Okay, this is December the 7th, 2004, and we have Ed drabs with us. Ed, why don't you start by telling us who you are and what your association has been with CSEA and asked me over the years?
Okay, I started in 1979 with AFSCME as an assistant legislative director in New York. Eventually became the legislative director in New York and worked for the International Union in New York State for 22 years.
Okay, what do you do now?
Now I am with Bolton St. John's, which is a governmental and affairs firm here in Albany, New York.
Great. Do you remember when you first became aware of an organization called CSEA?
Actually, my father was a local president with AFSCME in a small school district in upstate New York, Scotia Glenville. He had the non-instructional employees unit that varied from 75 to 125.
So during the when the Taylor Law came into existence, those units which were unorganized at the time, organizers from CSEA and organizers from AFSCME would come out and try to get those organizations to affiliate with them and create units.
And so that's when I first ran into CSEA and became aware of the organization.
And how did you come to be hired by AFSCME?
I did an internship with the AFLCIO when I was going to school, did an internship with AFSCME. It was when the State Senator Howard Nolan took on a rastis corning for mayor of the city of Albany in the AFSCME units, hated the mayor because he wouldn't allow them to organize and bargain collectively.
So AFSCME put a campaign together here and I worked on that with Maggie Dresen who was in the executive, the legislative director for AFSCME in New York, worked on that campaign.
After school got hired by the UAW and then her assistance position came open. And so I came back from South Carolina where it was working for the auto workers and took a job working with Maggie.
So if you started with AFSCME in 1979, which was really right at the time when CSEA had affiliated, what do you remember about those times in terms of the dynamics of the relationship?
Well, when I came in to the operation, it was just as the affiliation had occurred. So AFSCME was starting to staff up in the state because they had the new affiliate.
The other thing that was going on at that time was the current president of AFSCME was Jerry Wurf and the DC37 executive director Victor Gapam was preparing to mount a campaign to take Wurf on for president.
And interestingly enough, we had a legislative office that had the AFSCME legislative office, the DC37 legislative office, and the CSEA legislative office all housed in one contiguous office.
And so you had a lot going on because you had the affiliation going on and both Wurf and Gapam wanted that affiliation to occur. So they were for that. But at the same time, they were preparing to do battle with each other.
So they were watching the moves of each other. And so it was a very interesting office to be in to say the least.
There had been prior to the affiliation kind of an adversarial relationship between CSEA and AFSCME. How did you counteract that as a staff person when the affiliation went forward?
Well, it was interesting because I think most of the legislative and political department, almost all the people that we hired were very, very young. We were all in our 20s.
And we had no history. In fact, some of the folks in the office came from internships with either AFSCME or with CSEA or DC37. So we had this mix of young people that had no history of the problems there.
And the adversarial relationship of fighting for units and things like that that had gone on before. And one of the things that I've always found in the union movement is where people may fight about a lot of things. There's usually agreement on the political program.
Everybody wants the same bills passed. Everybody wants more money for contracts and for member benefits and things like that.
So that's the one place where even if things aren't working in other parts of the union where people that have diverse opinions on how the units should move forward, agree on the legislative and political program.
So we had a bunch of people there that had no history except as interns or very young staffers working together. We were all working on the same program. And we were told, and this was the thing that was really fascinating about it, we were told just to go out and service members.
We were told to go out and do trainings, go do outreach. And that's what we did. We did what good legislative and political staff should do. And even though all these politics were swirling above us, we were out dealing with members, organizing them, getting them to work together on endorsements, on legislative programs, on letter writing campaigns and on electoral politics.
So we didn't worry about what was going on above us. We just went out and did the program.
What you talk about what was going on kind of above you. The one hand you have DC37, which to that time was really the flagship of AFSME. And suddenly there's an affiliate of AFSME that has even more members and actually is kind of like striking in some ways an independent position because there was a lot of issue with maintaining CSEA's independence as well.
So how did the dynamic of that relationship work and how did you see that evolve over the years?
Well, I think you had basically two things going on at the same time. One was this was this worth got bomb thing. And a lot of that was centered in New York City. And a lot of that was centered within DC37.
On the other hand, you had this situation going on where you were basically CSEA and AFSME were dating. I mean, that's pretty much what it was.
They had made it an agreement that they were going to take a look at each other and that they wanted to affiliate. But CSEA always had the opportunity to pull out of that relationship.
And so one of the things that we were always very cognizant of was understanding the CSEA traditions and their independence and how they got to be to where they were in their structure, which their structure was so much different than the AFSME structures.
So the AFSME was in the 37 structures and the AFSME of New York structures, very much meshed. They were the same structure, same governance policies.
CSEA was an entirely different way of governing themselves and setting themselves up. Plus they came from a long tradition of being outside the AFSME of LCO where AFSME affiliates had already been part of the AFSME of LCO.
So understanding those traditions and the desire of the leadership and the members of that organization to retain those things that were theirs.
But to also say you can have those things but you can be part of this greater organization. If you're part of this greater organization, it's going to be good for you here in New York and it's good for public employees nationwide.
What did the CSEA affiliation do for AFSME's credibility in New York State?
The main thing was is that AFSME was a major political player in the city of New York because of DC37 but not a major political player statewide.
The CSEA affiliation gave the ability to have large numbers of members across the state, gave as an institution for AFSME, it gave them significant amounts of members in every political district in the state, both assembly and senate.
It gave you a platform to be major players in the gubernatorial and statewide elections that occurred.
Federally it was important because New York had a large congressional delegation and now it wasn't just New York City that AFSME was concentrated in but it had the ability to have tens of thousands of members in districts across the state.
So it really for both CSEA and AFSME, it was a huge opportunity to take this political muscle that was to create political muscle and that's what happened.
What of the benchmark achievements for CSEA and I would assume for AFSME to actually occur I think in 1979 which was the passage of the Public Employee Safety and Health Act.
What do you remember about the campaign to move that legislation forward and what significance do you think it's had?
Well I think the significance of it was that was just the beginning the tip of the iceberg of understanding what would happen if AFSME created this statewide political operation with all the affiliates working together, what role that meant in the labor movement.
Because you have to understand at that point in the labor movement the public employees were not a real part of the labor movement.
They had a thing called the Public Employee Conference that really lobbied and represented the public employees outside of the AFL, CIO at that point.
And it was a significant, significant piece of legislation because the Public Employee Union did it together on their own.
They asked me for the first time CSEA DC37 and the other asked me affiliates work together on a campaign and they won.
And obviously it meant health and safety protections for New York workers across whether they worked in the city or whether they worked in Hicksville or whether they worked in Amherst.
And it was extremely, extremely important in establishing worker safety rights in this state.
What was the dynamic like between the AFSME staff and the CSEA staff?
It was interesting. I mean, I'm going to talk strictly because I was a political operative.
I'm not going to talk about field service stuff. I'm going to talk about politics again.
One of the reasons that we were all so young is that we were not threatening.
The people that were the leaders or executive directors of the DC37, Norman Adler, Bernie Ryan, or those guys who had been around a long time,
you had the law firm that represented the CSEA at the time. They had big political credentials.
So we were not a threat to those political credentials. We worked really hard. We did the grassroots work and organized the members.
But they felt secure that their direct access to leaders wasn't being threatened by the international union.
Worth at one point is thought about coming in here and hiring a major law firm to represent the international union.
And went about talking about doing that and ran it by Victor Gopman, who was, of course, threatened by it.
We ran it by the CSEA folks who were threatened by it and they said, no, we like your political operation just the way it is.
And so it stayed just the way it is. The interesting thing was that Wurfwood made the biggest mistake in the world by doing that because he was never going to be, you know, the international union was not going to be the major player here because it didn't have the major amounts of members.
However, by taking a group of young and energetic field staff and putting us out to work with the CSEA members and their locals, that was the best thing he could do because we brought some of the AFSCME's political traditions to them.
They brought some of theirs to us and we formed and created this new political operation. So, you know, you did what you should do, which is a bill from the grassroots up and that's what we did.
Tell me a little bit about 1982 and the support for Mario Cuomo as kind of an underdog candidate running in a Democratic primary against Ed Koch, then the mayor of New York.
What did AFSCME and CSEA bring to the table in that primary?
Well, I can give you a perfect example of that campaign. Ed Koch was endorsed. He was the mayor of the city of New York. So, he had the entire New York Democratic-City Democratic party with him.
Upstate, everybody thought he was the inevitable governor. So, all the Democratic office holders immediately jumped onto the Koch campaign.
It was, of course, an enathma to DC-37. CSEA said, man, we've seen what he's done to 37 members. We can't have him as governor of the state in New York.
I was sent out to run Buffalo and I came out to the Buffalo office of the Mario Cuomo for Governor Campaign in July.
And the office consisted, and I'll always remember this, there's a huge Koch office, eerie county Democratic headquarters, everybody.
I go to an office, there is two phones. There is the CSEA regional political guy who's not like the kind of regional political guy who have on full-time leave, but a guy that's working full-time at a mental hospital and then coming in to do the thing myself.
A guy that worked at a parking garage and another guy who, he and his brother had so upset every faction of the Democratic party in Buffalo that nobody would talk to him.
And I walked, I came out there and that was the office. We had nothing. And the only reason that the Cuomo campaign survived was because the unions put in the resources to keep the campaign alive.
And then as the campaign took off, you had progressives and other labor organizations come to the campaign. And eventually we won in eerie county against everything.
And it really was a watershed moment because it showed public employees and labor as a whole in New York what they could do if they were politically organized.
What did you actually do with Cuomo during that campaign? Was he hands on out there working the members, how did you build up support among the membership ranks for this individual?
Well, it was, I mean, Cuomo, anybody that's seen Mario Cuomo knows he's an incredibly charismatic and unbelievably good speaker. And he did that. He would come to Buffalo and he would speak and just do these speeches that were absolutely incredible, fire up the crowd.
The thing that we had going for us really at the beginning because Mario Cuomo was pretty much an unknown quantity in Buffalo in New York. I mean, he's a, you know, Italian American from Queens who's been a secretary of state, you know, I mean, he and Lieutenant Governor, I mean, he was like pretty much unknown.
The thing was that we really worked with was the Koch record. What Ed Koch had done to public employees in the city of New York. And we had very concrete things that the Koch administration had done.
So what we had was a guy that was unknown but charismatic and could talk to working people. His speeches were about the issues that they cared about. He spoke directly to them. And then he was running against a guy who in office had made public employees public enemy number one and had used his administration to attack public employees.
So that's what we used to build the campaign. And it was exciting because since it was a gubernatorial race, whether you were in a school district local or a city local, whether you were in a state local, whether you were blue collar, white collar, it didn't matter. This was the governor. And so you can involve everybody in the race. And so it was an opportunity, you know, it was really the first opportunity since the merger to bring everybody together on a statewide.
So it was a very exciting race because we're able to touch all facets of the union and bring them together on it.
For you as an AFSCME Stanford, what do you remember about Jerry McIntee's election as president of AFSCME and what role did CSEA play in that?
Well, being in New York, what I remember is when that happened, you know, got bomb thought he was going to win.
And he thought that he had the entire CSEA unit. And in fact, he didn't. And CSEA split and Jerry McIntee won.
What I remember is being in our offices and Jerry coming through with Joe McDermott and them talking and looking at all the people.
And I remember that there was 28 of us before McIntee was elected and within three months there was four of us.
So it was a traumatic time to be a New York State staffer. In my shop, I had, I believe, six people.
And at the end of it, I mean, Sean has seen myself with the ones left in the state and the other ones were all gone.
And so we went from this huge, huge staff, which was really an organizing staff. That's with the level that we were doing it at.
Because that's what we were all intents and purposes doing is organizing CSEA to bring them in.
Even though they were an organization that had existed, we were organizing them in the amount of outreach and things were doing to a staff that was the kind of staff that you would see in a normal, asking the state.
What was the reason was it like a purge of warfoil, or got bound potentially, got bound?
No, I think it was what it really was about was the fact that when Jerry Wurf got sick, he made a determination that he wanted to change the structure of CSEA and the relationship of CSEA and its law firm.
And so he basically sent those of us that worked on the international staff to CSEA convention to basically infiltrate and to also hand out lit and stuff and say, basically look at the relationship that you currently have with your law firm and your leadership has with your law firm is not a good relationship.
It's bad for you, it's bad for institutionally.
And so all those staffers that went and did that were now basically had basically, I don't know what the term you'd want to use, but they had basically what they'd done politically was a real problem.
And when Wurf was no longer there, it was the mission of the international union when Wurf was there, it was no longer the mission of the international union to change the structure of CSEA, to change the relationship with law firm.
And so when that happened, those people that went on that and aggressively gone on that campaign were major political liabilities. And so that's what happened.
So let's come back to Mario Cuomo after CSEA and AFSCME help ensure that he is elected governor of New York State.
It seems that the relationship deteriorated. What do you remember about the early years of Cuomo and how that relationship changed?
Well, the amazing thing was is that those of us who had been on the campaign, those people that had been out in those campaign headquarters in July, knew the only reason that Mario Cuomo was governor of the state of New York was because of the commitment of public employee unions and labor to make him governor.
And his first budget came out, which is he had his state of the state, and his first budget came out within 23 days of him taking office. And it has major, major layoffs and cuts for public employees.
So public employee leadership and CSEA leadership went and met with the governor and they said, you know, you've been out there, you've told us all this rhetoric about how you care about working people, you care about, you know, our families, our jobs, make sure that we have secure jobs, good benefits, you know, good health care.
And the first thing you do is lay off thousands and thousands of us and Cuomo said, well, I'm the governor and this is what I have to do to balance the budget, not looking at, you know, any of the, this is what I have to do.
And I'm hoping you'll support me because you've always been my supporters.
And the leadership is like, incredulous, like, we're not going to support you. We're, you know, we're going to fight these cuts, we're going to fight him as hard as we can. And so I'm immediately going to attack.
Now for Cuomo, you were either loyal or you weren't loyal. And this was disloyalty. We had been with him. He was our guy, we should have trusted him. And the decisions he made were the right decisions.
He was doing what was best for the state. And we were just being a special interest here. Not the fact that the people he was laying off or the people are handing out palm cards and doing all those things for him less than four months ago.
So it immediately set this rift. And this is what happened during the entire Cuomo administration. Cuomo expected 100% loyalty from his supporters. So when you deviated from that, whether you were an environmentalist, a unionist, whatever you were, once you said no to him, then you were out.
You were no longer part of the coalition. You were no longer part of his team. And he saw each one of these as a personal front and a personal acted disloyalty when you disagreed with him.
So we went from probably the most significant political triumph of the public employee labor movement in this state to going immediately to war with the guy that we put there.
And what lesson is to be learned from that?
Well, the lesson that I always tell, this is one of the first things that I always tell locals when we're endorsing is that you have to remember that when a guy becomes the office holder, they become the boss.
Okay, they're politician and they're a candidate now, but they're going to become your boss. And when they become the boss, they're going to do things that you like and they're going to be things that you don't like.
There's no boss that you like 100% of the time. Now, certain bosses are better than other bosses, but in the end, they're all bosses.
So you got to remember, you can't believe that there's going to be anything more than bosses. At the end, like them or hate them, they're going to be the boss.
Now, understanding that they're going to be the boss, there's better bosses. And there's bad bosses. So you want to choose the best boss possible of the candidates you're given.
And that's the thing that public employees have that no other union group has. You have the right to pick your boss.
So what you have to do and why you want to be politically involved is you want to pick the best boss of those in the field possible.
As you look back at the Cuomo years, what do you think are some of the highlights in terms of what CSCA and ASME were able to achieve during that time frame?
Well, I think that the Cuomo years in a lot of ways were very disappointing for public employees.
And the fact that this was a guy that I think had tremendous potential to be a great governor. And he really wasn't a great governor.
I think that there's a lot more things we could have done. And again, this may be, I may be very jaded by the fact that I had to bump up against these guys every day.
And I saw lots of things that they could have done for public employees that they didn't do. And, you know, I mean, I think we made some strides, made some strides on some pension things.
We made some strides on some health and safety issues. But it's almost like I see that time period.
The relationship between the public employee unions and Cuomo was never the same after that those layoffs.
We were never welcomed back in the house as full participants again. He toyed constantly with running for President United States and would, you know,
go in and out of that. But the thing that was really tough was it was really tough from a lobbying point of view to deal with these guys because they just on things that you would have thought would have been a natural for a quote unquote liberal,
Northeastern Democrat. We're not easy to do with him. So I don't look back at those years as great years for us. I, we did some good things, but the potential to do some great things was, I think, lost.
And that when George Bataki gets elected governor in 1994, right. CSEA stays neutral. Right.
In that race, I believe that 37 endorsed Cuomo. That's correct. Yeah. But it was kind of a lukewarm. Yeah. It was, it was unenthusiastic.
And it could probably be argued that CSEA staying neutral certainly had some impact in terms of why Bataki ended up being elected governor.
But basically both CSEA and AFSCME faced the same issue when Bataki comes into office that you're looking again at major cuts and major layoffs.
Right. How did, how did the two unions respond and what was the outcome? Well, that was, I think, one of the most, it was, it was, it was a rough time. It was exciting time because I think that that's when the unions really learned how to fight back and fight back aggressively.
We brought thousands and thousands of workers into Albany to protest the layoffs and the cutbacks.
And we fought hard in the legislature to try to reverse those. We weren't always successful. We lost, you know, a lot of members.
The thing that that fight taught us though and was to that we needed to have a public policy operation to rival the business councils.
They had, you know, the business council and the, you know, Republican Party put out a lot of propaganda and a lot of numbers and a lot of things which we had no way to fight back.
When we fought back against, it was the union said this or the union said that. And what really came out of that fight was the understanding that we needed to have a public policy think tank which eventually became the physical policy institute where progressives, whether they were in the nonprofit community, the religious community, the environmental community, the labor community,
would have a operation that would look at statistics, look at numbers, look at the economy and come up with public policy programs that were not just union based but much broader and appeal that had academic credentials to them that we could work with progressive legislators and give them in which had credibility in the press.
The other thing that happened there was it really was the labor movement, whether it was construction trades, public employees, the AFL CIO as an institution worked hand in glove with public employees on that public employees were becoming a bigger and bigger percentage of the AFL CIO.
And that was really when for the first time the entire labor movement coalesced around issues that were important to public employees on education and social service issues and fought together.
And that fighting together led to better cooperation than they had ever been before. So what comes out of that fight is a progressive think tank to come up with solutions to the problems that face New York which weren't just the medics were like in a budget hole, we got to save money, the fastest way to do it is cut personnel.
So what you did is you came up with some progressive solutions to problems plus you had the entire trade union movement working together, fighting together and that led to a greater level of cooperation than ever before.
Potaki by being a right wing Republican when he took over forced all of us to see New York State, New York State government in a different way than we'd ever seen it before. And we came up with new solutions to fight the Potaki administration.
And we were incredibly successful in that in the long term, the short term we lost the battle but in the long term we won the war because if you look at the Potaki administration it continually moves to the center from being on the far right.
If you look at the New York State Senate which came in with him which was seen as a right wing Senate, it continually moves to the center. And that was because of the successful campaigns that we waged and the development of public policy arm strengthened with a political arm.
And if you looked at New York State Republicans, if you were to go to any other states, major AFS, states, Ohio, Iowa, places like that. And you said this is the policies of the governor and this is the policies of the Senate, they would think they were democratic.
They would not believe that they were Republican and we took a Republican party that would be considered now a red state Republican party and we moved them to the center because of vigorous political action and having a strategy that said we need to have policy solutions and then we can push those policy solutions into the general public and move forward on that. We're not just going to be beaten up.
Taking a step back a little bit earlier to 1992. What do you remember actually in 1991? What do you remember about CSEA's endorsement of Bill Clinton, President?
Well, that was an extremely exciting time. One of the things I remember, Joe McDermott, Mario Cuomo was getting ready to announce in 1992.
And McDermott had talked to Macinty and President Macinty and you know, Cuomo was a known quantity and it was quite obvious that New Yorkers did not, New York absentee did not want Cuomo endorsed.
And we wanted to hurt him immediately. So the night before Clinton was about to, Cuomo was about to announce whether he was going to run or not. We had no idea.
Joe McDermott was hooked up with CNN, BBC, I mean all over. All the trucks that came to Albany to do the live coverage of the Cuomo announcement. Joe was doing interviews and saying, we don't like this guy. He's not good for public play, he's not good for working people.
He may be doing himself as a progressive Democrat but this guy is really a bit. And meanwhile, every New Yorker is like, oh, we love the governor, we love the guy, he's a great guy. And Joe was resolutely going out there and hammering. He's not good for working people, not good for union people. If he runs, I'm going to cross this country. I'm going to talk to workers about what he's done to workers in this state.
And that was a major, major thing when Cuomo talked about that he didn't want to run because he's going to be tied up here in budget negotiations and he's going to be tied here with Ralph Merino.
Another thing that's not talked about is that the New York unions and especially CSEA was going to send out true squads that was going to be a real problem for this guy when he went out to run for president.
On the flip side, do you think it helped Clinton to have the support of the labor group in the Northeast?
For Clinton, the absme endorsement, and I'm going to tell you when we first started this before he was endorsed, you know, he was very skeptical about Bill Clinton, about whether or not he'd be good because he was a governor from the small southern state.
You know, there were some really good things about him, but there were some real concerns about him.
And the absme endorsement was the first progressive major group that Clinton got. He was part of the Democratic Leadership Council.
There was a war on in the Democratic Party about how the DLC was going to take the party too far to the center.
So for this institution of public employees with, you know, based in the Northeast and to do an endorsement was a huge, huge boost for that campaign.
It said to progressives that one of the most progressive labor organizations says this guy is okay and believe in him and think he can win.
And he up to that point had no groups like that. So it was, it was the first major endorsement that started moving Clinton in a way that he could begin bringing progressives in because you have to remember he's running against Hark and people like that.
There was these real progressives in this race that people thought that's where labor is going to go. And absme stepping out and doing Clinton said, no, that's not necessary where labor is going to go.
And that's what he does have progressive credentials.
And how well in contrast to the script you provided a Cuomo, some of the C became elected. How well did Clinton maintain the relationship with CSEA and ask me during his eight years in the White House?
Well, the thing that I have to say is, you know, just being a New Yorker, I have to say that during the eight years of the Clinton administration, we were always listen to.
And that was part of the discussion. We were always, you know, we didn't win on every issue. You never win on every issue.
But the White House was always, you know, accessible. And partially that was because we had New Yorkers down there, guys like Harold Dickies and things like that.
That were New Yorkers and Donna Shalela at HHS. So, you know, some of the folks that came out of New York, you know, were down there, part of that administration, indecision making roles.
And responsive to the needs of New York, it was a completely different relationship and a much more positive relationship.
And I know from the membership point of view, people felt very proud that they'd worked on those campaigns and felt that the right person had won the office, and it had been good for working people not only in New York, but across the country.
It was an entirely different feel.
Now, you also played a very significant role in Hillary Clinton's election to the Senate. Can you talk about how CSEA had asked me to support that campaign?
Sure. I, during the beginning of that campaign, it was actually on AFSEME staff. And I took a leave of absence to become Senator Clinton's deputy campaign manager for upstate New York.
So, I was the campaign manager from everything north of Westchester. And again, the labor movement, but especially CSEA and AFSEME, were integral in making that campaign.
They were there from the beginning, and they brought their organizational muscle and credibility to her campaign.
And the interesting thing is that there's always this perception that everybody in the labor movement is a democratic liberal.
Look at the CSEA membership, and especially that membership in upstate New York. There's a lot of Republicans. There's some Democrats. There's moderates. There's liberals. There's conservatives. They're all over the lot.
The one thing that they do bring to the table is that they're involved and they're active. And for Senator Clinton, who was coming in as First Lady of the United States, a quote unquote carpet bagger for some folks, she came in and met with CSEA members across state. She did a listening tour, which I think if you want to talk about what made that campaign, it was a listening tour, which is the beginning of the campaign,
where Senator Clinton went and sat in groups of 50, 100, 200, and had New Yorkers talk to her. And our folks were always at those meetings, and they were talking to her. And she was listening to them.
And a connection developed between her and our folks and our folks and her. And the great thing to me, I always describe to people what it's like working on a campaign with Senator Clinton, is you drive up in the car,
and on one side, there's people that are just ecstatic to see her and adulation. And on the other side of the car, there are people that have their go home Hillary, just like absolute hatred at times.
One thing you learn very quickly is always with side of the car to get out of you. Always go to the right. If you go to the left, they may never see you again. In fact, I think there's still staffers out there. They went to the left that we don't have anymore.
But the thing about that was is that the CSEA folks, because their institution had a great relationship with the Clinton White House, a great relationship, they believe in their institution, they're part of the endorsement process, they're part of the institution.
We got Republicans, conservatives to listen to her. And when they sat down and listened to her, they liked her. And you had an institution that really believed, saw her for her. And that was a huge help. And it was institutionally having the phone banks, having all those things was great.
But at the beginning, having those folks come to those listening things and getting out and talking to was really, really important.
Well, whether it was Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton, talk a little bit about the dynamic when they come in for a personal appearance at an ASP or a CSEA event and what happens even with those folks who might not, the surface be supportive of them.
Well, there is close in this business as you get to rock stars. They are bigger than life. They are famous. They're bigger than life. You see them on TV.
But the thing about them is that they have a real connection to the trade union movement. Clinton carried a, President Clinton carried a AFSCME card from Arkansas.
So they come in and what happens over and over again is I don't like them. I don't like them. You know, I see them on TV. I don't like them. I don't believe in them.
But they come to a CSEA event, a convention. Well, everybody's there whether you like them or not. And then they come in and they speak. And they start talking about the issues that are important to you.
Well, I believe in that. I believe in that. I believe in that. And suddenly you're not looking at this caricature, which is what they try to make them into cartoon characters.
They're no longer cartoon characters. There's somebody that's sitting there and talking to you and they're talking about issues that are important to you and that you actually believe in. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.
And then when they do the one on one stuff, when they actually are able to take the time to meet folks on the rope line to talk to leaders, one on one, they're incredibly engaging.
And so what you do, whether it's John Kerry and Swiftboats or these guys with white water or all those things, they try to caricature them so that people can't listen to what their actual message is.
And then the great thing about having an institution that allows you to come and see them without that stuff. But to see them and listen to their message, their message is all about the issues that we care about.
And that's why you'll see people who you would not normally believe supporting these folks. They support these folks because they see them in the setting institutional setting and they understand why people support them because they're talking about the issues are important to them.
And then another very important individual who had, I think what you could term a special relationship with CSCA and asked me was Carl McCall.
I wonder if you talk about how you saw him grow in office and really develop that relationship with CSCA and asked me.
And I'm very interested because when I first started lobbying and working for the union, Ned Reagan was the control of the state in New York.
And we had basically an adversarial relationship with that office. The controller has all of the, you know, is basically the trustee for the money, the deferred wages of these thousands and thousands of public employees.
And we had an adversarial relationship with these folks. He didn't try to help them to maximize their gain. He, you know, was a very, very strange relationship. He was not, he was more like a banker.
I'm that's the only way I could, I could term him. He didn't care about, you know, if they said, well, we're concerned about how our funds are invested. Well, I'm doing what's fiduciary, really responsible.
Well, there's more than one way to do what's fiduciary, responsible and what's good for our members is to do this and he would not listen, not listen.
Carl McCall comes in and it was the most shocking thing I've ever seen in my life. We would sit down with him and we'd say, you know, Carl, we have a concern.
Really? Let's talk about it. He saw more than one way to do things fiduciarily, responsibly.
We wanted to know what our members really wanted to do. He understood that this was their wages, that they weren't governmental monies. They were their wages that had been deferred so that they could retire.
His championing of the cola was probably the, you know, major reason. The unions had fought and fought and fought for cola.
Having the controllers say these people are right, they deserve this. It was a hugely, hugely important factor in making that happen.
The Senate, the Assembly, the governor could no longer hide behind the controllers at all. I'm not sure if we can do this. This was a controller that says, not only is it right, but we must do it.
So there was no hiding anymore. And his, he became, you know, an advocate, which was very, very exciting to see a controller that understood what the retirees and the future retirees needed, what their dreams were and said, let's work together to make those dreams a possibility.
And the cola victory is probably, you know, one of the most significant victories in the last 30 years. Going back to Taylor La. Taylor La Cola, those are absolutely landmark pieces of legislation.
And cola would not have been possible if Carl McCall had instead shoulder to shoulder with CSEA and fought for it.
Let me do this. Let me ask you about some of the personalities you've encountered over the last close to 30 years now. Tell me a little bit about Bill McGowan.
Bill McGowan was a member's leader. He was a guy that really had rose up from the rank and file and Bill never lost any of that, you know, when he was dealing with members, the members felt like they were dealing with one of their own.
And that was, I think, his real strength as a leader. He knew where he came from. He understood his members and what they expected.
And, you know, when you were with Bill McGowan, you were dealing with a genuine rank and file guy that had moved his way up and was trying to do the best he could for his members.
And, you know, you never felt that Bill was trying to do anything but what was best for his members.
Joe McDermott, a very different personality, what were some of his strengths and weaknesses?
Joe McDermott was out of the PS&T unit. He was an engineer, I think, by training, wasn't he? Or worked in DOT, I know that.
Much more intellectual. Joe was very, where McGowan was much more personality-wise, epivestant Irish kind of guy. Joe was much quieter, much more reserved, brilliant tactician, very smart, understood where he had to move the union and didn't do it by personality, but did it by strategically thinking how things,
how we wanted the union to move forward and then working with people to get them to that spot. But strategically, very, very bright.
Okay, from that same mirror, Irene Carr.
Irene Carr was one of the nicest people I ever worked with institutionally. A person who genuinely cared about members and staff.
I mean, when you were around Irene, you felt like you were around your grandmother. You know, she gave off that aura. And I think that rank and file folks and leaders and staff all had the same relationship with her. They felt that they could talk to her. They felt that she cared about them.
And again, a person who really was all about making the institution a stronger institution and moving it forward and a real pleasure to work with.
Okay, Danny, don't you?
Danny is absolutely one of the most fun leaders I've worked with.
We used to ask me lobbyists. He used to call us the munchkins. He goes, what are you munchkins involved in now? Are you getting into trouble?
I mean, not getting us into trouble. I mean, he is a guy that has a strategic vision and also has a great personality.
And that, I think, has made him, you know, the leader that he is today. He understands, and I've seen Danny, the thing I've seen Danny, you know, working with local members.
I've seen him working with staff. I've seen him working with the governor and, you know, presidency of the United States.
And Danny is always Danny. He understands who he is, understands who his organization is, understands where he's trying to get.
And he's no different, which I think is the hardest thing in this business. If he's sitting down with the president of the United States, the governor of the state of New York, or a rank and file member on Long Island, he's the same guy, same personality, same person.
I think that's a really, really hard thing to do in this business. And he knows who he is, he knows what his institution is. And people know that when Danny says what he says, that that's the way it is.
And he doesn't pull punches and he doesn't put on heirs and he doesn't sugarcoater. He doesn't, it's not a real spinner. Danny just says it. And that is a big thing.
So many people, especially in politics, they spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. Danny just says, here's where we are. Here's what we want. What are we going to do?
And that's, that to me is Danny's, you know, Danny's strength as a leader.
In a similar vein, talk a little bit about how you saw Jerry Mackinthe and Bill Lucy interact with CSAA over the years.
Mackinthe understood, I think, implicitly, the merger had occurred and he understood that a different relationship had to develop.
And he understood and started, you know, the worst years had been a whole, he was totally different than Jerry Wurf.
And he immediately developed a professional relationship with CSAA, which said, look, you guys are a big part of this institution.
You have an independent history. I'm going to respect that. But I'm also going to ask you to work in tandem with us.
And what Mackinthe did, Wurf was in a hurry to make CSAA a part of AFSCME culturally.
Mackinthe understood that there was an important culture in CSAA, an important culture in AFSCME. And if you let the two blend together, you'd have the best of both worlds.
And he was disciplined enough and patient enough to let that occur. And that's what's happened is that both sides have brought some really important things to the table.
And he's let that, you know, come together, take the time to make that happen. And now you have the institutions that you have today, which have blended together bringing the strengths of both traditions.
And he understood that and had the patience to allow that to occur and ended up with a stronger institution because of it.
How about Lucy?
Bill always, you know, was a guy who came in. And again, I think one of the things about Bill is, again, an expiring speaker, a speaker that understands.
And I think especially because he's African American, especially how workers, you know, especially public employee workers at times are treated as second class citizens in both the labor movement and within their communities and understood that and used that to educate members that there was another way.
And if you stayed together and you organized together that you could do that. And I think that was, you know, I've seen him speak numerous times.
And Bill always says, look, this is where we are. And if we work together, we got to get some some place else. But very, you know, always about moving forward that wherever we are right now is not where we should be that there's a better place that we can get to.
And that you have to confront your enemies. And, you know, that's what I think he was very good at and bringing a message to, you know, New Yorkers is, look it.
You may think the things are okay right now. But there's a better place you can get to and you have to realize that even if you think you're okay right now, there are people out there that are going to take that, try to take that away from you.
And they may be nationally, they may be locally, but you have to realize that that they're there and you have to fight those people.
Tell me about the best thing and the worst thing that happened to you in your experiences with CSCA.
I think the best thing was probably working with the political directors that have been here. Larry, especially Fran Turner, just some really good, incredibly talented people that have been turned out to be some of my best friends, people that work so hard for the rank and file that love their jobs that are talented work incredible.
And we had fun together. I mean, this job we laughed, we fought like hell in campaigns and stuff. We worked a zillion hours conspiring over the legislature, but working with those folks was absolutely the best, the best part of this job.
I think the worst part was when Wurf died and we thought we were all going to get fired. I lean and I just got engaged, we just bought a house and we thought, well, we're going to have to sell the house and move to Iowa.
That was probably the worst. Probably the worst actual moment was during that convention, Joe Dillon was the executive director and we were told the AFSCME staff not to come to the bar.
We had the convention that we infiltrated and I didn't get the memo that we weren't supposed to go to the bar. So I went down and we had three women on my staff and myself and walked in and Joe said to leave.
And I said, Joe, this is a public bar. I'm going to ask me international representative. This is your convention. I can stay here. He said, Eddie, you got to leave. I said, Joe, I'm not going to leave. I've got to stay here because I thought that's what the mission we were supposed to do.
I said, Eddie, I'm going to tell you for the last time you got to leave the bar. I said, Joe, I'm not going to. So he hauled off and punched me and knocked me over a table and the girls picked me up and I left and then I found out we weren't supposed to be there. So that was pretty funny.
So I guess that's kind of funny. But yeah, I think that we've had some great campaigns and the people, the members, the leadership, that's what makes an institution. That's what it's really all about.
We just had fun out there. We had fun working on those campaigns and we had fun winning and we won more than we lost. And that was the good part.
Tell me, can you give me what you think might be some of the important context for the CSEA affiliation with AFSCME in terms of watershed events for the labor movement in New York State?
Probably as far as public employees in New York go, obviously the Taylor Law and the organization DC37 is important. But the affiliation of CSEA with AFSCME is I think the most important thing that's happened in labor history in New York because it took two very diverse organizations, merged them together.
And then they just brought a strength to that merger and what came out of it was probably the strongest state public employee labor movement in the country.
The movement that is so strong that it's impacted all facets of life in New York State and how the people of the state are governed and how services are delivered.
And that to me would not have been possible if these institutions had stayed separate. Those coming together, each bringing their strength allowed the organizations to develop in the way that they did which has made a tremendous, tremendous organization for public employees in New York.
One final question, why do you think CSEA has been able to endure for close to 100 years?
I think that they've been able to endure for 100 years because workers have the right to be organized and workers have the right to have a say in their jobs.
And whether 100 years ago it was getting together to make sure that you had insurance to make sure that you were taking care of when you died, you had a death benefit or things like that.
Or whether it's sitting down as a shop steward bargaining contractor being represented in the New York State Legislator, public employees have always understood that they were stronger together than by themselves.
And they came together and they formed CSEA and they were never ever going to be turned around from that. No matter what happened, they were going to stay together, they were going to have an institution and that institution was going to reflect them and their needs.
And as long as CSEA continued to do that, it's never going to go away. And that's why it's been around for 100 years because it's reflected the needs of its membership.
