UAW Local 651 member Jeri Cooper was helping out on an organizing drive in Michigan and taking classes in Maryland when she first heard of the Conference on Creative Organizing.

Cooper studies organizing at the AFL-CIO’s George Meany Center National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., for a week every three months and through correspondence classes when she’s assembling Delphi auto parts in Flint, Mich.

With only a few weeks to go before the UAW election at Venture auto parts plants in Grand Blanc, Mich., Cooper realized something was needed to maintain momentum and keep up workers’ spirits.

"I had been asked to work on the volunteer team in the Venture organizing campaign," she recalls, "and I thought the conference might help."

So, for three days last July she found herself immersed in discussions with other union activists, swapping ideas for using humor, skits, and songs in organizing campaigns.

The conference, says Cooper, "made you get in a creative thinking mode. We were taught how to take the situation we were in and put it to words for a song, to write chants and short skits, how to make your picket line lively."

The conference grew out of the Great Labor Arts Exchange, the long running program that the Labor Heritage Foundation designed for union performers and artists.

Songs and skits that play off a company’s slogan or a workplace issue can add energy to organizing campaigns says Peter Jones, director of the Labor Heritage Foundation.

"Organizing campaigns are often about dignity, solidarity, and social justice," says Jones. "Creative techniques help people showcase these aspects. They also help educate people, build morale, and bring people together."

On the last day of the conference, a group of activists huddled with Cooper to brainstorm creative solutions to real-life dilemmas. The result was a spoof of the opening theme song from the 1960s TV sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies" that accurately and comically addressed health and safety problems at Venture.

When Cooper returned to the Venture drive in UAW Region 1C, copies of the song sheet quickly found their way around the Grand Blanc plants.

"They had fun with it," Cooper told the AFL-CIO’s America@Work magazine. When that song had run its course in the campaign, volunteer organizers and Venture workers came up with a pro-UAW version of Queen’s "We Will Rock You" with the refrain "We are, we are Union!"

The next month, as reported in the October 1999 Solidarity, the 600 workers at Venture voted to join the UAW by a two-to-one margin. The new UAW Local 524 members are now bargaining a contract that will address health and safety concerns and other issues.

"It was a great experience," Cooper says of the conference. "It’s a good program not just for organizers or an organizing campaign but for any group that wants to pump a little life into their membership or any creative person who needs to get that spark back."

This year the Conference on Creative Organizing and the Great Labor Arts Exchange will be held June 18-20.

For information call the Labor Heritage Foundation, 202-842-7810, or the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, 301-431-6400;
e-mail: info@georgemeany.org
website: www.georgemeany.org

This article includes material from the November/December 1999 issue of America@Work.