I'm Norman Adler, ADLER, and I'm the President of the Bolton St. John's, which is a lobbying
and political consulting firm with offices here in Albany and also in New York City.
I was the political and legislative director of District Council 37 of AFSMA at the time
that CSEA merged with AFSMA.
So my first contacts with AFSMA were really contacts with Jim Fevison-Haw when he came
down to meet with the Victor Gottbaum, who was then the executive director of District
Council 37 in the preliminary discussions prior to CSEA coming into AFSMA.
And I spent 11 years at District Council 37 and I think that CSEA came in around the
time that I went to DC37.
I went to DC37 in February of 76 and CSEA came in to AFSMA shortly thereafter.
And then later on, of course I had long history during that time, but later on I had
been hired by Larry Scanlan when he was the political director of CSEA to do consulting
work.
I subsequently left DC37 and I spent several years creating a political education program,
including the PALS program where, you know, members lobbied their own assembly members.
State Senators, I created training modules, I created video training program and the
like for CSEA.
Great, of course you were also at the assembly at that time.
And I was the assistant to the speaker of the assembly for one year when Mel Miller was
the speaker and during that time I was considered the assembly's liaison to the public employee
union.
So I spent at the fair amount of time actually over in this building.
Let me ask this when you first went to District Council 37.
CSEA at that time was an unaffiliated union not yet part of AFSMA.
What was the relationship between DC37 and CSEA?
Not a lot.
DC37 was exclusively a downstate union, really New York City Union, of course it represented
municipal workers for the most part.
We had some affiliates in the watershed, of course the reservoirs, but that was basically
it.
And up here in Albany, as far as I could determine, there wasn't a whole lot of cooperation
between my predecessor and the Civil Services Association.
One of the things is that DC37 was regarded as the left wing of the public employee labor
movement for a whole variety of reasons.
And CSEA was looked upon largely as an upstate Republican union, even though of course they
did have membership in the metropolitan area, a modest sized membership in the city of
New York.
During the very early part of that first year, I don't think I ever met anybody from CSEA,
even though I was coming to Albany every week.
What do you remember about the dynamic between the two as CSEA became a part of AFSMA?
At that time, District Council 37 was by far the largest entity in AFSMA, where you
have this other gigantic organization that's going to come in and basically be even bigger
than they are.
Well, Gotham was delighted that CSEA was coming in.
First of all, it was a feather in the cap of AFSMA that CSEA would merge with AFSMA because
they could have gone other places or I don't know what they could have stayed independent.
I think that CSEA was the ripest tomato on the vine for raiding by other unions.
It was having its own internal problems with its professional division at the time, that
eventually split off.
I think that from the point of view of leadership of DC37, they were really glad that CSEA
was coming in and they understood that in terms of size at least that they would be eclipse,
but we were miles ahead of CSEA in terms of our political and servicing operation.
If I had to describe the early relationship between DC37 and CSEA, I would say we were the
seeing-eye dog of CSEA's traveling down the road into AFSMA and Bill McGowan and Victor
spent a fair amount of time as I recall communicating with each other and visiting with each
other and alike.
The other thing was that there was a continually evolving friction between Gotham and Jerry
Wharf who was the president of AFSMA at the time, although Wharf had been the predecessor
at DC37.
In fact, several of the big city unions were in friction with Jerry.
I think somewhere in the recesses of Victor's mind, he thought that Bill McGowan would be
an ally of his in some of the battles that were emerging on the executive board of AFSMA.
Okay.
Well, talk about that a little bit because I think it was certainly a benchmark event when
Jerry Wharf passed and it was a fight for the leadership of AFSMA.
How did that whole situation play out from your perspective?
Well, I think Victor made assumptions that he shouldn't have made about where CSEA would
have wind up.
We were both in New York State.
We were close politically and the other way.
He just kind of assumed initially and then kind of worked at getting CSEA on board to
cast their votes for him.
He believed at one point as I think I did too that ultimately CSEA would have voted for
Vic, which they did not and he felt he was screwed and perhaps he wasn't, perhaps he wasn't,
but at the time Victor believed that this would be like the axis around which other dissident
affiliates around the country would congeal.
And in fact, I remember going with him to Louisiana and meeting with the rebels down there,
the Cajun guys in Louisiana hated Jerry.
And Victor's, part of Victor's sales pitch was that he was New York.
We had CSEA, we had DC37, we had 17, 07, we had 35.
We're all together.
We're an enormous block.
I think we represented at that time maybe 35 or 38 percent of the entire voting membership
of the union and they should come on board because he was going to be the next leader
in, of course, that didn't take place.
Was part of the issue, was Joe McDermott part of the fight?
Joe McDermott was part of the fight, but if you asked me ultimately what the cause of
the final outcome of that was, I couldn't tell you, my own belief was that it had more
to do with personality than it had to do with ideology or internal issues or even the
management of the union.
And I don't know what CSEA got at it.
I mean, looking back and retrospect, I don't know if they lost anything, but I didn't
begin anything either.
But I think there was hard feelings for a while.
I know there wasn't DC37 and there were some people who were fired and some people who
were quid and there was a big rift among some of the locals.
It did not affect my relationship with the political arm of CSEA for one day because by
that time we created PEC, the Public Employee Conference, which Victor and Barry Feinstein
really, Barry Feinstein, the team has initiated, but CSEA was more than willing to come on board.
And in fact, in many ways, CSEA's early support for PEC, legitimated PEC in the eyes of a lot
of the smaller and upstate unions because the suspicion originally was this was a deal
by the big city guys in New York.
And when CSEA said no, this is a good idea.
We're going to join.
It made it easier for other groups to join because Shankar had already given it his reluctant
blessing.
Now, why was PEC created?
Was it basically because the Public Employee unions were not really getting a fair
shake within the AFL CIO?
AFL CIO in this state has generally been much more sensitive.
And may not be true exactly today, but over the years, much more sensitive to the construction
trades than it was to the Public Employees.
And the Public Employees were, of course, emerging as the largest organizing group inside
the AFL CIO.
And we didn't get it.
In fact, the state Fed did not even think of a Public Employee Department until we started
with the organized PEC.
And then all of a sudden, Ludwig Jaffe, who was the research doctor, Ludwig Jaffe, was
the research director of the state Fed, then dreamed up this Public Employee Department.
And we had a pretty much of a war up to the point where I was brought up on charges and
had a hearing before the executive board of the state AFL CIO.
And I was in my work on organizing PEC.
But PEC was probably the best idea and the most effective vehicle for Public Employee
legislative politics in the history of the state.
It's really ashamed what happened to it, a chattering, which was Post-Berry Farnstein.
But it gave us immense power.
I remember sitting in a room with racecuse from the US-Date United Teachers and Jim
Fethison Hall from CSCA with Bertie Ryan, who was the Public Employee Director then.
Me, Mandy Kafka from the United Federation of the Teachers and a Ralph Prasimo from the
Teamsters and several other Public Employee lobbyists.
Our province, I know, from the Transport Workers Union, was in the room at the time and
talking about agency shop, which is something that all of us wanted very, very badly.
And we were at an impossible task of getting a time before PEC was created.
Of course, PEC's great surprising and lasting impact on Public Employees was the creation
of agency shop and then ultimately of Public Employee OSHA, neither of which could have
ever come about without the concerted lobbying efforts.
And we used to meet every week and usually up in my offices on State Street and somebody
in Frank Rooney from the cops had bring the bagels.
I always thought that was kind of funny.
And we had a coffee and my interns would be there, you know, passing out papers and stuff.
And we agree on what we were going to do when we coordinated efforts and helped each other
with our legislation.
And we were purely legislative.
We didn't do any political coordination on campaigns and the like.
Although DC-37 and CSCA did a lot of coordination.
In fact, even very early on, CSCA, DC-37, the teamsters, the electrical workers,
the auto workers and CWA used to have informal meetings in which we would compare notes
on which candidates we were supporting, who was giving them printing, who was giving the money,
who was loaning the personnel and that sort of thing.
And while we didn't always see eye to eye and all the stuff, we generally coordinated
on a number of the legislative races.
Before we go on with that, I want to go back for a second to the agency shop and the
cash law.
Now, you don't want to do that.
You want to go down before that.
Because after CSCA came about, the second year I was up here in 77, we moved our office
as out of the United Order Workers, which is where DC-37 was, and into Twin Towers,
here on Washington, to form an AFSCME office, which was Jim Jennings, who worked for the
international and us.
And CSCA just came over, Bernie Ryan used to come over and spend a lot of time over there.
We had a staff, we had interns and the like.
During that year, 77 and 78, I drove around the state, usually on Tuesday evenings, with
Bernie Ryan and Linda Tarwhale and me, to mental hospitals and to other large facilities
to help CSCA organize political committees.
Because CSCA had a dearth of grassroots political committees and a lot of the institutions.
And at DC-37, we were busy organizing a very tight political ship with enormous rank and
file participation in major recruitment campaigns.
And so I went around and spoke, told them about our experience, and then we organized a
pack.
And so I spent the better part of the year, maybe more than a year, actually out on the
hustings with CSCA and AFSCME, doing political organizing for CSCA, which of course created
an enormous bond, which later on in 1982, and then we'll go back to the pack, when we
did Mario Cuomo.
I was in, so tight with a lot of the CSCA guys, because of that early organizing, many of
those people stayed on and became big organizers.
And it made the whole organization about the Cuomo campaign much more effective.
And Bernie and CSCA played a major role, coordinating all of the upstate operations for Mario
Cuomo.
Indeed, Mario Cuomo couldn't have become governor.
He had not been for Bernie Ryan and Jim Pederson, and CSCA.
I remember the office down the hill, which was nominally a Cuomo office, but in reality,
it was CSCA office.
By 1982, CSCA had become even more of a powerhouse, because not only was it big and pretty well financed,
but at that time it had become much better organized as a political machine.
And I always felt, well, some ego involved, that that early organizing that we did after
CSCA came into AFSCME was a predicate for that eventual power.
Well, we'll talk about what you actually did when you went out to those psych centers and
other places.
How did the rank and file receive you when you were?
It was amazing, first of all, we were off in there in the evening, all of a sudden, not
always.
And we'd hit there and there'd be one of the local officials from the union was there,
and they'd already posted the notice.
On the bulletin board, and we'd get enormous turnout.
You'd think since in many of the places, CSCA had not done a lot of that kind of politics,
pretty much check book union.
It wrote very large checks in and of replaces.
And in a lot of the localities, in lower level campaigns, at the county level and the city
level, it was pretty active.
But on the state stuff, it was mostly financial.
But they really rose to it.
So we'd come, we'd have forms, and what we do is we describe what the political action
committee did.
What we were going to do, and then Bernie or somebody from CSCA would talk about what
was happening in Albany and what kind of fights we were involved in, or what things were
coming up.
And there was a Q&A period, and then people had felt volunteer forms.
And while back, I was doing a campaign for the Nick Spano when he went by 18 votes this
past year.
Because I've been his consultant for a long time.
And I was standing in the big room where all the volunteer groups were.
And this elderly gentleman, and I'm pretty old, so elderly is really elderly, came up
and said, you remember me?
And I said, yeah, I wouldn't remember my sister today.
And he introduced himself.
And he said, you know, you know the first time I met you when I said, when was that?
And he said, I met you when you came to our chapter, our CSCA chapter, to talk about politics
in Albany.
And right after you there, I joined the political committee.
And now I'm in the Retire Rees Association.
And we're here today volunteering for Nick Spano.
I said, well, that's really terrific.
And he said, CSCA gave me an interest in politics.
He said, and I never would have done it without them.
And I just thought, wow.
And I talked about planting a seedling and eating an apple.
That really was a wonderful experience.
Talk a little bit more about the agency shop and the cash because it seems like those
are two very interesting, both very important for the organization.
One's kind of an inside campaign, the others an outside campaign.
Well, the original, there had been a series of meetings.
In New York City, between Tony Scotto from the Longshoreman, Barry Fynstein from the
teamsters, Al Schanger from the United Federation of Teachers, and Victor Gottbauer about taking
over the old liberal party, which at one time had been an arm of the textile workers union
and the clothing workers union.
And in fact, the two ILGW heads had been the bosses of the liberal party.
And it was liberal party kind of falling on bad times and was losing membership.
But there was kind of this thought that labor probably should take them over.
And they had the number of discussions and then get anywhere.
But Barry at one point said to Vic, you know, what we really should do is we should
really organize a statewide operation, at least to do lobbying, because Victor said, you
never going to get all these unions to agree on political candidates.
You got Republicans, you need Democratic unions.
And the like, Barry said, but you know, a lot of the unions are not in the FFLCIO.
And in fact, teams is warrant at that time.
And he said, we should be putting all the public employees together in one place, like this
discussion we're having here.
And Victor said, what do you think?
He asked me and I said, yeah, screw it.
You know, what do we need them for?
We were building our political arm.
We were at that point, I had a political staff of 11, you know, and for one union in one
place, that was a huge staff.
But Victor said, well, you know, Barry thinks it's a good idea and shanker thinks it's a
good idea.
So let's give it a whirl.
And out of a variety of conversations that level higher than me, the agreement was to have
a meeting.
And we had a meeting and first there was a meeting of the bosses.
You know, the presidents and the executive directors.
And then we had a political meeting.
But of course, for feathers and Bernie, I mean, we'd been doing that all along.
This was not anything novel for us.
But and we always circled the teachers wear a lay because you know, they were kind of
on their own.
They cut their own deals and they would always go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then they'd screw us.
So, but of course, the big impetus here was agency shop, which was not as important
like the cops and firefighters because you know, you can't be in a precinct or not
during the PBA.
Of course, somebody shoots you.
But of course, for us, for CSEA and for DC37 and to a lesser extent for the teamsters,
this was an important thing.
I got a lot of people into the hassle labor where we could then talk about them actually
taking a membership card, but at least they'd be, you know, paying dues.
And of course, it was big money maker as well.
And they were an enormous number of free riders around the state who got our benefits because
it was mandated by Taylor Law.
You know, we had to represent them, but they didn't give us any money.
And every year they come up and fight for agency shop and every year they got screwed.
They just never got it.
And you know, it was yay, yay, yay, but the Republicans didn't want to do it because they
were suspicious of us because even though CSEA had a lot of Republicans in the ranks,
for them in the professional division, of course, then in the, you know, the guys who
take care of the roads and work in the mental hospitals and stuff, they thought that it
was dangerous to a given agency shop.
They understood a lot of money was at stake there and membership.
So, but PAC was a, the people who came into PAC were in different stages of political
development, but together, I mean, we were really big.
You know, when you started to take a look, when you, when you put all of the upstate and
downstate unions together and also all these non AFFL CIO unions like the cops and some
of the correctional officers and, and the teamsters and some of the other groups, there
was a lot of muscle there.
And as I said, the AFFL CIO, you know, they were, they had no interest in organizing or
servicing public employees or very little interest, I should say.
So the PAC organizing was a tool mostly for communication and coordination.
For one thing, we all started getting together and talking to one another and then we started
socializing, which I hadn't done before.
I mean, the great story, which I don't know, told the other day, reminded me of it was,
the first year I was up here when I was a fledgling lobbyist, I don't know what was going
on.
We went and had a meeting with Jack Haggerty who was at the time, the secretary to the
Republican conference in the Senate.
And there were a bunch of us different public employees to talk about issues.
And on the way out, we were going through the door and I was kind of like in the middle
and some guys were in front.
And the guy from one of the uniform unions, a pretty big guy, to his I remember, said
something very derogatory about Godbound.
You know, we'd be better shaped, you know, fucking Godbound, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I was very hot headed in those days.
Actually, I'm still kind of hot headed, but I was very hot headed.
And so I went to get him and the only reason I didn't get to him was that they were like,
well, these guys between he and me and they all started holding me back and stuff like
that.
But I want to get him and punch him out.
And it was like, you know, it was enormous friction.
But I didn't know this guy from the whole.
He didn't know us.
So when pet got started, the good thing about it first was we all got together in the room.
We started to know each other.
We started to talk to each other.
We started to share information first very wearily.
In fact, there was, I mean, I don't know what Feather said when he talked to you, but
he was very, very suspicious about this thing and about whether you could have touched
trust the teachers and we just weren't really sure about them and stuff.
But little by little, we started socializing.
We go out together and we had different kinds of information because we had access to
different kinds of people.
And I was extremely strong in the assembly, not very strong in the Senate.
The uniform guys were very strong in the Senate.
It didn't know us so virtually in the assembly.
And we started sharing stuff.
And then because I wanted to do politics and I was doing a lot of it in the city, Jim
called me one day on the phone and Feather said to me, you know, red water may be in trouble
in his race.
This is up in Geneva.
It was that Republican state senator.
We subsequently found out he was dying of cancer.
And he was very close to Warren Anderson.
And Bill Dordey, who was the labor council in the Senate, wonders whether you might be
willing to give a hand.
Well, I have no members up there, anything like that.
And I said, what do you want me to do?
And he said, well, go up and help to organize the campaign and stuff like that.
And I said, sure, he said, well, I'm going to drive up there next Wednesday at whatever
after session.
Would you go?
And we'll have a meeting.
So I said, sure.
So Jim and I hopped in the car and we drove to Geneva, New York, which is the first
time I'd been in Geneva, New York.
And we met with Senator Water in his grumpest room in the basement with his people.
And they talked about how many pens they had left over from the last campaign and how
many combs and how many raindrops.
And I was like, this may have been the way you run a campaign.
And Jim was like, I was like, I can't.
And then I said, you know, Senator, I'd like to try a very different kind of campaign.
And so I started outline a campaign with phone banks and not the rubber chicken circuit
stuff.
He said direct males and thematic things and the pole and all this exotic stuff that
they'd never heard of.
And Jim's kind of sitting next to Hollywood and said, well, we could try that.
Dirty was there too.
So when it was over, we drove back.
And I said, what do you think?
Dirty said, you just interested this guy in the far side of the moon.
Well, we did do the campaign.
I sent one of my interns, Dean Wilson, actually up there physically to be in the campaign.
And started to direct the campaign and CSCA and DC37 did the campaign.
We did it with expertise and we also had printing presses so we printed all of water's
campaign literature, which I designed and stuff.
And he won.
And that changed everything because it changed my relationship with Dirty, it changed my
relationship with the Senate.
We had also endorsed at Jim's Prodding.
We had endorsed several Republican candidates for the State Senate.
And I went to God Barberman suggested that we do this.
He said, well, if you can find it because we had never endorsed any Republicans.
I think the only one we ever endorsed was at that point had been Guy Vallele.
He was an assemblyman.
And that's because he was Greedo Mendes Cousin and Greedo was the Associate Director of Political
Action at DC37.
So the way politics works in unions.
So Jim and CSCA had helped me kind of create a relationship.
And we endorsed actually seven Republicans.
We worked hard for Kalandra, the Bronx and Marke and Staten Island working very closely
with CSCA affiliates and with the firefighters who also we had had a relationship with the
past, out in the Staten Island campaign for Marke, who won by a hair's breath.
And that was kind of a signal that the most left wing and minority Democratic Union could
work with the Republicans.
And it was also a signal that there was a special relationship between CSCA and DC37, which
politicians better take cognizance of because it now married a largely upstate somewhat Republican
Union.
Although I always believe that it's in its heart of hearts and it's rank and file even
in the old days that if you're peeled away the Republican County guys, you basically
got Democrats in CSCA.
But together so when Peck came about later on, so it was not just CSCA, DC37 and our relationship
with the teamsters, it signaled a remarkable power center and all of a sudden the Republicans
had two things going for them.
A, they could count on us to support their people that we regarded as friendly to labor,
but we wouldn't do it automatically the way CSCA wouldn't a lot of its places.
B, that it was CSCA, DC37 and the teachers and the firefighters and the cops and the
correctional officers, etc.
And that was when a number of senators and staff members started to say we can create a permanent
bond.
And then CSCA said, well, we'd like permanent agency shop, but why don't you just
give it to us with a sunset?
Then if you feel like we screwed you, you could always pull it.
So in a way, I guess we climbed into something that we've never extricated ourselves from,
which is the fact that the thing's got to be done every two years, but they don't, you
know, they also made a pact with the devil because they don't dare not do it.
And that's basically how it came about.
And years later, I remember one morning, it was like maybe 3 a.m.
Jim Feathers, no one I was sitting outside of Warren Anderson's office and they were,
and Warren was getting ready to leave.
And I think he was thinking as his parting gift, although he didn't leave that following
year, was that he'd give us permanent agency shop and we'd lab it our asses off for it.
And I remember sitting in this out of office, Jim and I, I was napping on the desk and
we were waiting to see Warren and the time ticked away and it was the last day of the session.
And finally, someone came out and said, he'll see you.
We went in and Warren said, I can't do it.
He said, we have other constituencies, which in those days meant a conservative party.
And I just, he said, I've thought about it and I've talked to people about it and he
said if there were two people that I'd want to do it for, it would be you two guys really
meaning our unions.
And I can't do it and I'm sorry.
We said finally, you know, we kind of walked out, we were exhausted and discouraged and
stuff like that.
But they went to other unions and they were, someone of fact, he was talking to us, but
through us, he was talking to Peck.
But in some ways, even though Barry Feinstein personified Peck as the leader, as the lobbyists,
I think it was really Jim and I that represented the, you know, all the public employees in
the minds of a lot of the union leadership, but especially the Senate.
Talk about the Peck Act because that was more of an outside campaign, one that the
Senate filed to get behind and before actively involved in.
When I came to Albany, John Corcoran, who was my predecessor, had been working on OSHA
for at least four years with no noticeable progress whatsoever.
And once we got agency shop and we started focusing in on other issues, the thing that
the blue collar guys in both our unions were most interested in was a passion.
Occupational safety and health for public employees.
And we had a legislative conference every year and our legislative conference adopted OSHA
as its number one issue, which kind of surprised me in a way because it wasn't really a bread
and butter issue.
And usually when we got together, it was always, you know, pensions and salaries and pensions
and salaries and salaries and pensions.
So but that was what they were, and even unions that locals that didn't have that big
a thing.
And then more surprising, I get a call from Larry Scanlon and he says to me, I think
it was Larry, maybe it was Bernie Ryan, said to me, we're going to do OSHA as our number
one issue this year.
I said, whoa, you know, there's chemistry there.
So we went and we talked to the firefighters and a couple of the other unions for whom OSHA
was a big deal, a team for the teamsters.
It was very big and sanitation guys and the transport workers.
They all had major issues, you know, lung issues and things like that.
And so when we had our first pet meeting in the winter time, we presented the thing.
And a few of the unions like the teachers were not really that interested in it, but the
unions that cared about it really cared about it.
And so Peck basically decided to make it OSHA, the number one issue.
And we had the good fortune of having two new labor chairs in the two houses that year.
In the assembly, we had sold Weprin who had replaced Seymour Posner.
And Seymour Posner was one of these guys.
He had originally come out of DC37 and he was, Seymour Posner was the guy that in the
debate on the floor of the assembly at one point, one of the Republicans accused him of being
a tool of labor and his response is you think it's easy being a tool of labor.
So that was Seymour.
He was nuts.
And he also was, you know, I mean, he worked very hard because he wasn't that respected.
And in the Senate, I think prior to that, it was like Dick Skurmahorn.
And I, you know, I think he was the kind of the shove it up our nose in a way.
And he wasn't really that interested in labor and he was pretty conservative and he hated
the teachers.
But we got Levy, Norman Levy, from Merrick in there who, you know, I mean, I don't
know, he had some CSCA people down there and some cops, but it wasn't much of a labor
district.
But he was one of these guys that liked to toy with legislation, like to play with language
and think about, you know, all the different parameters of it and stuff like that.
And he was like, one of the few real intellectuals up here.
And we started to put together a campaign with printed material brochures.
We brought up different groups that had been impacted every week.
We'd bring one or two groups to town from CSCA, from DC37, from the team, from the bus
drivers and others to talk about the impact of it.
We brought in a bunch of retirees.
We got the people at Mount Sinai in the OSHA group down there.
You know, they've done a lot of research.
They put together research paper for us.
We got them to do a hearing in the assembly on the issue.
We got to do a hearing in the Senate on the issue.
We did all of the groundwork stuff on this thing.
I think CSCA Reynolds led us to the editors campaign in the upstate papers as well to kind
of focus attention back home on it.
And then we got together and we decided that we would get Levy because we could get the
assembly really came on board.
We could get, we were going to get Levy and show him the OSHA problems and hear in
lots of stories.
So I talked to my blue collage guys and we decided that among the places we'd taken was
to the Owls Head Sewage Treatment Plant in New York City.
Owls Head was one of the most disgusting old-fashioned sewage treatment plants anywhere
in New York State.
The guys worked in this huge facility with this great churning sewage thing there where
if you fell into it, you would sink to the bottom because you couldn't, nothing flowed
in it because of that density and stuff.
The stink was so bad and they had a dome that the guys would take poles and bust out
some of the glass so that some of the fresh air would come in even though in the winter
time the temperatures got really cold and the snow came through.
So we took Norman Levy to Owls Head and above this big churning mess was a catwalk that
went all the way around so the guys could go around, check different parts of it, make
adjustments on the wheels and stuff like that.
We dressed Levy in a rain slicker where the air was always 100% humidity in there and rubber
boots and we take them up on the catwalk to show them what was going on.
When he'd been on trucks and he'd been at sewage sites and he'd been in the tunnels of
the transit authority and we really moved him around.
But this was something else.
He was pretty game until he got up there.
It is this catwalk and this catwalk has got barely anything to keep you from going right
off the catwalk and into the thing except it's very narrow rail but you know you could
slide under and over and he's walking along the thing and we got one of our form and
is walking.
Great big guys walking behind him and as he walks and the catwalk is slick as hell.
His foot slips and he starts to skid and this guy grabs him by the arm and pulls him
back and he said you know you're lucky it didn't fall in center and he said you're
like why and he said because there's no way to get you out you just would have fallen
right to the bottom and we would have had to drain the pool and what did get you out
of the thing and Norman said well did anybody ever fall in and the guy said yes a number
of people have fallen in and he said what happened to them and one of the other guys said
they died and Norman was like he just couldn't believe it and he said well then why hasn't
anybody done anything and they say because they don't care you know they paid off the
widows and that was the end of that.
We go back and Bernie and I went to see him like the next week and he said we're going
to do an ocean of plan and we're going to have a hearing so we have a hearing and so
we go to testify and when I get to testify on behalf of Peck and we had workers there.
I tell the story of a place in Long Island City where on one side there's a auto paint
place and they've got to have exhaust fans and a air purity monitoring system and stuff
like that because they paint cars and trucks commercially but in the same building on the
other side is a municipal paint thing that does painting for the trucks in the city and
they don't have anything.
So the guys there are breathing in paint stuff like that so and then we give them a lot
of different examples.
So I walk out and one of the CSEA guys turns to me and says where is that place in Long Island
City?
I say what place?
He said what that place was with the two sides.
I said I don't know.
He said there was such a place isn't there?
Not sure well it could be very well right?
So we stretched a bit but it was now with the two chairs really gung ho on the thing and
our opposition was really just governmental.
You know of course the business council is against everything that workers in four but
other than that we just didn't have a formidable opposition.
So the city in New York and you know the counties and stuff put in opposition things but we
had done such a good job of bringing the issue home to individual members and making it
very clear that this was our number one issue that the thing passed.
After lots and lots of years of doing it which I think is also again a credit to the coordinated
efforts of the public employees.
Tell me about how the Mario Cuomo endorsement came about.
Well I don't know how it came about at CSEA but Victor got out and Ed Koch went out
getting along that well.
And Victor wanted an alternative and Mario was looking for the endorsement.
I remember Victor going into to see Victor and he said look Mario Cuomo is running against
Koch and his primary and he can't beat him but I don't care and I talked to him again.
I think it was how maybe it was determined by that and I'm not sure but he said we're
going to go against him and I just want you to go in there and make Koch bleed from the
ears.
And he said CSEA is going to be on board and the communication workers are going to be
on board and Shankar doesn't know what he's going to do and Jan Pearson you are going
to run that show and you're going to be the inside guy and he's going to be the outside
guy.
So I immediately picked up the phone and called him fell asleep and I said you guys
are going to do that.
He said absolutely he said we can't have Koch.
He said first we'll be canceling to our members.
He's mayor of New York City and he's very city and our people won't trust them.
We know Cuomo and we have a relationship with him and while I'm not personally that
fond of him he's got to be a lot better than Koch and right now Koch has a big threat
because everybody assumed he was going to win.
We all a bunch of us met with Andrew Cuomo and with the guy who was managing the campaign
whose name escaped from me at the moment who then went on to run like generic drug companies
and stuff like that.
I know I can't think of his name.
And we said and we had all met with each other and most of the unions teachers were not
involved at that time.
Finestine was with Koch.
A couple of the unions were going to do the Republican, couple of the uniform guys were
going to do the Republican.
But basically it was us, CSEA, transport communications, order workers, electrical workers
and the garment trades and then there were few smaller unions in there and we met with
them and we said we'll come in but we want the number two spot in the campaign.
And they said well you know we don't like to be dictated too and I said well you know
fine you have to your prerogative but you have to understand something.
We're going to endorse Cuomo.
But there's a difference between endorsing and doing a real campaign and by that time by
82 we were very muscular politically.
CSEA was DC-37 was.
We had large train political cadres by that time.
We had committed a lot of financial resources.
The unions understood the importance of the election.
But we were given instructions that we shouldn't be pushed around.
They said well give us a few minutes and they went out and then they came back and they
said okay you can have the number two spot who's going to do it.
And we said we'll let you know.
So we had a meeting and of course nobody wanted to do it.
So finally Jim nominated me for which I'll never forgive him as long as I live.
And I went back to Gopam.
Gopam said he would release me and he released me to the campaign and CSEA released Bernie
Ryan.
Although I don't know how Jim Fethersenhor ever practiced law for those four and a half
months because he was virtually did nothing but travel upstate New York on behalf of Cuomo.
He was more places than Cuomo was.
Of course what happened at one point they turned against Bernie and that came about.
And the thing about Cuomo was is that you can be for them 99 percent and if you made one
faux pas they acted as if you were a Samabed Laden.
And I don't know if you heard the story but the story is that Bernie was invited to speak
to Alan Chartuck's political class.
And Alan said that everything that was said in that room was confidential and Bernie took
him in his word and he said something about the campaign or about the Cuomo's.
And one of the kids in the class was like a budding journalist type and he immediately
went out and told the reporter and it was in the papers.
And next thing I know I've got Andrew Storming in the office.
We firing Bernie Ryan.
That's not interesting since you don't pay him and he's a volunteer and he's a CSEA official.
He's out of the campaign and I said well he's not out of the campaign because if he's
out of the campaign then you're going to lose a lot of other people.
I went in time Pat Stryker when the teacher's because by that time we had had the Athevelcio
convention and the teachers come along with us and Pat came in to the room and I explained
what was going on and Pat is like tough tough tough.
She said well you're not throwing Bernie out of the campaign.
You're throwing Bernie out of the campaign.
You're throwing civil service employees association.
What are you going to do close the office and all of them?
You have no operation.
North of Rockland County and she's besides which and she was running all the phone banks
all over the state with mostly teachers for Mary.
She's besides which.
She said if Bernie Ryan's going I'm going and Norman's going so firing anybody.
Bernie was very upset about the thing.
I was on the phone with Jim and all and of course they didn't do that but it was like the
Cuomo's were assholes but they were our assholes which was really the whole thing.
It was a come from behind campaign.
We provided a lot of personnel.
Many of the people who work in the campaign were in our payroll.
Today you go to jail for it.
The rules are so much different but then it was much more flexible but you show up in
some county and it would be a rally for Cuomo and there would be 100 people with a rally
and 98 of them would be from CSCA.
CSCA really sold Cuomo to.
They sold Cuomo absolutely totally there.
Not only that it was more than that.
They got upstate workers, county and state workers to come out and vote in that primary
which I think a lot of them just would have stayed home figuring you got two guys from
New York City what's our stake in this thing.
Cuomo if you read the diaries that he wrote about this thing.
He really, first of all the only person he thought he owed anything to was Arastas
Corning which was a joke but that was his way of ducking his responsibility to acknowledge
the fact that the labor movement got him elected.
So here in Liza one more story then you can ask me another question.
Right after Cuomo was sworn in, well Cuomo was elected then we had the pet convention and
so I went to, I think it was the full view of the Neville for the pet convention and Mario
called me there and said hired Michael Dough Judas to be the budget director I think he
was and I think David Burke was a secretary of the governor and what do you want?
Well I'd worked with Cuomo long enough to know I don't want any part of him.
I said I'm going back to the union you know I like being at the union and just be a good
governor and he said no no no he said you can be in the executive office you can be somewhere
else and you know let me know what you want.
So I said okay but I knew I wasn't going to do it.
Some of that union.
Right after we came back to Albany in January Mario got sworn in and there was a budgetary
problem and the first thing he did was he laid off state workers.
So the press called me on the phone and said and they were all CSEA as far as I remember
and it was a lot of them it was like I don't want to exaggerate the number but it seemed
to me it was like a thousand or twelve hundred but it was a it was a formidable number.
So I got a call from the Times Union and the report says to me you know well you know
what do you think and you were the labor guy in the campaign and I said Mario Cuomo should
remember who helped get him elected governor and that appeared in the paper and he called
me on the telephone and he was flying man you know the sloyal day of I said wait wait wait
wait a minute governor.
I said I went into this campaign not because of you but because the AFSCME leadership
in the state decided that you were the preferable candidate for governor and then I came
back to DCT and he said well there are no DC37 people laid off I said hey we're all in
this thing together you laid off our brothers and sisters in this little service employees
association I said you can't conduct your governorship like that you're going to be
one term governor and he said well I expected more of you when you slam down the telephone
from that they on there was bad blood between me and he and the first thing that happened
is that Michael Del Jude is called the press and said that the reason that I had bad
mouth the governor is that I wanted to be the secretary of the governor and I was jealous
because I wasn't named to the post.
That kind of set the tone for the Cuomo administration.
For the Cuomo administration and for the continuing act cramony and it just proved what
Barry finds you know he said which is that there is no good deed that goes unpunished.
Was the Cuomo campaign a benchmark for CSEA in terms of its political credibility?
Yes because it nice it was involved and other unions were involved but when it was over
everyone in the union movement and many people politically out there on the hustings around
the state knew that where the Cuomo campaign had any kind of operation it was largely and
often exclusively especially in some of the smaller areas the province of CSEA and so
I would say if CSEA got it's I think CSE got the largest notch in its gun handle and
its political gun handle because of the campaign and because of the work that within the campaign
that Jim and Bernie did as the representatives of the union but also because hundreds and
hundreds of rank and file members worked you know staff these little tiny offices you
know on Main Street and storefronts and up a flight of stairs over the hardware store
and stuff like that and they were there and then the CSEA also did a rather remarkable
get out the vote operation both the primary and the general election I mean if anything
Laramon scared us more than Ed Koch because Ed Koch was still you know New York City Democrat
but I think that this was a very important watershed politically for the CSEA and I think
at that point leadership began to think that a lot of the untrained members ought to get
some training and I think that that's when they began to rethink the organization you
know Larry came in and he created these regional political directors in each of the regions
which were answerable to Albany rather than to the regions so there was a coordinated effort
and then they started to send out you know materials and stuff and then later on down
the line after I set up my own shop that's when Larry approached me and said you know I'd
like to because I had done a lot of writing and creation of instructional materials modeled
after the Black Rock program at UAW because when I first got in I looked around to see who
had the best political education and the best was at UAW that they had this thing at Black
Rock this training center and they had created some really good stuff and I went and got the
stuff and I swiped some of it and I expanded on it and then and we were always CSEA and DC-37
were we sharing you know that at least our level we're sharing that kind of stuff and so I
developed it and Larry said you know we've got the infrastructure now now I like to do the the
organs on you know the political education stuff tell me about some of the personalities who work
with them and you've certainly talked a lot about your feathers don't have to tell me about McGowan tell me about
McDermott Jim McGowan was a real soul to the earth you know guy he was he was the genuine article
he was in some ways enormously unsophisticated and in some ways he was very sophisticated in the ways
of union politics he was very suspicious of professionals you know I think if he had had his own way
he would have kind of brought in a bunch of rank of files let him run everything but he also
understood his own limitations which is why he relied more and more on on the feathers and whole law
firm for things and of course Jim was glad to accommodate him since Jim loved to run everything
but he was he was in some ways a very simple man and in some ways he was very sharp guy because
he he knew how he got where he got and he understood what some of the problems of holding together this
enormously disparate and and argumentative union was about although you know there was that period
there was CSEA really lost some of its compass and it lost its suffoc affiliate and it lost the
professionals although my own I used to say in the early days when I'd go and observe the
conventions I was used to say to Jim you know if the professionals watch out tomorrow morning
you guys would be a better union for it so I wasn't always sure that the creation of PEP was
necessarily a bad thing I know it hurt the union in terms of span and in terms of losing a certain
level of sophistication but I I was very fond of of Bill McGowan and I spent some time with him
and and Victor got down some time with him and we always came away thinking he made him not be the
sharpest knife on the draw but he was certainly there was very little bullshit in the man and he
always said what was on his mind sometimes the detriment both of he and of the union but what you
saw I believe at least what you saw is what you got McDermott was of different breed he was
better educated he was more sophisticated he was he was more of what one of my
chauffeurs at DC37 once described as a as a labor bureaucrat and that was his role he was much more
attuned to sharpening up the bureaucracies building departments creating chains of command and
responsibility then McGowan he also had an eye to Washington and the national stuff Bill
McGowan didn't give two shits about you know what was happening in Oklahoma whether or not the
Pennsylvania affiliate was having a bad a good relationship with the leadership in in Washington
but but you know his successor was a very very different in in in that way and so that was a time
that the union I believe structurally made its greatest strides in putting together real departments
and real razor working and also developing much more rigorous criteria for titles and
promotions and things of that sort tell me tell me about your observations of Danny Donnie
you on the leadership scene well Danny's the best politician the unions ever had in terms of
external politics I mean he knows politics he's very smart about politics he I think in some ways
is a melding of his two predecessors because on one hand I think that Danny has a real understanding
about the importance of the of the shop so to speak the the internal people who make the union work
but and but he also has a very good understanding of what moves both the internal and external politics
of the union and he also obviously has a very big interest in the international and could very
well be the next head of the international depending on how you know the cards fall out or
how long the current incumbent decides to you know to cheat the fate's and death
so I think he's a really good public employee union politician on one hand and on the other hand
I think that he's the kind of guy who I wouldn't be sorry to see Danny in a position at the AFL CIO
to do some of the wheeling and dealing and work on some of the reforming of the of the national
union movement I think that I don't know what either of his predecessors were up to it but I think
he I think he probably is and so in that way there's that that would be the biggest difference
why do you think CSEA is being able to succeed over a hundred years
well one reason is there's a need for it many of the members at CSEA represents are people who
have very very little voice of their own they're often not exceptionally well paid
although now in most cases better paid than their colleagues in the private sector but you
know they're not people make a great deal of money a lot of them are unsophisticated in the
ways of politics in the world they the CSEA gives them a voice politically and lower paid workers
in my experience a much more understanding of the value of unionism than higher paid workers
when I was at DC37 you could always get a hospital worker or a school lunchroom worker or a guy who
filled potholes to come out and work in a political campaign but librarians and the social workers
and the accountants and the guys who ran the snake house at the zoo forget about it you know
because they figured they could get it on their own and the lower paid workers understood
that they couldn't and I think that's part of it and I think part of it is that the union has
kind of risen over the years to the task it's become much more sophisticated in terms of
its internal operation it's become a lot more selective in who it hired to do the jobs it isn't
just you know mose cousin the way it was years ago and so they've got a much the I think the union's
got a much more sophisticated and well prepared and professional and experienced staff I think
that the union has understood the inextricable relationship between politics and government
on one hand and the collective bargaining fate on the other hand and it's used its politics
rather well in order to advance the interest of its of its workforce and and I think that the
other thing is that the servicing arm of the union has gotten better and better if anything the
unions biggest liability is the liability that all unions have which is that they get to the point
where people think if they pay their dues they're entitled to the services and they don't realize
that they got to be part of the union so a very small number of people take on the responsibilities
that a larger group should probably have and the better you are as a union at servicing the bigger
risk you have that you won't be so good on participation and I don't know a single really good
servicing union that hasn't that and I work for a lot of unions that hasn't faced this problem but
in a way it's testimony to the to the success of the union that the members are largely willing
to say you handle it so and so they have not been huge acrimonious political fights statewide
within the union and there aren't these warring political parties that you see in some unions and
that's testimony to the to the success of the union in the eyes of its of its membership
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0