The UE NEWS aims to be informative, educational and interesting to UE members, and it’s always heartening to get feedback from someone who enjoyed an article and learned something from it, or thought that one of Gary Huck’s cartoon hit the nail on the head on a current issue.
But some UE leaders in North Carolina have found a way to increase the impact of the UE NEWS. Through what they call “lunch-and-learn”, they engage members in group reading and discussion of articles in the UE NEWS. Some of them have been doing it for more than 10 years.
Local 150 Vice President Angaza Laughinghouse talks about how he and other UE activists in Raleigh and Durham have been putting our newspaper to use. “When I go to lunch, there’s my briefcase, it’s ready. I got some UE NEWS in it. I’ve got some of the UE Steward flyers in it. These are tools. We’ve got to make people more conscious of what kind of union we are, what role we want them to play. And our paper and the other tools that the national union provides, you’re making my job easy.
“Having a print paper is important, because less than 30 percent of our folks in my local are online. They don’t do email, they don’t search the web. Literacy is an issue for some of our folks, but if you show a video, or when we all take using the go-around to read something, people can engage in discussions of important questions.
“We started the lunch-and-learn because we had something to read and study that we thought could help strengthen our leaders and keep them active. I wouldn’t read just anything – some of these union newspapers aren’t worth a nickel. They’re really no more than the national union leadership trying to justify how they’re spending the union’s money and promote themselves. But ours is a mixture of history, talk about social movement issues going on in the community, it has some great educational cartoons, and it gives us a better sense of what role we should be playing in our own organization.
So after looking at it and talking to some of the other leaders like Cicero Warren, Kenny Myatt, Nathanette Mayo, Jackie Carroll, they said ‘Wow, this isn’t like some of the papers we’ve seen. You’re doing our work for us by giving us a tool in trying to engage people to pick up other books, because you always give references to other books and other readings. So we decided we were going to try it at lunch time.
Initially we started at the department of administration. It grew from my building at 116 Jones Street to the mail service center, from there we moved it over to the department of transportation.” It circulates to different work locations to reach other groups of workers, including state government workers and City of Durham workers, about five locations. “We try to get it going at least once a month, and at the end we hand out notices, update people and try to mobilize people to come to the next chapter meeting. I don’t go to all of them. After all, I’ve been doing this for 10 or 12 years, so after a while folks get the jist.”
“We use the UE NEWS and sometimes other readings, a xerox from a book or a Black Workers for Justice pamphlet on reclaiming the legacy of Dr. King, talking about King’s last stand with labor in 1968. And it gets the discussion going. We try to make it relevant. How are workers’ conditions changing? Are workers still dealing with safety issues? You may have heard about the Latino brothers who fell off the scaffolding here in Downtown Raleigh. So we get a chance to read newspaper clippings and talk about it, and relate it to what’s going on with us.” Safety issues at the mail service center – workers handling unmarked packages with possibly toxic contents – was the issue around which the union began organizing there. “So that article triggered organizing in some of the locations in my chapter.”
“I think we should have workshops on how to use our paper and our other literature that’s worthy of being used. Some people don’t even use the UE Steward as a piece for training and discussion. I just handed one to a worker a few minutes ago and said we ought to talk about it over lunch. If he gets two or three people, we’re going to roll with it.”
“Bob Kingsley came to a lunch-and-learn where we had 17 people for 30 minutes. Bob was impressed. It’s a practice I’ve used for years.
“We use the go-around. I don’t read the whole thing, we take turns reading, so we’re helping people read, some that don’t read that well we’re helping them with it, make them feel comfortable reading aloud, we’re getting them to speak up in front of five, six, seven people. It serves all those purposes. It’s training. And sometimes we tell them to try to convene some of the people who missed that session, and then they’re ready to lead the discussion.
“We’ve got a lot of leaders in our local, and now we’ve got some new leaders emerging. It’s great training. If you can speak in front of 10 or 15 people, you’re on your way. But my challenge is to get other people need to use this methodology as a way to get new people to develop the skills they need to feel confident to lead. I disappear oftentimes. ‘Angaza, where were you? You didn’t come to the lunch-and-learn.’ And I say, ‘So how did it go?’ I mean if they’ve done it three or four times they’re ready to lead it.”