Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en Marvin Miller's Lasting Legacy <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>While he was alive, the baseball establishment five times rejected Marvin Miller, who freed players from indentured servitude, from its Hall of Fame. The Major League Baseball Players Association, which Miller headed from 1966 to 1983, sat on its hands, failing to raise a stink about this outrageous miscarriage of justice.</p> <p>Miller, who died on Tuesday at 95, was never bitter about his exclusion from the Cooperstown shrine. As a staunch unionist, he knew which side he was on and understood that the baseball owners and executives who control the Hall of Fame would rig the rules to keep him out. The baseball moguls have always viewed their teams as personal fiefdoms and are among the most ferociously anti-union crowd around. </p> <p>But what’s appalling is the timidity of the Players Association to mount a campaign on Miller’s behalf. Over the years, many Hall of Fame players—including Tom Seaver, Joe Morgan, Brooks Robinson, Bert Blyleven, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, and Reggie Jackson—have expressed their belief that Miller deserves a place in the Hall. But they’ve failed to embrace a key lesson that Miller taught players after he took over the fledging union: Organize.</p> <p>Miller’s death should now spur the union to mobilize a crusade to get Miller the honor he clearly deserves. The union should bring together prominent Hall of Fame and rank-and-file players to hold a press conference, issue a statement, and lobby the selection committee demanding that when it next meets in December 2013, it vote Miller into Cooperstown.</p> <p>Miller has been on the ballot five times, but never received enough votes, because the committees have been stacked with enough owners and executives, including some whom Miller tangled with as head of the players union, to assure his exclusion. During the last vote in 2010, for example, Miller received 11 out of 16 votes cast, one less than the 75 percent needed to gain entry. Although the votes are secret, it is likely that the committee’s four baseball executives—Phillies owner Bill Giles, former Cubs and Orioles executive Andy MacPhail, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and David Glass, the former Walmart CEO who owns the Kansas City Royals—voted against Miller. Veteran Hall of Fame observes believe that the fifth anti-Miller vote was probably Whitey Herzog, a former manager.</p> <p>Over the years, the Hall of Fame has inducted many second-rate baseball owners and executives who had little impact on the game. Several former baseball commissioners—including the incompetent Bowie Kuhn, who lost every battle he fought with Miller—have their own plaques in Cooperstown.</p> <p>In contrast to these midgets, Miller was a giant. Baseball experts overwhelmingly agree with the great Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber, who said that Miller was one of the three most important figures in baseball history, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. Even Bud Selig, the former Milwaukee Brewers owner who has been the baseball commissioner since 1998, has said he agrees that Miller belongs in the Hall.</p> <p>Under Miller’s leadership—which included teaching players about labor history and labor law, giving them a sense of their own power, and training them how to outmaneuver the owners during negotiating sessions—the players won a democratic voice in their workplaces and dramatically improved their pay, pensions, and working conditions.</p> <p>As part of his 1999 Hall of Fame induction speech, Nolan Ryan reminded the audience that when he broke into the major leagues in 1966, he had to spend the winter months working at a gas station from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., while his wife worked at a local bookstore, to make ends meet. Because of Miller's efforts, Ryan said, "we brought that level up to where the players weren't put in that situation."</p> <p>Until 1966, the players union was a toothless tiger. That year, future Hall of Fame pitchers Robin Roberts and Jim Bunning recruited Miller, an economist for the steelworkers union, to serve as the players association's first full-time director and help transform the sport’s outdated labor relations. During his initial meetings with players, Miller explained: “If at any point the owners start singing my praises, there’s only one thing for you to do, and that’s fire me. And I’m not kidding.”</p> <p>Initially, even some players, glad just to be getting paid to put on a uniform, resisted the union idea. Most sportswriters at the time sided with the management, severely attacking Miller and the union.</p> <p>The owners, and their hired commissioners, fought Miller at every turn. Like all business leaders, baseball's owners warned that the union, higher wages and stronger workplace rules would destroy the industry. In fact, baseball is more popular and prosperous than ever. Last year, Major League Baseball had over $6 billion in revenues and 74.8 million in attendance, the fifth highest in history. Rather than stifle baseball’s prosperity, the union simply gave players the power to win a greater share of their employers' growing revenues.</p> <p>Before the union could challenge the owners, however, Miller had to get the players to stand up for themselves. "People today don't understand how beaten down the players were back then," Miller told us last year. "The players had low self-esteem, as any people in their position would have—like baggage owned by the clubs."</p> <p>Miller instructed ballplayers in the ABCs of trade unionism: fight for your rights to be treated as more than property, stick together against management, work on behalf of players who came before you and who would come after you, prepare yourself--professionally and financially--for life after your playing days are over, and don't allow owners to divide players by race, income or their place in the celebrity pecking order.</p> <p>And like any good union negotiator, Miller helped the players focus on pension issues. Most professional athletes are lucky to have ten-year careers. The average stay in the big leagues for baseball players is 5.6 years—but less for pitchers. So increasing payments and shortening the number of years needed to qualify for a pension became critical issues.</p> <p>The 1972 baseball strike was primarily about pensions for players. Today, even baseball players who had short and less-than-illustrious careers have good retirement benefits. Duane Kuiper—a second baseman for the Cleveland Indians and San Francisco Giants from 1974 to 1985—told the <em>San Francisco Chronicle</em>, "I don't think any of us really appreciated Marvin until we all got older."</p> <p>Before Miller, players had no rights to determine the conditions of their employment. They were tethered to their teams through the "reserve clause" in every player's contract. Those contracts were limited to one season. The contracts "reserved" the team's right to "retain" the player for the next season. Each year, the team owners told players: Take it or leave it.</p> <p>The players had no leverage to negotiate better deals. Even superstars went hat-in-hand to owners at the end of the season, begging for a raise.</p> <p>Two years after Miller took the union's reins, the players association negotiated its first collective bargaining agreement. It established players' rights to binding arbitration over salaries and grievances.</p> <p>Players also won the right to have agents to negotiate their contracts. In 1976, they won the right to become free agents. This gave players the right to decide for themselves which employer they wanted to work for, to veto proposed trades, and to bargain for the best contract. The players association also won increased per-diem allowances, improvements in travel conditions and better training facilities, locker room conditions and medical treatment.</p> <p>“The difference between a ballplayer's being required to accept whatever a club offered him, as had been the case almost from the beginning of professional baseball, and the new system of salary arbitration was like the difference between dictatorship and democracy,” Miller wrote in his 1991 autobiography, A Whole Different Ball Game.  </p> <p>In 1980, the owners sought to regain control over the players by demanding that each team receive compensation for free agents, a move designed to weaken the free agency system. The owners knew that their demand would provoke a players strike, but they figured that they could outlast the players. They miscalculated. The players voted 967 to 1 in favor of a strike. After more than a year of negotiations, the owners refused to budge. So on June 12, 1981, the players walked out. With the Players Association keeping the players informed about the ongoing talks, they stuck together, from superstar outfielder Dave Winfield (who lost roughly $7,770 for each day of the strike) to players earning the minimum salary of $32,5000 (who lost about $180 a day). On August 10, after 50 days and 712 cancelled games, the owners caved in.</p> <p>“From the standpoint of labor it was the most principled strike I've ever been associated with,” recalled Miller, who took himself off the Players Association payroll during the strike to demonstrate his own solidarity. “Many of the players struck not for a better deal for themselves but for a better deal for their colleagues, and for the players who would be coming into baseball in the future...There were veterans on every team who remembered how it used to be and the role of union solidarity in changing things.”</p> <p>The Major League Baseball Players Association is now the most successful union in the country. In 1967, the minimum salary was $6,000 and the average salary was $19,000. The first collective bargaining agreement the next year raised the minimum to $10,000. By the time Miller retired, the average player salary had increased to $240,000. Today, the minimum salary is $480,000 and the average salary is $3.1 million.</p> <p>Pro athletes in other major team sports—football, basketball and hockey—saw what Miller accomplished and eventually won the same bargaining rights as their baseball compatriots. No other figure in history comes close to Miller in terms of his role in revolutionizing the American sports business. So the petty baseball moguls, determined to win retribution, have kept him out of their Cooperstown shrine.</p> <p>In an interview with us, Miller said he wasn’t concerned about getting into the Hall. He was satisfied with his legacy of turning the players union into a powerful force and a model for what a strong labor movement could achieve. After being rejected five times, he said, “I told myself it wasn’t going to happen.”</p> <p>But simple justice requires that Miller be admitted to the Hall of Fame. He was baseball’s Moses, leading the players out of slavery.</p> <p>If a significant number of Hall of Famers and rank-and-file players join the crusade, it will be difficult for the next selection committee to reject Miller for the sixth time. Every player who donned a major league uniform over the past 40 years owes a huge debt of gratitude to Miller. They can repay it by acting like union members and mobilizing a campaign to pressure the Hall of Fame to end its blacklist of this remarkable labor and sports pioneer.</p> </div></div></div> Sat, 01 Dec 2012 17:28:38 +0000 216025 at Peter Dreier Kelly Candaele The Year of the Organizer <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><a href=""><img vspace="5" hspace="10" align="left" src="/galleries/img_articles/Elec08_MedButton.JPG" alt="" /></a></p> <p>The two remaining Democrats in the race for the presidency both have roots in the community-organizing world. Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College on legendary organizer Saul Alinsky. Barack Obama spent three years as a community organizer in Chicago. But it is Obama's campaign that most clearly embodies many of the characteristics of a social movement -- a redemptive calling for a better society, coupling individual and social transformation. This shouldn't be surprising. Obama has enlisted hundreds of seasoned organizers -- including unions, community groups, churches, and environmental groups -- into his campaign. They, in turn, have mobilized thousands of volunteers -- many of them neophytes in electoral politics -- into tightly knit, highly motivated, and efficient teams. This organizing effort has turned out a new group of voters, many of them young people and first-time voters. </p> <p>Obama's landslide victory in South Carolina was due in large measure to this grassroots organizing approach, which dramatically expanded voter turnout. Obama's campaign had organizers in each of South Carolina's 46 counties, 32 Get Out the Vote offices throughout the state, and 154 "staging" areas where volunteers picked up precinct lists and campaign materials. The South Carolina campaign was so well organized they conducted two GOTV "dry runs" on the two previous Saturdays before the primary, practicing every step of the Election Day operation to make sure that all staff and volunteers understood their responsibilities. </p> <p>On Election Day, the campaign had 15,000 volunteers in South Carolina, according to Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign field director. In another departure from past campaigns, Bird targeted people who had never participated in politics before. Turnout increased to 532,000 this year from 293,000 in 2004. Twenty-seven percent of those who cast a ballot were first-time voters. Moreover, turnout in the Democratic primary exceeded Republican turnout a week earlier by 97,000 voters. As a result, Bird says, "South Carolina is in play in November if Barack is the nominee," challenging the conventional wisdom that a Democrat can't win in the state. </p> <p>According to Bird, the Obama campaign made a decision early last year that they would not approach states with large African American populations in a traditional way. </p> <p>"Most campaigns come into South Carolina with the belief that only blacks can talk to blacks and only whites can talk to whites," explained Bird, a former seminarian who studied with organizing guru Marshall Ganz at Harvard. "Barack Obama ran a campaign of unity. If we would have segregated ourselves like other campaigns have done it would have been disingenuous." Obama received 81 percent of the black vote and did particularly well among black voters aged 30 to 44. </p> <p>The Clinton campaign, Bird said, ran "an old-school traditional campaign -- a top-down campaign based on political endorsements, not a campaign based on empowering and investing in people." </p> <p>The Obama campaign also hopes to leave behind a network of trained activists in South Carolina and other states. </p> <p>"We have been digging in here since last April, which is unprecedented in a presidential campaign," Bird commented. "South Carolina does not have a tradition of grassroots organizing, but what we will leave behind are hundreds of trained organizers and volunteers who will now run for school board, city council, the state legislature," Bird predicted. "They will transform this state." </p> <p><b>A History of Organizing</b> </p> <p>As a community organizer for three years in Chicago in the late 1980s, Obama learned the skills of motivating and mobilizing people who had little faith in their ability to make politicians, corporations, and other powerful institutions accountable. Working with churches and neighborhood groups, Obama taught low-income people how to analyze power relations, gain confidence in their own leadership abilities, and work together to improve their housing, schools, and other basic services. </p> <p>"What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer," he asked a local newspaper at the time, "as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?" </p> <p>Since embarking on a political career, Obama hasn't forgotten the philosophical and practical lessons that he learned on the streets of Chicago and that are now central to his campaign for the White House. </p> <p>Last year, Obama enlisted Marshall Ganz, one of the country's leading organizing theorists, to help train organizers and volunteers as a key component of his presidential campaign. In the early 1960s, Ganz dropped out of Harvard to work in the South with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the student wing of the civil-rights movement. He then returned to his home state of California to join Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, becoming a key architect of the union's early successes. The UFW combined a clear-eyed drive for more workers' power in the California fields and orchards with a deep spiritual yearning for personal and social change. </p> <p>Ganz now teaches the history and practice of organizing at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Organizing," he says, "combines the language of the heart as well as the head." </p> <p>According to Ganz, "it is values, not just interests" that inspire people to participate in social movements. This approach is well-suited to Obama's own style of translating values into action by telling his own story in public. </p> <p>A key tenet of community organizing is developing face to face contact with people so that they forge commitments to work together around shared values. Organizers are not social workers. Their orientation is not to "service" people as if they were clients, but to encourage people to develop their own abilities to mobilize others. They help people turn their "hot" anger into disciplined action. Community organizers also distinguish themselves from traditional political campaign operatives who approach voters as customers through direct mail, telemarketing, and canvassing urging them to support their candidate as if they were selling soap. </p> <p>This approach is reflected in how Obama's campaign has integrated itself into local communities. In Iowa, for example, campaign organizers, both paid staff and volunteers, were required to help in community recycling projects, tree planting and garbage pick-up -- making themselves available for the day-to-day tasks required to enhance the neighborhoods they were in. </p> <p>Mitch Stewart, the Iowa field director, explained that "the Obama campaign merged the professional political operation and the movement operation." </p> <p>The campaign recruited coordinators and volunteer teams in each of Iowa's 1,781 precincts, developed chapters at over 200 Iowa high schools (called "Barack Stars"), and built campaign operations on almost every college campus in the state. On caucus day, the campaign enlisted 3,000 volunteers. </p> <p>The dramatic increase in Iowa's caucus turnout -- twice the number from four years earlier -- is due in large measure to the these organizing efforts. </p> <p>Political observers credit the Internet and the blogosphere for changing many aspects of election campaigns. Many volunteers made their first contact with the Obama campaign online but, according to Stewart, who had worked on Edwards' 2004 campaign and for an environmental group, "you can't let the Internet be the sole experience for someone to participate in a campaign." Campaign organizers quickly reached through the ether to enlist these volunteers in one-on-one meetings and precinct teams. The Internet is fine for collecting data and raising money, Ganz points out, but "you should not mistake the carpenter with the tools." </p> <p>A key part of every organizer's lexicon is "hope." For an organizer, hope is not merely a fuzzy political platitude but a fundamental part of what it means to be human. In the UFW, the phrase "si se puede" -- it can be done -- embodied this outlook. Obama has made "hope" an essential element of his political persona. After his overwhelming victory in South Carolina, Obama's victory stirring images of "healing the nation" and "overcoming the racial divide," were a key example of how he uses progressive-values language to surface deeper emotions. </p> <p>Temo Figueroa, the son and nephew of UFW activists, and a UCLA graduate, worked as a union organizer before joining the Obama campaign as its national field director. According to Figueroa, most presidential campaigns take volunteers off the street and put them to work immediately on the "grunt" work of the campaign -- making phone calls, handing out leaflets, or walking door to door. The campaign's recent successes are the result of extensive training sessions that took place last year throughout the country. </p> <p>The Obama campaign, he says, is different. Before it sent its volunteers into the fields, he explained, the campaign required them to go through several days of intense four-day training sessions called "Camp Obama." The sessions were led by Ganz and other experienced organizers, including Mike Kruglik, one of Obama's organizing mentors in Chicago. Potential field organizers were given an overview of the history of grassroots organizing techniques and the key lessons of campaigns that have succeeded and failed. </p> <p>Reflecting upon his civil-rights and UFW experiences, Ganz told the Obama staffers and volunteers that "there was a celebration and joy to those movements. It was hard not to get involved." <b><br /></b></p> <p><b>Super Tuesday</b> </p> <p>Twenty-two states will hold elections on Feb. 5. Five of those states use a caucus system for voting similar to Iowa. In California and other populous states -- where most political pundits believe elections are won and lost by the size of a campaign's media budget, not its on-the-ground field operation -- the Obama campaign is wagering that its community-organizing approach will pay off. Obama and Clinton are contesting for the support of traditional Democratic voters, including women, seniors, union members, African Americans, and Latinos. As he did in Iowa and South Carolina, Obama is depending on his field operation to identify, register, and turn out new voters and young voters who are attracted by his idealism. </p> <p>Obama's California field operation has been building since last July, when a number of initial training sessions were conducted. Heading into February, the Obama campaign has over 3,000 volunteers, according to Buffy Wicks, the 30-year-old California field director who had previously worked for Howard Dean in 2004, as an aide to Congressman Bob Filner of California, in the anti-war movement, and with the union-backed Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign. </p> <p>In California -- a huge state where political field organizers are a dying breed and media svengalis rule -- the Obama campaign is again bucking tradition. Wicks estimates the campaign is making around 18,000 calls a day, all with volunteer help. And in an Internet twist on the usual boiler-room phone-bank operations, phoners for Obama can obtain phone lists and scripts through their computers at home, obviating the need to gather in a single location -- a technology pioneered by MoveOn.Org. The campaign can track in real time the number of calls made, who is phoning, and the results of the calls. </p> <p>Like Bird in South Carolina, Wicks is looking past the February primary to potential long-term impacts of the campaign. "We're training a new kind of political campaign organizer that speaks to who Barack is," she observes two weeks before the election. "We're trying to create community organizers out of our activists. There's so much energy and enthusiasm. It's just a matter of providing the infrastructure, the technology, the training, and the tools, and they feel part of a larger movement." </p> <p>If Obama secures the Democratic nomination and wins the White House, Ganz and other organizers will look for opportunities to encourage his organizing instincts to shape how he governs the nation, whom he appoints to key positions, and how he seeks to translate his campaign promises, such as reforming health care and tackling global warming, into public policy. Obama knows that he will have to find balance between working inside the Beltway and encouraging Americans to organize and mobilize to battle powerful corporate interests and congressional in-fighting. But if Obama wants to be a champion of change, he'll need to redefine the role of president as organizer-in-chief. </p> </div></div></div> Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:05:26 +0000 146975 at Kelly Candaele