March 2006

Maurice Henderson ('97) and Timothy Sullivan ('02) Fight for Workers' Rights

Maurice Henderson (’97) and Timothy Sullivan (’02) have relied heavily on grassroots organizing to reach their core constituents in the United Steelworkers (USW) and the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, respectively. 

Henderson, a relative newcomer to union advocacy, joined the staff of the USW in January 2005 as the national communications specialist for the union’s Associate Member Program (AMP). Sullivan, who grew up in a union family, has worked with unions on the local, state and federal levels since accepting a job as the political and legislative coordinator with the Massachusetts AFL-CIO in April 2004. Both men have grappled with the challenge of strengthening their respective unions given the significant decline in union membership nationwide during the last 30 years. 

The AMP, which serves as an organizing model for recruiting support beyond traditional union ranks, offers one way to meet that challenge, according to Henderson. The USW launched the AMP in 2004 and hired Henderson shortly thereafter to create a sustainable communications strategy for its outreach.  

The AMP aims to strengthen the USW by building coalitions with like-minded people and groups, Henderson explained. “Many people like students, engineers, priests and lawyers may not be in jobs that have unions,” Henderson said, “but they may share union members’ values regarding such things as social and economic justice issues.” These people can now join the AMP and help advance an agenda focused on improving the lives of working people and the middle class. 

Thus far, the AMP has concentrated its organizing efforts in the states of Minnesota, Ohio and Washington, Henderson said. People in these states have rallied to fight against CAFTA, Social Security privatization, reductions in Medicare coverage and poor working conditions in the international factories of large companies like Coca-Cola, Nike and Gap. 

The AMP has been instrumental in building the Blue-Green Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental activists led by the USW and the Sierra Club, Henderson said. The alliance has supported clean car initiatives, fought against corporate dumping and improper disposal of toxic chemicals and pushed for renewable energy initiatives and an end to the nation’s reliance on oil. 

Henderson also pointed to the AMP’s grassroots organizing and coalition building in the Rescue Ohio Jobs Campaign. The campaign supports passage of Ohio Senate Bill 13, which would end the taxpayer-assisted outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries.  

Like Henderson, much of Sullivan’s job as political and legislative coordinator for the Massachusetts AFL-CIO has involved communicating with his target audience—in his case, labor leaders, union members, elected officials and the general public—about pending political campaigns, legislation and issues that affect them. Some key issues for the AFL-CIO include raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, advancing worker safety, securing affordable health care and protecting pensions.  

Sullivan credited the organization’s strong grassroots activism for sweeping the Massachusetts Legislature elections in 2004 and for playing an influential role in the 2004 presidential election in New Hampshire. New Hampshire voted Republican in the 2000 presidential election and Democratic in the 2004 presidential election, the only state to make this switch. 

Sullivan stressed the countless benefits workers and their families derive from union membership and encouraged more people to join the Massachusetts AFL-CIO to support the union’s efforts at improving the quality of life for working families. The Massachusetts AFL-CIO currently comprises 750 local unions representing 400,000 union families, a veritable force by any standard. Even so, unions today do not represent as large a proportion of the workforce as they once did. Sullivan agreed with Henderson that if unions are to survive, they must do a better job of reaching out to nonunion members.  

“The AFL-CIO is almost more important to nonunion members than it is to union members,” Sullivan said. “People who are not in a union often work so hard that they don’t have time to see their families. Unions improve the quality of the average worker’s life by ensuring the proper work-family balance.” 

Sullivan worried about what he views as a shift in the public’s perception about their ability to effect change. “People protested in the streets in the 1960s,” he said, “but people today seem to think they can’t change things. We have to change that attitude, because if we don’t, everyone stands to lose everything the unions have worked so hard to achieve for all working families in the last 70 to 80 years.” 

Sullivan touted the collective bargaining power of unions as the way to effect changes that will benefit working-class people. He cited the relatively small number of Wal-Marts in Massachusetts—only 13—as proof that unions can and do use their collective power to thwart the spread of large anti-union corporations, thereby improving the quality of life for the average worker. 

Both Henderson and Sullivan have relied on mass mailings, phone banks and door-to-door canvassing to appeal to union members and nonmembers alike, often with considerable success. For example, Henderson credited recent mass mailings in California and New York with raising AMP membership in those states to almost 1,000 and 600, respectively. Likewise, when the Massachusetts AFL-CIO sent a mailing to all its local unions requesting participation in a December 8 rally, 5,000 union members answered the call, flooding Boston’s city center, Sullivan said.  

Sullivan expressed excitement about the communication potential of the blog launched by the AFL-CIO at the beginning of this month. “Anyone and everyone can contribute to a blog,” he said. “It’s the most democratic form of communication this country has seen in a long time.” He remarked on the difficulty of getting an op-ed published in a newspaper today and said that blogs provide a venue for more voices to be heard and for the dissemination of information to workers and the general public. 

Both Henderson and Sullivan remain strong advocates of labor unions, but Henderson will no longer be working directly for a union. He left his union job at the beginning of this month to become deputy press secretary for Timothy Kaine, Virginia’s recently inaugurated Democratic governor. He will be able to continue his advocacy work on behalf of working-class people with the policymakers he will encounter on a daily basis in his new position, he said.  

Sullivan asserted his desire to maintain his direct involvement with the union. “They’ll have to kick me out of the labor movement if they want me to leave,” he said. “There’s a lifetime of work to be done here, and we need people both in and out of the movement to make things better for working families.”  

As Henderson eagerly anticipated the challenges of his new job, he reflected positively on his employment with the USW. “My association with the USW was a really powerful experience,” Henderson said. “Every dollar I made was given to me by a union member who wanted me to use my skills to make their life better.”  

Sullivan echoed some of the same sentiments. “My father has been a union member for almost 25 years and is currently the president of the Utility Workers Local 369 Union in Boston,” Sullivan said, “so I grew up knowing what being in a union meant for the prospects of my family. My dad was able to put three kids through exceptional colleges because he was in a union. Union workers do hard and sometimes dangerous work, and they deserve to have the high quality of life they’ve earned for themselves and their families.”