Interview Date: 4/13/05
Subject: Norman Adler: President and Political Affairs Consultant, Bolton-St-Johns, Inc.
1991-present; Assistant to NYS Assembly Speaker of the House, 1989-1990; Director of
Political Action and Legislation for District Council 37, AFSCME, 1976-1986; Deputy
Campaign Manager and Field Director for Governor Mario Cuomo, 1982; Speechwriter
to former NYC Mayor Robert F. Wagner; First Director of the NYC Council Political
Action Committee; Adjunct Full Professor at NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of
Public Affairs; Faculty at Hunter College, Columbia University’s Teachers College,
Barnard College and Baruch College; Member of NYS Temporary Commission of
School Decentralization; Two terms on the Advisory Commission on Archives and
Historical Records; Author.
Norm Adler, a former political and legislative director for AFSCME’s District
Council 37, who held this position when CSEA and AFSCME merged, provided a
descriptive account of his relationship with CSEA and their employees throughout their
time working together. Adler, who after leaving AFSCME briefly did consulting work
for CSEA, spoke in detail about his partnership with CSEA after the merger, namely the
“enormous bond” he was able to create with them. He specifically mentioned traveling
around the State to psychiatric centers and other hospitals with CSEA, and helping them
organize political committees, which allowed them to become an effective political
machine.
In his interview, Adler provided great detail about the Public Employees
Conference (PEC), explaining how and why it was created, the hard work put forth by
representatives from the unions involved, who among other things met to coordinate
endorsements for legislative races, and the relationship PEC built between AFSCME and
CSEA. He also explained the importance of PEC due to its role in the creation of agency
shop and OSHA for public employees, and described the efforts leading up to the Public
Employee Safety and Health (PESH) Act, the next biggest union interest after agency
shop.
Adler recalled organizing and directing political campaigns with the help of DC
37 and CSEA and mentioned how CSEA had become a political “powerhouse” by 1982.
He spoke in abundance about Mario Cuomo’s campaign for Governor in that year, which
DC 37 had worked extensively on with CSEA. Adler mentioned the “major” role CSEA
played in coordinating all of Cuomo’s Upstate operations, which allowed Cuomo to gain
support from Upstate workers and ultimately win the election. Adler referred to the
leadership and power demonstrated by CSEA during the Cuomo campaign as a political
benchmark for the organization.
Adler also spoke about CSEA Presidents, Bill McGowan, Joe McDermott, and
Danny Donohue. He attributed CSEA’s longevity due to their members need for the
political voice CSEA provides them and mentioned that over the years CSEA’s staff has
become more sophisticated, well prepared, professional, and experienced.
Key Words
Agency Shop
Communications Workers of America (CWA)
Electrical Workers
International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)
Governor Mario Cuomo’s Campaign in 1982
Mt. Sinai Hospital
New York State United Teachers (NYSUT)
OSHA
Owls Head Sewage Treatment Plant
Public Employees Conference (PEC)
Public Employees Federation (PEF)
PESH Act
Teamsters Union
Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA)
Transport Workers Union (TWU)
United Auto Workers Union (UAW)
United Federation of Teachers (UFT)
Key People
Warren Anderson
Alan Chartock
John Corcoran
Governor Mario Cuomo
Michael Deljudice
Danny Donohue
Bill Dougherty
Jim Featherstonhaugh
Barry Feinstein
Victor Gottbaum
Jack Haggerty
Dr. Ludwig Jaffe
James Jennings
Ed Koch
Manny Kofka
Senator Norman Levy
Joe McDermott
Bill McGowan
Guido Mendez
Jan Pierce
Seymour Posner
Al Provensano
Frank Rooney
Bernie Ryan
Larry Scanlon
Al Schenker
Dick Schermerhorn
Anthony Scotto
Ray Skuz
Linda Tarwhalen
Guy Valella
Senator Red Water
Assemblyman Saul Weprin
Jerry Wirth
CSEA HISTORY PROJECT
NORM ADLER INTERVIEW
4/13/05
INTERVIEWER: Norman, I wonder if you
would start by telling us your full name and if
you would spell it for us and tell us what some
of your professional positions at the
(inaudible) and your contact with CSEA.
MR. ADLER: Sure. I'm Norman Adler,
A-d-l-e-r, and I'm the president of Bolton
St. Johns, 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
AFSCME at the time that CSEA merged with AFSCME,
so my first contacts with AFSCME were really
contacts with -- with Jim Featherstonhaugh when
he came down to meet with Victor Gottbaum who
was then the executive director of District
Council 37 in the preliminary discussions prior
to CSEA coming into AFSCME.
And I spent 11 years at District
Council 37 and I think that CSEA came in around
the time that I went to DC 37. I went to DC 37
in February of '76 and CSEA came into AFSCME --
INTERVIEWER: A short while later.
MR. ADLER: -- shortly thereafter.
And then later on, of course I had a long
history during that time, but later on I was
hired by Larry Scanlon when he was the political
director of CSEA to do consulting work, so I
subsequently left DC 37 and I spent several
years creating a political education program,
including the PALS program where, you know,
members lobbied their own Assembly members and
State Senators. I created training modules, I
created a video training program and the like
for the CSEA.
INTERVIEWER: Of course, you were also
at the Assembly at one time.
MR. ADLER: 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 unions, so I spent a fair amount
of time actually over in this building.
INTERVIEWER: Let me -- let me ask
this. When you first went to District
Council 37, CSEA at that time was an
unaffiliated union, not yet part of AFSCME.
What was the relationship between DC 37 and
CSEA?
MR. ADLER: Not a lot.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
MR. ADLER: DC 37 was exclusively a
Downstate union, really New York City union,
because it represented municipal workers for the
most part. We had a -- some affiliates in the
watershed because of 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
Service Association.
One of the things is that DC 37 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,
you know, a modest size membership in the City
of New York.
So there was -- during the very early
part of my -- of that first year, I don't think
I ever met anybody from CSEA, even though I was
coming to Albany every week.
INTERVIEWER: What -- what do you
remember about the dynamic between the two as
CSEA became a part of AFSCME? At that time
District Council 37 was by far the largest
entity in AFSCME --
MR. ADLER: Right.
INTERVIEWER: -- and here you have
this other gigantic organization that's gonna
come in and basically be even bigger than they
are.
MR. ADLER: Well, Gottbaum was
delighted that CSEA was coming in. First of all
it was a feather in the cap of AFSCME that CSEA
would merge with AFSCME because they could have
gone other places or, you know -- I don't know
whether they could have stayed independent. I
think that CSEA was the ripest tomato on the
vine for raiding by other unions, but -- and it
was having its own internal problems with its
professional division at the time, you know,
that eventually split off.
So I think that from the point of view
of the leadership of -- of DC 37, they were
really glad that CSEA was coming in and they
understood that in terms of size, at least, that
they would be eclipsed, but we were, you know,
miles ahead of CSEA in terms of our political
in-servicing operation, and if I had to describe
the early relationship between DC 37 and CSEA I
would say we were the Seeing Eye Dog of CSEA's
traveling down the road into AFSCME and Bill
McGowan and Victor spent a fair amount of time,
as I recall, communicating with each other and
visiting with each other and the like.
The other thing was -- is that there
was a -- a continually evolving friction between
Gottbaum and Jerry Wirth, who was the president
of AFSCME at the time, although Wirth had been
Victor's predecessor at DC 37, and -- in fact,
several of the big City unions were in friction
with Jerry and 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
AFSCME.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Well, talk about
that a little bit because Vic, you know, it was
certainly a benchmark event when Jerry Wirth
passed and there was a fight for --
MR. ADLER: Right.
INTERVIEWER: -- the leadership of
AFSCME. How did the whole situation play out
from your perspective?
MR. ADLER: Well, I think Victor made
assumptions that he shouldn't have made about
where CSEA would wind up. You know, we were
both from New York State. We were close
politically and the -- and he just kind of
assumed initially and then kind of worked at
getting CSEA on board to cast their votes for
him and he believed at one point, as I think I
did too, that ultimately CSEA would vote for
Vic, which they did not, and he felt he was
screwed, and perhaps he was and perhaps he
wasn't.
But at the -- at the time Victor
believed that -- that this would be like the
axis around which other dissident affiliates
around the country would -- 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 -- and Victor's -- part of Victor's
sales pitch was that he was New York. We had
CSEA, we had DC 37, we had 1707, we had 35, we
were all together. We were 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 gonna be the -- gonna be the next leader
and, of course, that didn't -- that didn't take
place.
INTERVIEWER: M-m h-m-m. Was part --
was part of the issue -- was Joe McDermott part
of the fight?
MR. ADLER: 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 was -- 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 -- I don't know
what CSEA got out of it. I mean looking back in
retrospect, I don't think we lost anything, but
I don't think we gained anything either.
But I -- and I think there was hard
feelings for a while. I know there was in DC 37
and there were some people who were fired and
some people quit 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 had traded PEC, the Public Employee
Conference, which Victor and Barry Feinstein --
really Barry Feinstein for the Teamsters
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 Upstate unions
because the suspicion originally was this was a
deal by the big city guys in New York and then
CSEA said, no, this is a good idea. We're gonna
join, it made it easier for other groups to join
because Schanker had already given it his
reluctant blessing.
INTERVIEWER: Now, why was -- why was
PEC created? Was it basically because the
public employee unions were not really getting a
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fair shake within the AFL-C10?
MR. ADLER: The AFL-CIO in this state
has generally been much more sensitive. That
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 would -- we didn't get -- in
fact, the State said to not even think of a
public employee department until we started to
organize PEC and then all of a sudden Ludwig
Jaffe, who was the research -- Dr. 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 by --
and had a hearing before the executive board of
the State AFL-CIO because of my work in
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
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and it's really a shame what happened to it.
You know, its shattering, which was post-Barry
Feinstein, but it -- it gave us immense --
immense power.
I remember sitting in a room with Ray
Skuse from New York State United Teachers and Jim
Featherstonhaugh from CSEA with Bernie Ryan, who
was political director then, me, Manny Kafka
from the United Federation of Teachers, and --
and Ralph Prossimo from the Teamsters and
several other public employee lobbyists. AL
Provensano 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 the -- we were -- had an
impossible task of getting it done before PEC
was created and, 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.
We used to meet every week and usually
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up at my offices on State Street and somebody --
Frank Rooney from the cops would bring bagels.
I always thought that was kind of funny. And
we'd have coffee and my interns would be there,
you know, passing out papers and stuff, and we'd
agree on what we were gonna do and 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 CSEA did a lot of coordination. In
fact, even very early on CSEA, 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 them money, who
was loaning them personnel and that sort of
thing.
And while we didn't always see eye to
eye on all this stuff, we generally coordinated
on a number of the legislative races.
INTERVIEWER: Before we go on with
that I want to go back for a second to the
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agency shop and the PESH Law because --
MR. ADLER: Nah, you don't want to do
that. You want to go down before that --
INTERVIEWER: Well --
MR. ADLER: -- because after -- after
CSEA came about the second year I was up here,
‘77, we moved our offices out of the United Auto
Workers, which is where DC 37 was, and into Twin
Towers, you know, here on Washington, to form an
AFSCME office, which was Jim Jennings, who
worked for the international, and us
And CSEA used to come 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 Tarr-Whelan
and -- and me to mental hospitals and to other
large facilities to help CSEA organize political
committees because CSEA had a dearth of
grassroots political committees at a lot of the
institutions and at DC 37 we were busy
organizing a very tight political ship with
enormous rank-and-file participation and major
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recruitment campaigns.
And so I went around and spoke, told
them about our experience, and then we'd
organize a PAC and so I spent the better part of
a year, maybe more than a year, actually out on
the hustings with CSEA and AFSCME doing
political organizing for CSEA which, of course,
created an enormous bond which when -- later on
in '82, and then we'll go back to -- it's okay
to pack -- when we did Mario Cuomo.
I was in so tight with a lot of the
CSEA 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, you know, Bernie and CSEA played a major
role in coordinating all of the Upstate
operations for Mario Cuomo.
Indeed, Mario Cuomo couldn't have
become Governor had it not been for Bernie Ryan
and Jim Featherstonhaugh and CSEA. I remember
the office now, down the hill, which was
nominally a Cuomo office but in reality it was a
CSEA office. By '82 CSEA had become even more
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of a powerhouse because not only was it big and
pretty well-financed, but by that time it had
become much better organized as a -- as a
political -- as a political machine and I always
felt, with some ego involved, that that early
organizing that we did after CSEA came into
AFSCME was a predicate for that eventual power.
INTERVIEWER: Well -- well, talk about
what you actually did when you went out to those
psych centers and other places. How did the --
how did the rank and file receive you when
you --
MR. ADLER: Great. I -- it was
amazing. First of all, you know, we were often
there in the evening, although some -- not
always, and we hit there and there'd be, you
know, one of the -- the local officials from the
union was there and they'd already posted the
notice on the bulletin board and we'd get
enormous turnouts.
You know, you'd think since in many of
the places CSEA had not done a lot of that kind
of politics, pretty much checkbook union, you
know. It wrote very large checks in a number of
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places and in a lot of 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'd do is we'd
describe what the political action committee did
and what we were gonna do and then Bernie or
somebody from CSEA would talk about what was
happening in Albany and what kind of fights we
were involved in or what kind of things were
coming up and there was a Q&A period and then
people'd fill out volunteer forms.
And a while back I was doing -- I was
doing a campaign for the -- Nick Spano when he
won by 18 votes this past year so 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, Remember me? And I said, gee, you know, I
wouldn't remember my sister today, and he
introduced himself.
And he said, you know, you know the
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first time I met you, and I said when was that,
and he said I met you when you came to our
chapter, our CSEA chapter to talk about politics
in Albany and I -- right after you were there I
joined the political committee and now I'm in
the Retirees' Association and we're here today
volunteering for Nick Spano.
I said, well, that's really terrific,
and he said CSEA gave me an interest in
politics, he said, and I never would have done
it without them, and I just thought, wow, talk
about, you know, planting a seedling and eating
an apple, that really was -- that was really a
wonderful experience.
INTERVIEWER: M-m h-m-m. Talk a
little bit more about the agency shop and --
MR. ADLER: And PEC.
INTERVIEWER: Because it seems like
those are two very interesting -- both very
important for the organization. One's kind of
an inside campaign, the other's an outside
campaign.
MR. ADLER: Well, the original --
Barry -- we -- there was -- there had been a
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series of meetings in New York City between Tony
Scotto from the Longshoremen, Barry Feinstein
from the Teamsters, Al Schanker from the United
Federation of Teachers, and Victor Gotbaum
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 -- matter of fact, the two ILGWU
heads had been the, you know, the bosses of the
Liberal party and it was -- the Liberal Party
had kind of fallen on bad times and it was
losing membership but there was kind of this
thought that Labor probably should take them
over and they had a number of discussions. They
didn't 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 work, so Victor said, you're
never gonna get all these unions to agree on
political candidates. You got Republican
unions, you got Democratic unions, you know, and
the like.
And Barry said but, you know, a lot of
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the unions are not in the AFL-CIO and the
Teamsters weren't 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? You know, we were
building our political arm. At that point I had
a political staff of 11, you know, and one --
you know, one union in one place, that was a
huge step.
But Victor said, well, you know, Barry
thinks it's a good idea and Schanker thinks it's
a good idea so let's give it a whirl, and out of
a variety of conversations and levels 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 also circled
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the Teachers warily because, you know, they were
kind of on their own. They cut their own deals
and they would also 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 to the cops and firefighters
because, you know, you can't be in a precinct
and not join the PBA ‘cause somebody'd shoot ya,
but, of course, for us, for CSEA and for DC 37
and to a lesser extent for the Teamsters, this
was an important thing.
(A) It got a lot of people into the
House of 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 a big money maker as well and
there were an enormous number of free riders
around the -- 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, you know, give us any money.
And every year they'd come up and
fight for agency shop and every year they got
screwed, they just never got it and, you know,
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it was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 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, more than
in the Professional Division, of course, than 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
give us agency shop. They understood a lot of
Money was at stake there and membership so --
but PEC was -- was a -- the people who came into
PEC were in different stages of political
development but together -- I mean we were
really, really big.
You know, when you started to take a
look, when you put all of the Upstate and
Downstate unions together and also all these
non-AFL-CIO unions like the cops and -- and some
of the correction officers and -- and the
Teamsters and some of the other groups, there
was a lot of muscle there and, as I said, the
AFL-CIO, you know, they were no -- they had no
interest in organizing or servicing public
22
employees or very little interest, I should say.
So the PEC 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 who told
it the other day -- reminded me of it was.
The first year I was up here when I
was a fledgling lobbyist, I didn'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 talking about issues.
And on the way out we were all going
through the door, I was kind of like in the
middle and some guys were up front, and the guy
from one of the uniform unions -- pretty big
guy, too, as I remember -- said something very
derogatory about Gottbaum. You know, we'd be in
better shape if, you know, fuckin' Gottbaum blah
blah blah blah blah, and I was very hot-headed
in those days. Actually, I'm still kind of
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hot-headed, but I was very hot-headed, and so I
went to get ‘im and the only reason I didn't get
to him was that there were like all these guys
between he and me and they all started holdin'
me back and stuff like that.
But I, you know, wanted 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 a hole in the wall and he didn't know us,
so when PEC 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, at first very warily.
In fact there was -- I mean I don't
know what Feathers said when he talked to you
but he was very, very suspicious about this
thing and about whether you could ever trust the
Teachers and, you know, we just weren't really
sure about them and stuff, so -- but little by
little we start socializing, we go out together
and we had different kinds of information
because we had access to different kinds of
people.
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And I was extremely strong in the
Assembly, not very strong in the Senate. The
uniform guys were very strong in the Senate,
didn't know a soul 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,
Featherstone, and he said to me, you know, Red
Warder may be in trouble in his race, this is up
in Geneva. He was State -- Republican State
Senator. We al...we subsequently found out he
was dying of cancer, and he was very close to
Warren Anderson, and Bill Dougherty who was the
labor counsel and to the Senate, wonders whether
you might be willing to, you know, give a hand.
I had no members up there or anything
like that and I said, you know, what do you want
me to do? And he said, well, you know, go up
and help to organize the campaign and stuff like
that, and I said sure. He said, well, I'm gonna
drive up there next Wednesday or whatever after
Session. Would you go and we'll have a meeting,
so I said sure.
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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 rumpus 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 Reagan
hats and I was like dismayed.
I said is this the way you run a
campaign? And Jim was looking at me and I was
looking at him and then I said, you know,
Senator, I'd like to try a very different type
of campaign and so I started to outline a
campaign with, you know, phone banks and not the
rubber chicken circuit stuff, and a series of
direct mails and dramatic things and a poll and,
you know, all this exotic stuff that they'd
never heard of.
And Jim's kind of saying, that's
(inaudible). Water said, well, you know, we
could try that, we could try that, and Dougherty
was there too. So when it was over we, you
know, drove back and I said what do you think
and Dougherty said, you know, you just
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interested this guy in the far side of the moon.
Well, we did do the campaign. I sent
one of my interns, Deanne Wilson actually, up
there physically to be in the campaign and
started to direct the campaign and CSEA and
DC 37 did the campaign. We did it with, you
know, 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 -- and that
changed everything because it changed my
relationship with Dougherty. 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.
When I went to Gottbaum and suggested
that we do this he said, well, if you can find
-- of course, we had never endorsed any
Republicans. I think the only one we ever
endorsed was -- at that point had been Guy
Valella. He was an Assemblyman and that's
because he was Guido Menta's cousin and Guido
was the associate director of political action
27
in DC 37.
So, you know the way politics works in
unions, so -- so Jim and CSEA had helped me kind
of create a relationship and we endorsed,
actually, seven Republicans. We worked hard for
Calandra in the Bronx and Marchi in Staten
Island, working very closely with CSEA
affiliates and with the firefighters, who also
we had had no relationship in the past, out in
the Staten Island campaign for Marchi, who won
by a hair's breadth.
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 CSEA and DC 37 which politicians better
take cognizance of because it had now married a
largely Upstate somewhat Republican union,
although I always believed that in its heart of
hearts and its rank and file even in the old
days that if you peeled away the Republican
county guys you basically got Democrats in CSEA.
But together -- so when PEC came about
later on, so it was not just CSEA/DC 37 and our
28
relationship with the Teamsters, it signaled a
remarkable power center and all of a sudden the
Republicans had two things goin' 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 CSEA would in a lot of its places.
(B) That it was CSEA/ DC 37 and the
teachers and the firefighters and the cops and
the correction officers, et cetera, and that was
when a number of Senators and staff members
started to say we can create a permanent bond
and then CSEA said, well, we'd like permanent
agency shop but why don't you just give it to us
with the sunset and if you feel like we screwed
you, you can 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 gotta
be done every two years, but they don't -- you
know, it's -- they also made a pact with the
devil ‘cause they don't dare not do it, and
that's basically how it came about.
Then years later I remember one
29
morning it was like maybe 3 a.m., Jim
Featherstonhaugh and I were sitting outside of
Warren Anderson's office and they were -- 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 lobbied our asses
off for it.
And I remember sitting in this outer
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 somebody came out and said
he'll see you and we went in. And Warren said,
I can't do it. He said we have other
constituencies which, in those days, meant the
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.
And we said fine and we, you know, we
kind of walked out. We were exhausted and
discouraged and stuff like that, but there were
no other unions in the room so, in effect, he
was talkin' to us but through us he was talkin'
to PEC. But in some ways, even though Barry
Feinstein personified PEC as the leader, as the
lobbyist, 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 and especially the Senate.
INTERVIEWER: Talk about the POSH Act
because that was more of an outside campaign,
one that rank and file --
MR. ADLER: OSHA.
INTERVIEWER: -- could get behind and
be --
MR. ADLER: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: -- more actively
involved in --
MR. ADLER: When I came to Albany,
John Corcoran who was my predecessor, had been
working on OSHA for at least four years with no
notable progress whatsoever. And once we got
agency shop and we started focusing in on other
issues. The thing that the blue collar guys in
30
31
both our unions were most interested in was
PESH, 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 -- 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 gonna 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. The Teamsters --
for the Teamsters it was very big and sanitation
32
guys and the transport workers. They all had
major issues; lung issues and things like that.
And so when we had our first PEC
meeting in the -- in the wintertime, 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 PEC 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 Sol Weparin,
who had replaced Seymour Posner and Seymour
Posner was one of these guys, he had originally
come out of DC 37 and he was -- Seymour Posner
was the guy 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 was, you think it's easy being a tool
of labor?
So (laughter) so, that was Seymour.
He was nuts and he also was -- you know, I mean
he worked for us very hard but he wasn't that
respected and in the Senate I think parts of
33
that was like Dick Schermerhorn. You know, I
think he was there kind of to shove it up our
nose in a way ‘cause he wasn't really that
interested in labor. He was pretty
conservative. 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 CSEA 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. He liked to play
with language and think about, you know, all the
different parameters of it and stuff like that
and he was 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 CSEA, from DC 37, the
Teamsters, from the bus drivers and others, to
talk about the impact.
We brought in a bunch of retirees. We
got the people at Mt. Sinai in the OSHA group
34
down there. You know, they've done a lot of
research. They put together a research paper
for us. We got them to do a hearing in the
Assembly on the issue. We got them to do a
hearing in the Senate on the issue. We did all
of the groundwork stuff on this thing.
I think -- I think CSEA ran a letters-
to-the-editors campaign in the Upstate papers as
well to kind of, you know, 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 gonna get Levy and show him
the OSHA problems and herein lies the story.
So I talked to my blue collar guys and
we decided that among the places we'd take him
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.
And 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
35
floated in it because of the density and stuff,
and the stink was so bad they had like 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 wintertime the
temperatures got really cold and the snow came
4hrough.
So we took Norman Levy to Owls Head
and above this big churning mass was a catwalk
that went all the way round so the guys could go
around, check different parts of it, make
adjustments on the wheels and stuff like that,
so we dressed Levy in a rain slicker with a hat,
because the air was always 100 percent humidity
in there, and -- and rubber boots, and we take
him up on the catwalk to show him what was goin'
on, you know.
And he'd been on trucks and he'd been
at sewage sites and he'd been in the tunnels of
the Transit Authority, we really moved him
around, but this was something else. He was
pretty game till he got up there and there's
this catwalk -- and this catwalk has got barely
anything to keep you from going right off the
36
catwalk and into the thing except this very
narrow rail but, you know, you could slide under
and over.
And he's walking along the thing and
we got one of the -- one of our foremen is
walking, great big guy, is 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 says, you know, you're lucky you didn't
fall in, Senator.
And he said 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 in order to 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 said because they don't care,
you know. They paid off -- they paid off the
37
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
gonna do an OSHA at that plant and we're gonna
have a hearing. So we have a hearing and so we
go to testify and when I get to testify on
behalf of PEC, and we had workers there.
I tell the story of a place in Long
Island City where on one side there's an auto
paint place and they've gotta have exhaust fans
and an 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 and stuff like that, so --
and then we give ‘em 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 says, well,
that place with the two sides. I said I don't
38
know. He said, well, there is such a place,
isn't there? I said, well, there could be very
well, right?
(Laughter. )
MR. ADLER: So we stretched a little
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, you know, the Business Council is
against everything that the workers are for, but
other than that we just didn't have a formidable
opposition. So the City of New York and, you
know, the counties and stuff put in opposition
things but we had done such a good job of -- of
bringing the issue home to individual members
and making it very clear that this was our
number one issue, that -- 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 -- of the public
employees.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about how the
Mario Cuomo endorsement came about.
MR. ADLER: Well, I don't know how it
39
came about at CSEA but Victor Gottbaum and Ed
Koch were not gettin' along that well and Victor
wanted an alternative and Mario was lookin' for
the endorsement. I remember Victor going in to
see -- to see Victor and he said, look, Mario
Cuomo's running against Koch in this primary and
he can't beat 'im but I don't care.
And I talked to McGowan. I think it
was McGowan. Maybe it was McDermott by then,
I'm not sure, but he said we're gonna go against
him and I just want you to go in there and make
Koch bleed from the ears.
And he said CSEA's gonna be on board
and the Communication Workers are gonna be on
board and Schenker doesn't know what he's gonna
do and Jan Pierce and you are gonna run that
show and you're gonna be the inside guy and he's
gonna be the outside guy.
So I immediately picked up the phone
and called Jim Featherstonhaugh and I said are
you guys gonna do that? He said absolutely. He
said we can't have Koch. He said first of all
we can't sell him to our members. You know,
he's the mayor of New York City and he's very
40
City and our people won't trust him and, you
know, we know Cuomo. We have a relationship
with him and while I'm not personally that fond
of him, he's gotta be a lot better than Koch and
right now Koch is a big threat because everybody
assumed he was gonna win.
So the -- we all -- a bunch of us met
with Andrew Cuomo and with the guy who was
managing the campaign, whose name escapes 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 in that at
that time.
Feinstein was with the -- was with
Koch. A couple of the unions were gonna do the
Republican. A couple of the uniform guys were
gonna do the Republican but basically it was us,
CSEA, Transport Communications, Auto Workers,
Electrical Workers and the garment trades and
there were a 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.
41
And they said, well, you know, we
don't like to be dictated to and I said, well,
you know, fine. You have -- it's your
prerogative but you have to understand
something. We're -- we're gonna endorse Cuomo
but there's a difference between endorsing him
and doing a real campaign.
And by that time, by '82, we were very
Muscular politically. CSEA was, DC 37 was. We
had large, trained 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, so 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 gonna 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. I went back to Gottbaum and Gottbaum
said he would release me and he released me to
42
the campaign and CSEA released Bernie Ryan,
although I don't know how Jim Featherstonhaugh
ever practiced law for those four and a half
months because he was -- virtually did nothing
but travel Upstate New York on behalf of -- on
behalf of Cuomo. He was in more places than
Cuomo was.
Of course what happened at one point
they turned against Bernie, and that came about
-- oh, and the thing about the Cuomos was is
that you could be for them 99 percent and if you
made one faux pas they acted as if you were, you
know, Osama Bin Ladin.
And I don't know if you heard the
story, but the story is that Bernie was invited
to speak to Alan Chartock's class, political
class, and Alan said that everything that was
said in that room was confidential and Bernie
took him at his word and he said something about
the campaign or about the Cuomos.
And one of the kids in the class was
like a budding journalist type and he
immediately went out and told a reporter and it
was in the papers and the next thing I know I've
43
got Andrew storming into my office and, you
know, we're firing Bernie Ryan.
I said, well, that's interesting since
you don't pay him, you know, and he's a
volunteer and he's a CSEA official. He's out of
the campaign. I said, well, you know, he's not
out of the campaign because if he's out of the
campaign then you're gonna lose a lot of other
people.
And I went into town and got Striker
from the Teachers because by that time we had
had the AFL-CIO convention and the Teachers had
come along with us and Pat came into the room
and I explained what was going on and, you know,
Pat is like tough, tough, tough.
And she said, well, you're not
throwing Bernie out of the campaign. You throw
Bernie out of the campaign you're throwing Civil
Service Employees Association. What are you
gonna do, close the office in Albany? You have
no operation north of Rockland County and she
said, besides which -- and she was running all
the phone banks all over the state with mostly
teachers for Mario -- and she said, besides
44
which, if Bernie Ryan's goin', I'm goin' and
Norman's goin', so you're not firing anybody.
And Bernie was very upset about the
thing. I was on the phone with Jim and all of
them and, of course, they didn't do that but it
was like -- the Cuomos were assholes but they
were our assholes, which was really the whole
thing, but it was a come-from-behind campaign.
We provided a lot of the personnel.
Many of the people who worked on the campaign
were on our payroll. Today you'd go to jail for
it, you know, the rules are so much different,
but then it was much more flexible.
But you'd show up in some county and
there'd be a rally for Cuomo and there'd be a
hundred people at the rally and 98 of them would
be from CSEA.
INTERVIEWER: CSEA really sold Cuomo
MR. ADLER: They sold Cuomo,
absolutely, totally there. And 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, you know, I
45
think a lot of them just would have stayed home
figuring, you know, you got two guys from New
York City. You know, what's our stake in this
thing?
And Cuomo, if you read the diaries,
you know, that he wrote about this thing, he
really -- first of all, the only person he
thought he owed anything to was Erastus 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 and
so herein lies one more story. Then you can ask
me another question.
Right after Cuomo was sworn in --
well, Cuomo was elected. Then we had the PEC
convention and so I went to -- I think it was
the Fallsview or the Nevele for the PEC
convention and Mario called me there and said
I've hired Michael Deljudice to be the budget
director, I think he was, and I think David
Burke was the secretary to the Governor. What
do you want?
Well, I'd worked with Cuomo long
enough to know I didn't want any part of him. I
46
said I -- I'm going to back to the union. You
know, I like being with the union, and just be a
good governor.
He said, no, no, no. He said you can
be in the executive office, you can be somewhere
else, da da da and, you know, let me know what
you want. So I said, okay, but I knew I wasn't
gonna do it, so I went back to the 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 there was a lot
of ‘em. It was like -- I don't want to
exaggerate the number, but it seemed to me it
was Like 1000 or 1200, but it was a formidable
number.
So I got a call from the Times Union
and the reporter 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
47
called me on the telephone and he was flyin',
man. You know, the -- and I said, wait, wait,
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 DC -- and he said, well, there were
no DC 37 people laid off.
I said, hey, we're all in this thing
together. You laid off our brothers and sisters
in the Civil Service Employees Association. I
said you can't conduct your governorship like
that. You're gonna be a one-term governor.
And he said, well, I expected more of
you and he slammed down the telephone. From
that day on there was bad blood between me and
he and the first that happened is that Michael
Deljudice called the press and said that the
reason that I had bad-mouthed the Governor is
that I wanted to be the Secretary to the
Governor and I was jealous because I wasn't
named to the post, so --
INTERVIEWER: And that kind of set the
48
tone for the Cuomo Administration.
MR. ADLER: For the Cuomo
Administration and for the continuing acrimony
and it just proved what Barry Feinstein always
said, which is that there is no good deed that
goes unpunished.
INTERVIEWER: The -- was the Cuomo
campaign a benchmark for CSEA in terms of its
political credibility?
MR. ADLER: Yes, because it -- NYSUT
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 its --
I think CSEA got the largest notch in its gun
handle, in 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
49
members worked, you know, staffed these little
tiny offices, you know, on Main Street and store
fronts and up a flight of stairs over the
hardware store and stuff like that, and they
were there.
And then they -- CSEA also did a
rather remarkable get-out-the-vote operation,
both the primary and the general election. I
mean, if anything, Lehrman scared us more than
Ed Koch 'cause Ed Koch was still, you know, a
New York City Democrat but, you know, I think
that -- I think that this was a very important
watershed politically for the CSEA.
And I think at that point the
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
50
the line, after I set up my own shop, that's
when Larry approached me and said, you know, I'd
like to -- ‘cause I'd done a lot of writing and
creation of instructional materials modeled
after the Black Rock program at UAW.
Of course when I -- when I first got
in I looked around to see who had the best
political education and the best was at UAW.
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 I --
and we were always -- CSEA and DC 37 were always
sharing, you know, that -- at least our level
was sharing that kind of stuff, and so I had
developed it.
And Larry said, you know, we've got
the infrastructure now. Now I'd like to do the
-- the organiza...you know, the political
education stuff.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about some of
the personalities you worked with. I mean
you've certainly talked a lot about Jim
Featherstonhaugh. Tell me about McGowan, tell
51
me about McDermott.
MR. ADLER: Jim McGowan was a real
salt of the earth union 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 and files and let ‘em run
everything.
But he also understood his own
limitations, which is why he relied more and
more on -- on the Featherstonhaugh 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 a very
sharp guy because he -- he un...he knew how he
got where he got and he understood what some of
the problems of holding together this enormously
disparate and argumentative union was about.
Although, you know, there was a period
there where CSEA really lost some of its compass
52
and it lost its Suffolk 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 always used to say that Jim,
you know, if the Professionals march out
tomorrow morning, you guys would be a better
union for it, so I wasn't always sure that the
creation of PEF 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 Victor Gottbaum spent some time with him and
we always came away thinking he may not be the
sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was
certainly -- there was very little bullshit in
the man and he always said what was on his mind,
sometimes to the detriment both of he and of the
union, but you -- what you saw, I believe at
least, what you saw is what you got.
McDermott was a different breed. He
was better educated. He was more sophisticated.
He was -- he was more of what one of my
chauffeurs at DC 37 once described as a con...as
53
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 than
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, or whether or not the Pennsylvania
affiliate was having a bad or good relationship
with the leadership in Washington but, you know,
his successor was very, very different in that
way .
And so that was the time that the
union, I believe, structurally made its greatest
strides in putting together real departments and
real ways of working and also developing much
more rigorous criteria for titles and promotions
and things of that sort.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me -- tell me about
your observations of Danny Donohue on the
leadership scene.
MR. ADLER: Well, Danny's the best
politician the union's ever had in terms of
54
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 -- of
the shop, so to speak, 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 fates 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 national union movement.
I think that -- I don't know whether
either of his predecessors were up to it, but I
55
think -- I think he probably is and so in that
way there is -- that would be the biggest
difference.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you think CSEA
has been able to succeed over a hundred years?
MR. ADLER: Well, one reason is
there's a need for it. Many of the members that
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
making a great deal of money.
A lot of them are unsophisticated in
the ways of politics in the world. CSEA gives
them a voice politically and lower-paid workers
in my experience are much more understanding of
the value of unionism than higher-paid workers.
When I was at DC 37 you could always
get a hospital worker or a school lunch room
worker or a guy who filled potholes to come out
and work in the political campaign but
librarians and the social workers and the
accountants, the guys who ran the snake house at
56
the zoo, forget about it, you know ‘cause 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, Moe's cousin the
way it -- it was years ago, and so they've got a
much -- 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 work force and I think
that the other thing is that the servicing arm
of the union has gotten better and better.
If anything, the union's biggest
liability is the liability that all unions have,
57
which is 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
gotta 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 -- and I
worked for a lot of unions -- that hasn't faced
this problem.
But in a way it's a testimony to the
-- to the success of the union that the members
are largely willing to say you handle it so --
and so there 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 membership.
(Conclusion of interview of Norm
Adler.)
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