Sept. 16, 2021
The Future of Work in Rural America with Labor Leader Sandy Pope
On this episode of Everywhere Radio, Whitney talks with labor veteran Sandy Pope. Today, Pope is the Bargaining Director for the Office of Professional Employees International Union or OPEIU, an organization that represents more than 110,000 employees nationwide. With more than three decades of union organizing experience, Pope is perhaps best known for her 2010 campaign for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, when she ran against a three-term incumbent, who happened to be the son of Jimmy Hoffa. Whitney and Sandy talk about what the future holds for rural workers — whether they’re working in meatpacking, trucking, or manufacturing — as well as the communities that rely upon them.
Transcript
[Preview]
Sandy Pope: Unless you inherited a few million you’ve got to go to work. So why would you leave that up to whatever the whims are of your employer, when you do have rights?
Whitney Kimball Coe:
That was labor organizer Sandy Pope, this week’s guest on Everywhere Radio. Everywhere Radio is a production of the Rural Assembly and I’m your host, Whitney Kimball Coe. Each episode I spotlight the good, scrappy, and joyful ways rural people and their allies are building a more inclusive nation. But before we get to this week’s episode, I’d like to let you know about a special event coming up. Rural Women Everywhere is a two-day virtual event celebrating the voices and contributions and leadership of women across the countryside. We’ll meet on October 19th and 20th and will examine the ways rural and native women are participating in the work of building more welcoming inclusive communities. We’ll hear from journalists, organizers, artists, and poets, faith leaders, and young women—all of who are building bridges and crossing borders to connect us to one another and the places we call home.
Registration is free and available now at ruralassembly.org and now Sandy Pope.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
I’m really pumped about this episode that we’re bringing you today. My guest is Sandy Pope. And if you don’t know who Sandy is, don’t worry, you will in a minute. So throughout the month of September, the Rural Assembly is spotlighting the importance of labor organizing and labor movements and the lives of rural, native and immigrant Americans in their communities. We’re all familiar with Labor Day, that federal holiday set aside every September to celebrate the contributions of American workers. But what often gets lost in the celebration and the barbecues and recreation in the dog days of summer, is an acknowledgement of all the ways workers and communities are linked.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
We tend to forget that workers have organized and continue to organize for better lives in their communities, better wages, safer work environments and brighter futures. So this September, the Rural Assembly seeks to acknowledge the very real historic and contemporary barriers American workers face particularly amid a global pandemic. For example, we know that in rural America workers at meat packing plants were among the first to be infected with COVID-19 due to cramped workspaces, a culture of under-reporting illnesses and an absence of worker safeguards or unenforced safeguards.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
And according to the CDC, 90% of those affected in those meat packing plants were people of color. We also know in rural that trucking and manufacturing jobs make up a considerable share of economies, but they’re also incredibly vulnerable to automation. What does the future hold for communities who rely heavily on these industries? And so my guest today, again, is Sandy Pope. Sandy is the Bargaining Director for the Office of Professional Employees International Union, or OPEI, you, an organization that represents over 110,000 employees nationwide.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
She’s got more than 30 years of union organizing experience under her belt and is perhaps best known for her 2010 campaign run for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. At that time out of the 407 Teamster locals, only 16 of them were women led. Her campaign was particularly noteworthy because she was running against the three-term incumbent, who happened to be the son of Jimmy Hoffa. Sandy did lose that election, but she continues to organize and speak across the country, including in my own backyard here in Tennessee. Sandy, isn’t rural per se. She grew up in a suburb of Boston and now lives in New York city. But according to some of my favorite rural people, she’s the best source for reacquainting ourselves with the language and power of labor organizing. And she’s making the case we need to get back to educating ourselves about the importance and raw power of local collective organizing. So Sandy, I’m grateful, you said yes to us and that you’re here with us at Everywhere Radio.
Sandy Pope:
Thank you for inviting me.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
Where are you calling from today?
Sandy Pope:
I’m calling from Connecticut, from the shore of Connecticut.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
Well, I really want to just jump right in and ask you to give me a snapshot of your career over time as a labor and union organizer, and what does it even mean to be a labor organizer?
Sandy Pope:
I wanted to start by saying that my first job was I was a rank and file union member in the Teamsters union. I worked in a warehouse and an AMP warehouse. Some of you may remember that grocery company. And I was the first woman hired in the warehouse to load trucks and pick the vegetables and fruit. And eventually became a truck driver because I lost my job in the warehouse and decided to learn to drive a truck. So I spent seven years in Ohio. I was living in Cleveland at the time, driving a truck and making deliveries of Ford auto parts to Ford dealers. So I drove a tractor trailer through the roads of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York and made deliveries often in very rural areas to the Ford dealers.
Sandy Pope:
But it did give me a really good opportunity to meet people in all different types of jobs, including lots of different union jobs and other truck drivers. You mentioned that there’s a lot of rural workers in this country that drive trucks and sadly, that sector has lost a lot of the union jobs. Those of you who remember the eighties and the devastation of the loss of auto and steel jobs, especially in rubber, that’s where a lot of people from the south moved up.
Sandy Pope:
so there were a lot of folks from West Virginia and Georgia and areas like that, that moved up north and got really good jobs in the factories and driving trucks. And if you were a truck driver you’re making 60/70,000 a year, pretty good. And you could still go home to your nice little house out in the country in a lot of areas. But anyway, I lived through that and it was disastrous and we lost a lot of union jobs. And why that is important is that a lot of those jobs had protections in them. We thought we had job security. Well, that didn’t happen. But the older people were more secure than the newer people. They were able to keep their jobs longer, but we lost our pensions, many of us. We lost good health care benefits. And the companies that came back in to replace them eventually, like in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, were frequently non-union or had much poorer contracts because the people that were making that good money in the auto plants and steel mills, their grandparents fought like crazy to unionize those jobs and they were killed.
Sandy Pope:
I mean, there’s plenty of people that could tell you stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents in West Virginia in the coal mine getting shot by security guards called Pinkerton’s back in the day. And the great Minneapolis Teamster strike that organized thousands and thousands of truck drivers. You know, they battled in the streets, but they went through a lot to bring jobs, security, pensions. I mean, pensions were, retirement security was a big deal. And a six day workweek was a big deal because people were working seven days, women were working seven days a week with their kids at home being taken care of by ten-year-old, older children.
But mostly it’s protection, it’s getting your basic rights so that they can’t just fire you because they want to hire their new son-in-law and get rid of you Fun fact, which is really sad, my job when I worked in amp warehouse, I was 22 years old when I got hired, my pay was $16 an hour. And I won’t tell you quite how long ago that was, but it was way more than 35 years ago. $16 an hour back then plus really good benefits. Now that job is still maybe 20. Maybe.
30 some years later. Is that right? That’s not right. The other important thing is that union jobs the, the union setting was an equalizer. And if you look at women’s wages today, union women make the highest rate of pay for what they do than any women. Black workers make the highest rate of pay if they’re in unions for the same job. And it’s very simple, we bargain together to get more
Whitney Kimball Coe:
Yeah, no, I’m in my thirties and I will say that this language of collective bargaining and unionization is not something that I grew up thinking about or talking about as much as perhaps generations before me. So what is a union? If you could just boil it down for us and why it’s important.
Sandy Pope:
It’s an organization that’s set up within a workplace. You’re protected by the law. It’s called the National Labor Relations Act. And it’s a very old law and it’s from the forties.
Sandy Pope:
And they said people have the right to collectively bargain, to work together, to get better working conditions and pay. So what happens first is you file your interest in becoming a part of a union. And usually an employer will fight it and you might go to the boss and say, “Hey, we all want to join the sheet metal workers union. And here we signed cards and we all want to join.” Well, they’ll say, “No, no, no. You know, we’re going to have an election,” because say at first they do, they call either our lawyer and they find out, “Can they do this?” And the lawyer says, “Yeah, but you can make it take a lot longer. Go tell them they have to go file for an election.”
Sandy Pope:
Then you have to show the national labor relations board, which is the government entity that oversees the law, enforces the law. And they come in, they check the cards, they ask the employer for all the names of the people who work in your type of job. So they get 50 names and they check to see if there’s a majority of people that want to have an election to join a union. They’ll set a date for an election. So they set it for a couple of months. Yeah. On the road 15/16 weeks, something like that. And then the boss in the meantime is going to tell you all the reasons you shouldn’t join a union.
Sandy Pope:
Because they don’t want you to do that. And then you have a secret ballot election. It is secret with a capital S. The employer does not know how you voted. They may know if you voted because they may have onsite location, but the national labor relations board agents, the people that work there, make sure they’re the ones that run the election. They’re the ones that see the ballots, they’re the ones that check your driver’s license and make sure it’s actually you coming in to vote. And then if a majority of people that come into vote, vote yes. Then you have a union. And then you tell the boss, “Okay, now we want to bargain a contract.” And the contract covers working conditions and pay benefits. They call it the terms and conditions of employment.
Sandy Pope:
And then you work to see if you can come to an agreement with management. It’s not like, you can’t bludgeon them over the head, but you can you’ll hear people going on strike sometimes if they really are butting heads too much. But most union contracts end, not amicably, but without a strike.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
And all these years, what has your role been in organizing these groups or providing technical assistance or showing up to make the case for why this is important?
Sandy Pope:
Well, I’ve done all of the above. I started out as what’s called a shop steward, which is the person who’s on the job, making sure that the contract is being followed or being able to ask questions or answer questions to coworkers who want to know what their rights are. “Shouldn’t they have paid me overtime for those extra hours that I worked, or how come they didn’t call me in on Saturday? They called in so-and-so,” and I think that sort of thing. So I played that role, which was a volunteer position I wanted. I was very interested in the union and I cared a lot about enforcing our rights. And so that was my first role. And then I helped organize new workers, people who wanted to join and form a union in my local. And so I did that for a few years and then eventually through a lot of different things that changed in my life, I ended up becoming the president of a local in New York City.
Sandy Pope:
And I did in the Teamsters and I did that for almost 20 years and that’s when I ran for office, national office. So now I’m back, I’m here with another union because I decided I wanted to do a bigger, a different type of job where I would help pass on my knowledge in bargaining and organizing to other staff, people, younger staff, people coming up and building up this union. It’s been really gratifying. I really like it and still love my Teamster brothers and sisters, but I’m enjoying this job too.
[Break]
Whitney Kimball Coe:
I’m sure there are a lot of stereotypes and lore that comes with the narrative about unions and about worker organizing and similarly in rural America is often stereotyped as a place that’s mostly white, mostly conservative, often agriculturally based. But we know that rural is incredibly diverse. That manufacturing is one of the biggest economic drivers in rural. So I just wonder what you might say to that, how do we parse out what’s the stereotype and what’s the heartbeat of union and labor organizing?
Sandy Pope:
Oh yeah. There’s lots of stereotypes it’s the Jimmy Hoffa thing, bunch of gangsters and that sort of thing, which is definitely not true, certainly not now. Then they tell you what to do, or they’ve got people on the payroll who get paid all this money and they don’t do anything for you which, what I’m always amazed at as people will hire a lawyer. If they had enough money to do it, they’d hire a lawyer to do everything. To buy their house, to fight with the neighbor over what they’re doing to the lawn.
But when it comes to the workplace, it’s okay for your boss to say, “Oh, you know what? Come in tomorrow at six hours after you just got off of work and you’ve been working 12 hours, that’s okay. You know what? I’m going to have to cut your pay because we’re just not making quite enough right now, or I’m going to have to lay you off and keep my daughter-in-law who’s only been here for two years. I’ll keep her. And you have to feed a family of four, but really your skills, aren’t up to par. She knows how to do more technology or something. Goodbye.” Unless you inherited a few million, you got to go to work. So why do you leave that up to whatever the whims are of your employer? And when you do have rights and most people don’t know that they have rights on a job, but they’re not individual rights. There are very few individual rights on the job. Our laws in this country, in the workplace are based on collective rights. That’s where they got built.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
We have a mutual friend, you and I, who organizes in East Tennessee across different unions and across different industries. And he talks about the importance of manufacturing, not just sticking or staying in a silo. That linking arms with other unions and other groups in other industries is actually beneficial for the whole region. And it’s beneficial for even the personal lives of workers. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit.
Sandy Pope:
I actually am thinking of a different example, not Eastern Tennessee at the moment though, I will talk about the Tennessee Valley Authority. I want to give an example of in Southern Louisiana and Houma and a couple of other areas where Bristow helicopters used to be. And we represent the helicopter pilots and mechanics there, and they merged with another company and which was non-union. They decided to consolidate, we had to have a vote. They bought off our pilots and said, “Here, we’ll give you a year’s worth of pay goodbye.” And they left the non-union pilots who were making half as much. And we went to the state of Louisiana. We tried to get help and said, “This is going to devastate the towns that these bases are in because they provide training for pilots from not just the U S but all over the world. They have customers coming in and out to go to the oil rigs and all this stuff.” They flattened an entire town, city, small city. I mean, it’s like nothing. They left and it was nothing.
And especially in places in rural America, where one big company comes in or one big air force base or space or something like that. And then they pull it out or they go out of business or they decide to move. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected. And often they go to the official of the town and county and, and say, “You know what? We need a tax break. We’ll come in and we’ll provide these great jobs to you. You just got to give us a total tax break and we’ll do that. And you’ll get so many jobs and this is really great.”
And they do it. And the officials go, “Oh, this is really great. I’m going to look really good because I brought these jobs in,” five years later, they’re gone and they paid no taxes. And they’re huge, rich, corporate. Amazon not paying taxes. Are you kidding me? So we’re all definitely connected here. And the Tennessee Valley is a very important example of, the Tennessee Valley authority was created originally by Roosevelt in Congress during that era, to provide electricity to the rural Tennessee Valley. They couldn’t develop the area, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, that whole area couldn’t be developed during that era, because there was no electricity or very little. And so they decided to harness the Tennessee River and build plants and all that. And they created the Tennessee Valley Authority. Part of their mission was also not just to provide electricity at an inexpensive rates to that whole section of the country, it’s also to provide jobs, good jobs. And they are good jobs.
The problem is that they’ve been now over the last few years, they’ve lost sight of that part of the mission. And they contract out work, they tried to contract out a whole lot of very good jobs, which their union fought and won. Two years ago they tried to outsource a lot of engineering jobs and the union fought and won. They hire people into jobs. I just saw four this week that they hired young people out of college, and they hired them as contractors into jobs that we represent, but they don’t have any health benefits, they don’t have any retirement benefits, they don’t get holidays, they don’t get personal days, they don’t get step raises every six months like our folks do. And of course our people may have wanted one of those jobs because they could have been a promotion.
So we’re having big fights over this. It’s a trend in corporate America as a way to have a more flexible workforce, let’s say. A whole bunch of people who they can just let go at the drop of a hat. But to think that these young people are being hired into jobs that are supposed to be good, steady jobs, you can raise your family, you know you’re secure, they can’t just lay you off at the drop of a hat and here they are. You know, it’s something we’re having an ongoing conversation that’s getting escalated. But it’s just wrong. And I hope that we can work with the coalitions in the Tennessee Valley area to pressure the Tennessee Valley Authority to remember that their obligation is not just to provide cheap electricity, but good jobs.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
Yeah. And to the economic development of our region.
Well one other kind of big question I wanted to put on you is what do you think the prospects for the future of American work look like? I mean, what does the future of American workforce look like to you given the political climate we’re in, the pandemic, it seems like the decrease in union participation. Are you hopeful? Are you concerned? Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?
Sandy Pope:
I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t always see the light. I think people can only tolerate so much when their work is undervalued. And COVID has thrown a real curve into everybody’s lives. The bad and the good of it has made it difficult for people to go into work, right? And a lot of the big facilities are still closed down. But it has shown a lot of management that they can allow people to work from home because of technology because of Zoom and other types of technology that are available.
And that’s a plus for working families. And most people say they would love to have a workweek that was a couple of days working from home and three days working at the office. They still want to see people, but it’s really nice to be able to have a little flexibility in your life and be able to work from home a couple of days, especially if you commute a lot. Now for people who work face-to-face or work in the service industry, and have to be exposed to this dangerous virus, especially in the early days before they really knew how much it was being transmitted in the air.
That’s a little scarier and they don’t have as much choices. What I hope is that people, one of the things that unions can do is really, and we’re doing it in our workplaces is push for better at ventilation where they have filters. These HEPA filters that can filter out the dangerous particles in the air, almost 98%, 99%. People could have a little thing right by their desk. but do employers want to spend the money? No. Will they get away with it as long as they can? Yes. And if you have a union, you can put it right up on the front burner a lot more and pressure that way. Back to the future of unions. The internet has made it much easier for us to provide information to people about unionizing. So that’s a big plus. So we are getting there’s a lot more people interested. The tech industry is starting to organize, nonprofit groups.
A lot of digital media organizations are unionizing. So there’s lots of areas that we’re seeing a lot of hope. And then warehouses like Amazon and other large workplaces that have these production systems that are very exploitive and very hard to work in. And just one other sad note that I think I’m hoping is going to get turned around as all those good United Parcel Service jobs by where you live like a king when you live in Kentucky, on a UPS drivers pay, Amazon now making deliveries themselves, they’re having people start up their own little trucking company to make deliveries. And those folks are making a quarter, at best. And it’s getting somebody a job. They get to work for themselves. Supposedly. They don’t really. The exploitation is terrible. I see them and I’m hoping that the Teamsters will be organizing them soon because everyone should have decent pay and working conditions. So I am hopeful. Unions aren’t going away. There’s no way.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
You’re describing this very interconnected system of our lives and so unions are part of all of that and influence all of that.
Oh absolutely. It’s about having some kind of power, having a voice that’s effective. Just screaming out into the air doesn’t get you too much. I mean, it makes you feel better for a minute, but it’s way better if we can all support each other and understand that there’s definitely connections, we are definitely all connected. So we got to get working together.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
The need is still there. We also like to ask visitors to Everywhere Radio, what are you reading right now or listening to, or watching that is informing your path in the world right now, or that’s just making you happy?
Sandy Pope:
I really liked to read about innovations in environment, especially actually in farming and agriculture. And I think if I had not gone off into the union organizing I would have become an environmental activist. I’m growing my own butterfly garden now to help the Monarch butterflies. But I love to read how young people and scientists are just working on these., because you don’t think about, you just get sad, you get sad thinking about the fish that aren’t there and that sort of thing, and the trees that are dying. But there’s lots of people working to change that. And they’re finding success. I mean, technologies really can help in so many ways.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
Oh, that’s inspiring. And hearing from you today has been inspiring. Thank you for sharing your time and your knowledge with our audience.
Sandy Pope:
I can’t wait too, now I’ve been introduced to a new thing to listen to, and podcasts. So I’m excited about that too.
Whitney Kimball Coe:
Great. Thank you so much, Sandy.
Sandy Pope:
Thank you.