Introduction
Florida is a right to work state. Your coalition has no power. I have been here for 27 years and I have never known your coalition to call for a wildcat strike, a slowdown, a sit-in, a march against an offensive body, e.g., UF utility provider Duke Energy, or a campaign—not a Jeremiah performance to plead that the City be nice– to support visibly the oppressed Gainesville Regional Transportation Union, when several members told horror stories about unfair discipline, overtime hours, discriminatory pay practices. Your mayor Po’ Poe urged them to take individual grievances within the framework of a contract. When the new contract was renewed, the Coalition was silent. It could have cheered or jeered. But Jeremiah is the polite union champion. Far be it for the coalition to clap or cheer when a labor organization gets a good agreement or to boo in the Auditorium when it does not. In short, you guys are a joke.
But you are used effectively by the Democratic Partly Executive Committee of Alachua County to pretend there is a local labor voice. So you will proudly endorse their candidate for the at-large City Commission seat- Harvey Ward’s financially supported darling of the left (yeah right) Reina Saco, ardent activist in Students for Justice in Palestine, Inc., during her salad days at the Levin School of Law, 2015-2017, an organization which does not trouble itself in being clear whether it is anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish, or both.
However, your Mayor Lauren Poe does not include you in his pretense Friendship 7, which includes the Chamber of Commerce. So it stands to reason that the City Commission is not listening to you whenever there is a conflict with the Chamber of Commerce.
What is disgraceful is your willingness to be a pretend voice, e.g. for any issue which might concern labor—e.g. Charter Review Commission, use of prisoners in the labor force, minimum wage, etc., and to show up in mass (e.g. two or three of you) to protest an inequity. None of you—Jeremiah, Rosa, or Jayson—shows any inclination to listen to anyone else.
For instance on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2019, all three of you showed, and applauded the City’s willingness to consider the tough issues, e.g. minimum wage for all people in all of the businesses run by contractors and subcontractors and vendors.
Y’all didn’t utter a peep when I complained that the City EO Office failed in recent years to report on the few contracts or purchases Gainesville makes with or from minority contractors or vendors. Were the minimum wage demands imposed across the board, minority contractors and vendors likely would disappear altogether.
Please, please. Travel outside of Gainesville to, say, California, to see what happens when you have a real union in the vicinity—say, for example a place where teachers strike from time to time—not just go to Tallahassee to bleat that teachers are underpaid.
As organizer of not one—but two successful labor organizations—e.g. Group 4 unfair labor practice success against a magazine publisher, and the local at Latino Justice, chapter of National Organization of Legal Service Workers, UAW-AFL-CIO—I deplore the support you lend to the phony image that Gainesville is a progressive city. Read on!
- I support a minimum wage for most workers but given that there is fixed budget I would prefer that experienced Public Works employees, and older workers get raises rather than have young part-time lifeguards get the increase. As for contracted workers, see what I have written previously about having more minority businesses paying workers less than minimum wages than having fewer minority businesses, perhaps with no employees at all because they cannot afford minimum wages.
- I would join a demand in writing that the 2018 report be published immediately. I would join the Coalition in asking for the public record trail to reveal the actual City response to this initiative and I would urge the Coalition to hire an attorney to get those records when they are withheld by the City, as they invariably are.
- I would suggest that a Coalition delegation go to every mass media in Gainesville—Sun, Guardian (sic), Alligator, Iguana, Fine Print, Sinclair and Fox Communication as well as ABC-TV, WUFT—to publicize the comparative poverty in this area. When those efforts fall on deaf ears, I would call for a mass demonstration at the outlet—hell; it would be unprecedented to have such a protest on the lot and in the outer offices of the Gainesville Sun, Guardian, and Alligator.
- To encourage large employers to do right by their employees—e.g., Publix—I would have rotating pickets periodically at each Publix store, for just an hour or so but sooner or later Publix would notice. I certainly would get UF/SFCC students involved with leaflets to them and by them throughout the community to stress a prepared list of demands which are not being met.
- As for paid administrative leave in the event of emergency closures, I would have to know the specific events which have happened before I could answer this question intelligently.
- I have been an employer only once—as director of Greater Orlando Area Legal Services, Inc. (GOALS) I learned that the predominantly white union of lawyers in fact was a company union which separately itself off the predominantly minority support staff, because they feared their salaries would be cut across the board by the Reagan-controlled Legal Services Boar. I blew the whistle on my employees, forced the leaders flee to Boston Legal Services, and I was justifiably terminated. Either you’re a boss or a worker. You can’t be both.
- I would form a Renters’ organization before I did anything and support what its members believed they actually could accomplish—instead of your B.S. goody-two-shoes bullshit.
- There is nothing the City can do. The history of allowing contractors to build wherever and whenever they pleased has prevented any serious attempt to create affordable housing. The fact that the lone attempt to do so—Heartwood, the vestige of Kennedy Homes—has failed miserably should be a lesson to all of you B.S. artists that affordable housing is not going to happen, short of a nationwide depression. The one organization which might become more involved in advocating for affordable housing would be the VA, especially for veterans with military service compensation because of injuries suffered while on active duty.
- I certainly support any pay/benefits apprenticeship programs in Gainesville including the creation of such at local high schools.
10 I support free RTS bus passes for K-12 students. You should not be worried about improving transporting but advocating for RTS union employees. Despite your stupid belief that you can come to a fork in the road and take both, stop advocating for issues which actually hurt workers, e.g. RTS workers. Add more routes without getting more benefits and protections for drivers will cause them to flee.
- Gainesville should be a sanctuary city and take the punishment meted out to those communities by the Trump Administration.
- Oh, go babble with Commissioners Johnson and Simmons and Mayor Poe’s endless workshops, book clubs, and meetings on these issues. These are NOT labor concerns. You are not all things to all people. Poor people and poor workers’ interests often clash, especially when you are dealing with public agencies with comparatively fixed budgets. My father, a radical beyond your imagination, was a racist, because he believed based on facts, which the poor, often minorities, scabbed because they needed the dough, in the garment industry factories when those employers faced union action. There are contradictions that you simpletons refuse to acknowledge as you come down on the “right side” with someone else’s money.
- I will support any leafleting campaign on the campus to let the students know about the abuses by University of Florida.
- This is the stupidest question of the lot—how will you work with UF to ensure better access to affordable, quality housing in Gainesville? UF is the employer, the large employer. They are your alleged adversary.
Finally, the Coalition used to hold a forum before it endorsed the candidates of the Democratic Party of Alachua County. I suspect that you could not must a real crowd to attend. Regardless, I would urge you to set up a debate between you all and me on these issues (Of course, that is the same “never going to happen” action as those you preposterously invent. Gabe Kaimowitz, J.D. 1967, M.A. 1988, B.S., B.A., 1952, 2013.