The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

October 21, 1997

Flash back 1997. October 21.

I was wearing an orange paisley skirt and a black sweater with boots. It was chilly in South Jersey.

I did my first organizing meeting on my own with a group of nurses who wanted to organize a union at their hospital.

Prior to that, I had spent about a year and a half knocking on doors, what we call “housevisiting,” talking to workers in Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina about the union. I had gotten good at cold calling, gotten over any hesitance I might have had about talking to strangers, but I was born an organizer. I naturally talk to people whether they like it or not. I am good at making a pest of myself. It is hard now to repress that part of me.

My boss at the time, my old friend Larry, was based in North Jersey, and he trusted me to do the meeting by myself. We did run through the agenda, but we both knew that real organizing doesn’t follow an agenda. It is not the scripted show of politicians that I sometimes have to try to adapt myself to. Millennials were kids, Gen Z was not even born, I didn’t have a cell phone, and people actually talked to each other.

I was just barely 23, and the average age of a nurse was 47. People often asked me, “Are you old enough to be doing this?” “Are you someone’s daughter?” Well, yes, I am someone’s daughter, in fact I have three parents, but I am here in my function as a union organizer.

I had to win their trust and confidence and lead them through a process that was terrifying. People lose their jobs, sometimes, though not as often as they think. But they go through psychological torture. Their managers are forced to pull them into one on one meetings and lie, threaten any kind of deal they may have. I remember one nurse who was told that she could no longer arrange her schedule to take her young son who had cancer to his chemo appointments. Management can hold workers in mandatory anti-union meetings for their entire shift if they want. And it is perfectly legal for them to lie, which they do, all the time.

I learned so much in those days. I was determined to become the best organizer of my generation, and if I didn’t I came darn close. Certainly among healthcare organizers there were none better. Julie Oppenheimer was up there… does anyone know what she’s up to? I miss Rachel Brickman, a legend just a few years older than I am, who taught my friend who taught me. I miss Jon the crazy organizer from Boston. I miss Larry but we talk a lot. I miss my girl pals, Emmabear and Lisa. Hi Emmabear! We both went on to get MPHs. We were a blonde, a redhead and a brunette. We used to call ourselves Larry’s angels.

I lost that campaign by 6 votes. Everyone votes in a union election. Management flew in no votes from vacation. Is that legal? No. There’s nothing you can do about it. Labor law had no teeth in those days, and I hear it’s better now but I’m not on the ground anymore. One of my friends is an NLRB agent and he keeps me posted from time to time (that’s National Labor Relations Board.)

Do I miss it? Yes, I miss certain aspects of it. As Joni Mitchell sings, “It seems like you’ve gotta give up such a piece of your soul when you give up the chase.”

But I don’t have that kind of energy or fanaticism anymore, and I doubt I could deal with what passes for organizers today. I do know some quite fabulous young organizers, but I suspect they are the exception not the rule. The scripted interactions of the woke generations have infected the movement, I am told, and I for one could not deal.

I miss the reality of organizing. The cold hard numbers that do not lie. The real wins, the real losses. It is so far from the shadow world of social media and messaging. Of course we had messaging, and we had message discipline like the new generation could probably never believe. We had order, authority, and you didn’t expect to feel “safe.” I’m laughing at the thought of the younger generations trying to survive what I survived.

There are a few things I would have done differently, but not many. The things I would have done differently are seemingly small things, but they are ways in which I started to do what Harriet Lerner calls “de-selfing.” I cancelled two vacations because men wanted me to. I gained a lot of weight in some weird subconscious effort to not be called a slut again. I put too much faith in other people and too little in myself. I stopped going to church.

I eventually lost the weight, went back to church, got a job as Director of Organizing at age 28 and the rest was interesting.

I am not so young anymore, and I like being older. Being young was swimming upstream against a very rough current. It is odd now to be a Gen Xer living in a world where people can’t put down their iPhones, but I find ways to adapt. I like to read books, talk with humans, and pet cats.

Today is another day. I look off at a new horizon. It is always the first day of the rest of your life.