AFSCME’s Benner retires just when the fun’s starting

“I think it’s going to be a very fun time to be a union leader.” It’s an odd statement from Peter Benner ? coming, as it does, only two days before he retires as a union leader, after more than 20 years as director of Minnesota’s largest state-employee union, AFSCME Council 6.

“I have no regrets on retiring, I really don’t,” Benner says. “But for AFSCME in Minnesota, and I think the broader labor movement, we’re at one of these moments in history that, for all the bad stuff going on around you, you can see how you can put the pieces together to fundamentally strengthen and transform the labor movement.?

“There’s stuff going on right now in the Minnesota labor movement that I have not seen in my 30 years. We’re going to survive the next four years of Bush. We’re going to survive the next two years of Pawlenty,” he says as he knocks on the table. “And if we keep doing the stuff that we know we need to do, we’re going to be strong.”

What’s our message?
Though he’s optimistic, the 55-year-old Benner says the labor movement needs to do two things: Define what it stands for, and make a genuine, aggressive commitment to mobilizing its members and other workers.

“What does the labor movement believe we collectively need out of government? The Republicans, especially the Taxpayers League types, have been incredibly successful with their ‘no new taxes’ message. That is a crisp, clean, coherent message.?

“What are the core things we think people are entitled to as citizens of this country? What do we see the role of government in helping ensure that they get them?”

The labor movement needs to lead the way in developing those core values, then target the message at its members, at the general public, and especially at the Democrats, Benner says.

“This takes some serious work on our part, because not only do we have to have a message here, but we have to start to figure out ways that people believe that government in fact has a way of intervening.”

Peter Benner: “When a union is going to be successful, it is all of us together mobilizing and organizing, and our strength is in that organization. Our strength is in that mobilization. And that’s a lesson you’ve got to learn. That’s not an intellectual lesson.” Union Advocate photo

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Health care and more
The Minnesota AFL-CIO’s proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing health care for all state residents is a start, Benner says.

“There’s a government obligation to ensure that all of us have adequate health care. Not just poor people ? all of us have adequate health care.”

He suggests other “entitlements” for all citizens: adequate education, an adequate retirement, a decent standard of living while they’re working.

“One of the the things Ronald Reagan has succeeded in doing is making people believe that government intervention is not a solution to the problems in their life.” The effort to privatize or phase out Social Security ? whatever the fiscal claims behind it ? also disconnects “one of the few remaining benefits people get from government,” he says.

“And while I blame Democrats for some of this, ultimately I think, if the labor movement is going to say ‘We want to elect people that support working people,’ it’s going to be up to us, as a labor movement, to come up with our equivalent of ‘no new taxes,’ and say ‘This is what we want out of government’.”

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Thirty years of activism ? and then some
Benner’s years in AFSCME are, to some extent, defined by two state employee strikes ? the first in 1981, the second in 2001. But he also bridges eras that saw major changes in the power and rights of public-sector unions, and a parallel decline in the power of private-sector unions. Now he leaves ? as he points out ? with a third state workers strike perhaps more than a mirage on the horizon, and also at a time when the labor movement is wrestling with how to restore power and effectiveness for their members and for working people as a whole.

Benner became active in union work in the early 1970s, while a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Iowa. He grew up outside Boston, but came to Iowa because “they offered me money to go to grad school.” (The University of Minnesota also tried to lure him, he says, but “Iowa offered me more.”)

He intended to study American religious history, but wound up doing his masters work “in radicalism and disruption.”He was active in the antiwar movement and the University of Iowa Employees Association, a loose-knit union trying to organize clerical workers and other predominantly female employee groups on campus.

One thing led to another ? he attended a meeting, he started speaking to groups of workers, he worked on grievances, he was elected an officer.

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Fighting for equal pay
Benner’s parents had no union experiences, but his Catholic education helped lead him into organizing, Benner says. “I’m a fallen-away Catholic and have been for a long time. But I went to Catholic schools, had Jesuits in high school, Jesuits in college.” He took the concept of service out of that Catholic education, he says. “The Jesuits, as an order, were very much involved in social-justice issues.? I fell into it.”

In 1971, he and some law school friends filed an equal-pay complaint with the Department of Labor on behalf of “maids” ? female janitors who essentially did the same work as male janitors, but were paid less. “And to our shock and surprise, the Department of Labor says, ‘Yes, University of Iowa, you are violating the Equal Pay Act and all the female maids ought to be paid the same amount of money as the janitors.”

The university initially resisted, but public pressure “guilted” the administration into giving the women two years’ back pay, he says. “That kind of broke open organizing at the university, because finally a union had done something for people.”

At the time, he notes, public-sector labor law was in the era of “collective begging.” “You had no bargaining rights, so you schmoozed here, you schmoozed there. What we were able to get on behalf of our members was what we could lobby out of or plead out of the county commissioner or the mayor or the city council person or the school board or the governor.”

Peter Benner: “You’re different on the back end of a strike than you are on the front end of a strike.” Union Advocate photo

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Moving along
Benner became an AFSCME member for the first time when the campus employee association merged with an AFSCME local that had long represented “the guys” on campus. He was an executive board member and, again, things began moving quickly. He came to Minnesota in February 1974, on a lost-time assignment in St. Paul to help locals do internal organizing. That fall, he became what is now called an educational rep, doing steward training in Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas. He did legislative work in Minnesota in 1975. That winter, AFSCME sent him to South Dakota on an emergency basis to keep the state council running.

“If you think winter in Minnesota is a difficult experience, it ain’t nothing until you’ve done a winter in Huron, South Dakota.” But he survived the winter ? and learned to like Hank Williams and country music as a bonus.

Council 6 hired Benner as a business agent in 1976. He became assistant to director Bernard Brommer, then assistant director under Bob Currie. In 1982, at age 33, Benner was named director, replacing Currie, who was fired amid fallout from the 1981 state employees strike.

“It was not one we were ready for,” Benner says. “It was not one that was expected, at least by my boss.”

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Nobody blinked
“I don’t think either our negotiator or the state’s negotiator really believed there was going to be a strike. I think our lead guy believed, at the end, the state was going to blink. The state’s negotiator believed, at the end, we were going to blink.

“While we had talked strike, like you always do, we had not done a ton of stuff to, in fact, prepare for one. So, to the extent the employer was looking at behavior on the ground by us as an indication of intent, they weren’t seeing what they should be seeing.

“We took a strike vote, as we typically had done, and we got a strike authorization vote in June, but I think the leadership on the state’s end thought that was for show. I think our leadership thought, not that it was for show, [but] that it would be sufficient in and of itself to move the state.

“Well, it was not sufficient in and of itself to move the state. And all of a sudden, we’ve got ourselves with a strike on our hands. And I’ll tell you, we did not have enough picket signs on Day One to cover even the metro area barely. So we are running around just going, ‘There’s a Strike!’

“This had never happened before in Minnesota.? Between just keeping the picket lines up and running the media and getting stuff out, we must have been doing 20-hour days every day.”

Ten days into the strike, air traffic controllers launched their fatal, national strike. “When PATCO went out and you had the Reagan example of ‘fire [them],’ that got even harder.”

Strike headquarters were on Plato Blvd. in St. Paul, across from Awada’s. “They kept the kitchen open for us. So we’d be eating whatever we were eating at 11 at night, drinking way too much. How we did this with the amount of alcohol that got consumed is beyond me.”

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Strike changed union
Ready or not, the 22-day strike “made us” as a union, Benner says. “You’re different on the back end of a strike than you are on the front end of a strike. You just are a different organization.”

Before the strike, he says, Building Trades and industrial unions “weren’t quite sure what to make of the public sector unions, because it wasn’t clear that we really had to bargain and do all the stuff they had to do to get contracts. The law was new.”

The strike sent the message, “Well, you know guys, we’re a union now, too. We’re a real union, even though we’re public sector, we’re a real union now. And 6 became a very different organization coming out of it.”

Among the changes: Leadership that was used to the old, civil service rules being replaced by new leaders forged by strike leadership in their locals. Women demanding much greater participation in leadership roles.

Although the strike changed Council 6 for the better, he says, there was a downside. “We stopped doing some of the stuff that got us as far as 1981. We organized like the devil in the ’70s ? there really was an organizing culture in Council 6 in the ’70s. We lost that during the ’80s.”

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Another rejuvenation
The 14-day strike in 2001, unlike in 1981, was not a surprise, Benner says. “I think we all saw this one coming a year out.”

But the strike ? which Council 6 pulled off side-by-side with the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees ? had a similar galvanizing effect on the union and its members.

“You don’t want to do these every 20 years, whether you need to or not. But? for a labor union, that sort of mass, participatory struggle by the members really is a defining event for the rank-and-file member, for all the levels of elected leadership, and for the staff. And it should color how you view the rest of what you do.”

The dilemma for unions, he says, is that most of the time they get caught up in the day-to-day routine of providing services, filing grievances, negotiating contracts and other necessary business.

“And we think about the service disconnected from members needing to mobilize to win the fight. What strike things do, or what things like Labor 2004 do, what an organizing campaign for a new group of workers does, is say, ‘No, the union is not a small number of staff and elected leaders who are providing a service to the members.’ When a union is going to be successful, it is all of us together mobilizing and organizing, and our strength is in that organization. Our strength is in that mobilization. And that’s a lesson you’ve got to learn. That’s not an intellectual lesson.? This is really something that needs to be experienced by union leaders to make them believers that this is really the way we’ve got to do business.”

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Putting the ‘move’ in movement
Minnesota AFL-CIO president Ray Waldron “gets this,” Benner says. “He really gets this.” He points to Waldron’s commitment to the Labor 2004 election effort, which unified the state’s labor movement, including involving unions such as the Teamsters, Carpenters and MAPE, which for different reasons, aren’t or can’t be dues-paying members of the state AFL-CIO. He points to work with the nonprofit and faith communities in the Minnesota is Watching campaign.

Member mobilization skills translate into effective contract negotiations, organizing campaigns, strikes, or political acion, he says. But “they are different skills, different expectations, than what it just means to be a good steward who files grievances well.? For all too many union members in the country, their experiene of their union is totally passive.?

“That’s our fault as leaders for not having figured out ways of bringing the message to our membership that fully connects the dots of negotiations and organizing and political action, so people see this as something that’s got to be seamless and all interconnected.”

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Unification points to future
Benner retires as Council 6 has been absorbed into the larger Council 5 ? a unification of three AFSCME councils intended to connect those dots and improve the union’s organizing, mobilizing and political power so members can earn better contracts.

He calls the unification one of his proudest achievements, though he wishes he would have had the vision 10 or even 15 years ago.

“We are such a different union in 2005 than in 1974, when I came to Minnesota. And I think I have some level of claim for having helped us make that change. We’re good at what we do. We’re respected. I think we have a good vision of what a labor union has to be going forward. And I like to think at least some of it happened because I was here.”

He has promised to be available for “transitional” advice, and will spend the next 18 months in a “one-third time” position heading up the 21st Century Committee that will do an internal evaluation for the national union.

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A union marriage
“Beyond this next 18-24 months, I’ve not thought this thing through. One of the reasons I’m retiring is to, in fact, not have our lives so totally dependent on the rhythm of the union.”

He met his wife, Mary, when she was a board member and activist in Local 2829. They were married in 1989, during an AFSCME state convention in Duluth. Mary Benner “was promoted out of the bargaining unit,” he says, and is now an information technology manager for the state Department of Labor and Industry. They have a 13-year-old son, Patrick.

“I think every serious friendship I have in my adult life is through the labor movement.? There’s a set of friendships there that I value very greatly.”

Benner says he is not interested in elected office.

“I want to be engaged in the movement, engaged in the struggle, but in a different role, which lets me think about stuff and give great advice without actually having to worry about the day-to-day of how you actually do some of this.”

Michael Kuchta is editor of the Union Advocate, the official publication of the St. Paul Trades & Labor Assembly, AFL-CIO. E-mail him at advocate@mtn.org

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