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By Timothy Kudo

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The workers file into Mira Hershey Hall, stopping at a small table covered with a plastic tablecloth to pour a cup of coffee, add a touch of non-dairy creamer, and grab a pastry.

They enter room 1657 and walk up to the green and white banner for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees with its slogan, “In the public service.”

By this sign, the sign-up sheet for the meeting rests on the table.

“We’re going to start, but only when people move up to the front,” says AFSCME organizer Kimberley Carter.

The group filing in is taking time on a warm Saturday afternoon to prepare for upcoming contract negotiations over wages and the corresponding marches and rallies scheduled to happen at UCLA on Sept. 12.

They’re focused on the work they have ahead of them but they’re a small group of people familiar with each other and some of the inhibitions more in place with the previous two meetings are gone.

Like students going to class, most of the 25-member group, who are union leaders in their respective departments, are sitting in the last of eight rows of seats.

As they slowly make the move to the front, the group divides in two along color lines.

Aside from a lone reporter from the AFL-CIO who appears to be white, the African Americans sit apart from the Latinos.

But, in interviewing one of the workers, the reasons behind the division become apparent.

“I don’t speak any English,” says Esther Alvarado in English. She was a worker at the UCLA Laundry Facility before its closure and now works at the Medical Center, partly because of the union’s work.

The meeting is supposed to start at 4:00 p.m., and it’s 4:15.

Carter tells the crowd this is the third in a set of meetings. One happened the night before, Aug. 25, for those working the graveyard shift and one was held that morning.

In all, over a hundred people showed up for the three.

“As you all know, these meetings are about our upcoming contract negotiations and how we can get our union stronger,” Carter says.

The start of the meeting begins with an ice-breaker, the kind done at summer camp. The group is informed they are to learn the names of people sitting next to them and report the answers back to the group.

The instructions are given first in English, then in Spanish, as would continue for the rest of the meeting.

During the introduction, the lead union organizer, Jose Hernandez, known to co-workers as J.R., gives the Bruins a small lesson in union history.

He explains how the AFL-CIO is the umbrella organization encompassing unions representing the different factions of the working class and how AFSCME represents many of the workers at UCLA.

“You have white collar unions, you have blue collar unions, and sometimes you have a mix like AFSCME,” he says.

The white collars are the patient care technical workers and the blue collars are the service employees the union represents.

After organizers realize that the ornately worked out introduction system is taken too long, everyone just resorts to saying their own names.

Marco Manjarrez, another union organizer, gives an update on the situation of casual workers, who often work full-time shifts yet fail to receive benefits because of loopholes in the university’s hiring policies.

“The university has promised that in all the new buildings opening up, they are going to make them 100 percent career,” Manjarrez says to an ovation.

At which point Hernandez leans over and quietly notes that any new building that opens up refers only to De Neve Plaza.

Organized labor isn’t so organized today.

The talk then turns to what the meeting is mostly about, contract negotiations.

“We try to come up with some kind of middle ground that each side is happy with,” says Cornelius Bowser, a business agent for the union.

Bowser then goes into the nitty-gritty details of contract negotiations. Taking the group through the process of impasse – when the two sides negotiating can’t come to an agreement – through to what the Public Employment Relations Board, the group that oversees public labor disputes, will do at that time.

After impasse is declared, PERB will begin fact finding to see the legitimacy of the arguments on each side before leaving the matter to the parties involved if no wrongdoing is found.

“This year we want to change that,” Bowser says.

After him, another union business agent stands to give the motivational part of the meeting.

“Are we ready to kick some butt here today?” says Bob Battle, another business agent.

The spanish translator has trouble translating “kick some butt.”

“If there is anybody in this room who doesn’t think that they deserve a raise then leave now,” Battle says.

Surprisingly, nobody gets up.

At the end of his speech, Battle challenges the crowd: “Is everybody going to be out there on March 12, or am I mistaken?”

Hernandez shouts back, “You’re mistaken.”

The negotiations are on Sept. 12, not March 12.

“Ok, is everyone going to be out there on Sept. 12?” Battle asks.

“Yes,” the crowd shouts back.

As the first part of the meeting ends, some leave, some smoke, and after a short break off into small groups to go over how to spread the unions message to their co-workers, everyone regroups for a pageant of sorts.

“This week we did nominations for who is the worst manager,” says Grant Lindsay, a union organizer.

There’s a list of about 10 people from around campus voted on by the group members.

“So, if you’ve got a nominee on there, be proud,” Lindsay says.