea into one of organized labor's top spots in Minnesota, the presidency of Local 26 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Union leaders here describe the rapid rise of Morillo-Alicea, highly educated and just 36 years old, as a rarity.
Perhaps even more noteworthy is the ascendance of SEIU itself. In an era of decline for organized labor, union membership actually rose as a share of the work force last year in Minnesota. One big reason is the SEIU, which has grown to more than 28,000 members in the state from 23,000 five years ago.
Nationally, the union has roughly doubled its size over the last decade to 1.8 million members. It led the Change to Win coalition that broke off from the AFL-CIO this summer.
Mario Bognanno, a longtime industrial relations professor at the University of Minnesota, says the SEIU is succeeding because it has targeted a huge and mostly unorganized part of the work force: low-paid workers who often get few or no benefits.
"They're hitting a sector of need," he says.
Bognanno says multiple growth strategies are working for the SEIU. He cites the increased use of signed "card checks" instead of more formal elections to organize employees; personalized membership drives; organizing entire industries instead of isolated clusters of workers; and reaching out to immigrants.
Others note the union's global perspective, its practice of targeting companies that can't easily run away to escape a union, its research and the nation's move to a service-based economy.
The SEIU has four locals in Minnesota. Most of its members belong to the three largest: Locals 26, 113 and 284. Most of the growth has been coming at Morillo-Alicea's local and at Local 113, the largest of the four with 14,000 members.
Shane Allers, executive director of Local 284, says his unit hopes to expand beyond its core constituency of school support workers. That could happen over the long haul, thanks to an old-fashioned door-knocking campaign the local launched last November to organize the estimated 18,000 workers in the state's subsidized, home-based child care industry.
This campaign, like others across the country, is being led jointly by the local and SEIU International. All of these efforts are modeled after the SEIU's success in Illinois, where it recently won the right to represent 49,000 child care workers after a decade-long struggle.
Jon Youngdahl, the SEIU's executive director in Minnesota, says these workers typically earn about $2 an hour per child before taxes and other costs in Minnesota and do not have benefits.
Local 284 has contracts for support workers at 140 of the state's public school districts.
Another potential growth source for Local 284 is First Student, which provides school bus services for districts across the state. The local lost elections to represent the firm's workers in 1999 and 2001; now it is pursuing a global approach there.
First Student is part of FirstGroup, a Scotland-based transnational. Allers says the parent firm, organized by the United Kingdom's huge Transport and General Workers Union, has been more hospitable to organized labor in the U.K. than in the U.S.
Twice, Allers has gone to the U.K. as part of a continuing effort to persuade the parent company to ease its opposition to unions in the U.S. SEIU officials say a similar strategy helped its U.S. locals to organize Securitas, a Sweden-based transnational that is a big player in the security guard industry.
Julie Schnell is president of Local 113, and of the SEIU's state council. She points to two recent victories for the local and adds that it continues its drive to organize hospitals, clinics and nursing homes.
A week ago, Local 113 won a first-ever contract for 250 workers at Allina's St. Francis Regional Medical Center in Shakopee. Union officials say the agreement brought St. Francis workers' wages up to levels of workers at other metro area hospitals, in some cases with pay boosts of as much as 27 percent. The local also recently organized 150 workers at an Allina hospital in Owatonna.
Youngdahl says the strongest expansion over the last five or six years has come at Local 26, which is allied with the SEIU's national "Justice for Janitors" movement.
Local 26 claims about 4,000 janitors at commercial office buildings in St. Paul and Minneapolis, about 85 percent of the market. It has another 750 guards in the two cities and is pushing hard to sign up guards at Hannon Security Services, the largest of the security firms remaining unorganized here.
"We represent jobs that can't leave," says Morillo-Alicea. "What we learned is that if you organize one building and everything else around it is nonunion, that building is not going to last very long.
"The rise of unions in the service industry is an indication of the way capitalism is going," he adds. "We've de-industrialized."
Latino immigrants are accounting for a rising share of the local's membership here. Morillo-Alicea, who is bilingual, conducts Local 26 membership meetings in English and Spanish.
He was born in Panama and raised in Puerto Rico. His father served in the military.
Morillo-Alicea has completed all but his dissertation, a saga about the global ambitions of the Spanish empire more than a century ago, for his doctorate in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. He moved to Minnesota in 2000 to teach at Carleton College,then came to the Twin Cities in 2002 to teach at Macalester College.
"The students fell in love with him," says Macalester labor historian Peter Rachleff. "He's a great speaker. There's no façade."
Morillo-Alicea left Macalester in May 2003 to work on Democratic and DFL campaigns and later for the SEIU's state council.
"I decided that thinking and writing about social justice just wasn't enough — it just wasn't for me," he says. "What I love about what I do is I see direct results."
Dan Klingensmith, who retired in March after 14 years as president at Local 26, helped recruit Morillo-Alicea. "I just like the guy," says Klingensmith. "He's a quick study. It was an easy decision to make."
Dave Beal can be reached at dbeal@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5429.
Ole' Woody Guthrie may be makin a comeback!
Lyrics to "Red Wing"
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.
Don't forget Joe Hill:
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.
"The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe" says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe "What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize"
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where working-men defend their rights,
it's there you find Joe Hill,
it's there you find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.
I knew Javier and his siblings growing up, he was not "Dirt Poor". He grew up in a military family. His dad was in the Army. They were absolutley not rich or even upper middle class, but definitely not "Dirt Poor".
I was Javier Morillo's neighbor in Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, and it is incredible he would consider himself and his family "dirt poor." They were solid middle class, and his parents provided a decent, clean, safe home. He needed for nothing.
I'm sure that Javier Morillo's parents would disagree with his statement that he was "dirt poor". If his intent is to make other's pay attention to him, then shame on him for doing it in this manner. Childhood friends will tell you that Javier did not live a "dirt poor" lifestyle.
I too grew up with Javier Morillo and his siblings in Ft. Buchanan. My father and his father held the same rank in the Army. We and the Morillo were not "dirt poor". We weren't rich, but the US Army provided our families with good lives.
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