Regina V. Polk Women's Labor Leadership Conference
- 2008 Conference Brochure
- 2008 Scholarship Application
- The Collective Bargaining Focus
- Culture at the Polk Conference
- The Resort
- The Regina V. Polk Scholarship Fund
- 2007 Conference Highlights
- 2008 Conference Plans
The Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference, named in honor of Regina V. Polk, has been held annually since 1988. It is a small, intensive, four-day residential conference that focuses on developing women’s knowledge, activism and leadership skills. It is coordinated by the Labor Education Program of the University of Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations.
Over the years, at least 750 women from Chicago and the Midwest have attended this conference and an additional 50 to 100 have participated as teachers, coaches, performers or presenters. For the past 6 years it has been held in May of each year at the Pheasant Run Resort in St. Charles, Illinois, about forty miles west of Chicago. Since 2004 it has had a core curriculum built around a collective bargaining role play.
The Collective Bargaining Focus
For the past four years, the focus of the conference has been on collective bargaining, built around a role play that extends across three days and winds up on the last day with a contest among three labor-management teams to see which team got the best agreement. Past bargaining scenarios have included manufacturing, meatpacking (the Cargill plant in Ottumwa, Iowa) and a healthcare facility. Each side has between four and six members, making it possible for everyone to practice developing a proposal, negotiating, recording, leading a caucus and finally, presenting to the entire conference.
Interspersed between the sessions dedicated to bargaining are sessions teaching campaign and bargaining research, traditional bargaining process, recognizing and filing unfair labor practices at the National Labor Relations Board, basic concepts of economics, the impact of trade agreements on negotiations, how to hold an effective meeting, special issues for the public sector, and other topics as appropriate to each conference.
The first morning’s classes are assigned, to make sure that each team has members that have had recent training in specific content areas, but after that, participants can choose whatever class they want to take. The small size of the conference, the compact layout of the facility with numerous breakout rooms, and the intimacy of the bargaining teams motivates teams and individuals to try to get the best possible contract by the expiration date and means that learning goes on all the time, sometimes late into the night.
Culture at the Polk Conference
Learning does not happen in a bare room, so we make an effort to multiply the varieties of experience at Polk in as many ways as we can. This means theater and music.
The opening night dinner is usually followed by a piece of theater such as Alma Washington’s one-woman performance of the life of Lucy Parsons.
Throughout the conference, Anne Feeney, activist singer and performer, raises songs appropriate to the moment, sometimes performing solo, sometimes leading a labor chorus and sometimes writing a song that will be carried beyond the conference. One such song came out of the 2005 Polk Conference. Written to underscore a rising crisis at United Airlines, where the IAMAW was about to go on strike, this song was taken by Anne and several Polk participants to the gates of United at O’Hare Airport. Anne got out her guitar among the waiting passengers and started to sing and play. The Polk woman who accompanied her, who was actually on her day off at that time, was given a direct order by her supervisor to “make that woman stop singing.” When the Polk woman responded, “I can’t,” – a simple statement of fact — she was suspended. It took over six months of a grievance process to get her job back, an experience documented in videos and photos that became the basis for a workshop at Polk the following May.
On the second night of the conference we hold an improvised theater event we call “Women’s Work,” in which participants and instructors actually perform their work – not their union work, but the work by which they earn their livings. Women have been told, in their acceptance letters, to bring any tools or objects that they use at work. In the center of the circle of chairs we have had a plumber light a welding torch, a flight attendant scream the commands scripted for a crashing plane, a food inspector display vermin in a basket of bread, a train maintenance worker change a brake pad, a striker (at the long-running Congress Hotel strike) perform the endless circling of a picket line, a government worker deal with a difficult client on the phone, a public school substitute teacher imitate the behavior of feral high school kids, a mailhouse worker show how she sets up envelopes to stuff, and the physical movements that enable her to stuff 1,000 in one hour. This is always a moving, eye-opening event. One of the kinds of thinking it provokes is the match and mismatch between what one actually does for a living, how risky, dangerous or satisfying it is, and how much one gets paid for it.
The Pheasant Run Resort, located 38 miles west of the Chicago Loop on Highway 64 (or East Main Street in St. Charles), is a sprawling and ever-expanding site that includes a golf course, theaters, restaurants, multiple swimming pools, and a large hot tub where Polk women – at least those who are not exhausted by the day’s work – meet for a debriefing at the end of the day. The employees at Pheasant Run are represented by UNITE HERE, and the banquet waitresses who are usually assigned to the Polk Conference have been there for ten or twenty years themselves. Participants always mention the food in their evaluations, sometimes simply praising it, sometimes saying that there was too much of it and too much variety. Most women stay in double rooms with a roommate, unless they want to pay for a single room upgrade.
The Regina V. Polk Scholarship Fund for Women's Labor Leadership
The Polk Conference is funded by the Regina V. Polk Fund Scholarship for Women’s Labor Leadership, which has provided substantial ($50,000 or more per year) support for this conference as well as for other women’s labor education projects. The Polk Fund honors the life work of Gina Polk who, as a young graduate student at the University of Chicago, worked part-time as a waitress and was fired for leading protests against working conditions for food service workers. She sought help from Teamsters Local 743 in Chicago, won a grievance against the restaurant, and decided to make the labor movement her life. As a Business Agent for IBT 743 she returned to the University of Chicago to help organize clerical workers. She also represented workers at Governors State and Chicago State Universities. On October 11, 1983, Gina was on her way to an Illinois Jobs Coordination Council in Carbondale when the plane in which she was flying crashed.
Friends and relatives of Regina Polk established the Fund in her memory to continue her work of developing women labor leaders through education. The names of many women who are now familiar public figures in the midwest labor movement appear on the list of past Polk Conference participants. For example, on the list of participants from 1988 the following names appear: Cassandra Davis (IBT), Helen Ramirez (CTU), Wanda Black (ATU), Rosetta Daylie (AFSCME), Jerre McPartlin (HERE), Alicia Padilla (IBT), Melva Meacham (BTCWU), Muriel Tuteur (ACTWU, now UNITE HERE), and Jacqueline Vaughn (CTU).
The 2007 Polk Conference took several major risks: we decided to address a bargaining scenario that would raise the issue of immigration, we decided to do the conference in both Spanish and English using simultaneous translation, we decided to bring monolingual Spanish-speaking women, and we decided to base the scenario on a contract that had been bargained outside the National Labor Relations Act. The conference successfully rose to override all four of these risks and was, arguably, the best conference we have done to date: best in the sense of seriousness of purpose, variety and range of experience, steep learning curves and memorable moments.
The contract that we chose to bargain was the contract negotiated between the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the North Carolina Growers Association. Back in December 2006, Leticia Zavala, Vice President of FLOC, had agreed to come to Polk despite being several months pregnant and expecting her baby in March. Nevertheless, she did come, bringing baby and a young woman who works in the FLOC office, Martena Requena, who also shared childcare responsibilties. Leticia also provided us with the FLOC contract and other materials in both English and Spanish and submitted to interviews to help us understand the meanings of various articles. Since farm labor is not under either the NLRA or the Fair Labor Standards Act, this contract had to bring into the agreement things that other contracts can take for granted. To prepare the bargaining scenario, we selected four items that had in fact been bargained and put them aside, replacing them with our formulation of the employer’s perspective and the workers’ perspective on each of them and giving those to the participants depending on which team, labor or management, they were on, to bargain.
In the past, we have had trouble finding monolingual Spanish-speaking women who would come to this conference. This is a problem from several points of view. Since many low-wage workers who need labor education are Spanish-speaking, we needed to be able to reach them. Also, since many monolingual English speaking women know little about the realities of conditions under which non-English speaking workers live, we need to bring both groups together. In addition, there is reason to think that the strongest rising activism in the labor movement is coming from immigrants who are responding to economic conditions as they are changed by trade agreements, and we needed to understand this in a one-on-one context. This year we had help from two sources to recruit those women. One was the UE, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union, which has been organizing manufacturing sites in the Chicago area that include many Spanish-speaking workers. UE also gave us the contacts to good women translators with extensive experience in the vocabulary and culture of the labor movement. The other was the San Lucas Workers Center, a center for organizing workers, many of them Spanish-speaking, including day laborers in manufacturing and construction. Interestingly, once we advertised this conference as being presented in a bi-lingual format we received numerous applications from women who were bi-lingual themselves, so that ultimately we had almost a third of the participants who could speak either English or Spanish. Several instructors were also bi-lingual. On the scale of the four-day conference (Wednesday evening through Saturday afternoon) it took about 24 hours for the participants to learn to trust that the translators were in fact able to build a bridge across the two languages.
In part because the labor side teams in the FLOC bargaining scenario could not count on the customary foundation of labor law that supports, however weakly, conventional bargaining, it seemed at first as if the growers were gaining the upper hand rapidly and inexorably. One important teaching point, therefore, was to explore the ways in which the growers benefited from and depended on having a controlled, skilled labor force. This knowledge put power in the union’s hands. It was also a point that would resurface when we received the news during the conference that the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill had made it through Congress and that it contained an enlarged guest worker program. A guest worker program, participants learned, could work – but only if workers have a strong union. In the short term, the impact of this apparently tilted playing field was that some of the workers, revealing commendable creativity, broke out of their teams and organized a multi-team demonstration and press conference at breakfast on the last day – including a prayer vigil and a song – intended to influence the management side of all three teams.
There was a grim reality behind the scenario. Participants were sent an email several weeks before the conference with the news item that a young man, Santiago Cruz, who had been sent to work in the FLOC office in Monterrey, Mexico, had been murdered. Click here for full story.
In all likelihood the murderers were from the numerous gangs that recruit and transport Mexican workers into the U.S., often for large sums of money, sometimes inventing debt en route which the worker then spends the rest of the season paying off, a condition not far from outright slavery. By setting up a legitimate organizing and transport process, pre-paid by U.S. employers through a negotiated agreement, FLOC was competing against these gangs. The story of Santiago Rafael Cruz cast a shadow over the conference and reminded participants that lives would be saved or lost depending on the agreements they were able to make.
The 2008 Regina V. Polk Conference
Mailings containing applications to the 2008 Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference will go out in winter 2007 to all women who have been students of the University of Illinois Labor Education Program, labor leaders in Illinois and nearby states, and to past Polk participants and instructors. Participants are selected to maximize the range of life and work experiences. Preference is given to women who have not participated before, although some spots are open for past participants who can work as coaches or instructors. (see top of page for brochure and scholarship applications)