As this website refers you to several other anti-FFPIR sites, including articles and blogs that detail their well-documented and infamous labor practices, and union-busting past, we will avoid in-depth discussion of these elements here, for brevity’s sake. While we would be only too happy to elaborate further for anyone who contacts us either personally or through this website, suffice it to say, the seven of us, each with at least six months experience in the LA door office, had seen our fill.

Before we unionized....

By the end of spring 2005, Regional Director Ben Flamm had come to the conclusion over the previous winter season that regardless of canvassing ability, general good attitudes, and pride taken in our work, these canvassers, after so much time on staff, no longer had total blind obedience to and absolute belief in FFPIR, and were therefore beyond repair. These canvassers needed to be gotten rid of. His solution, as the summer season loomed, was not to send in office directors like Monique Sullivan and Aliya Haq (summer 2004) who knew how to respect core staff and make their experience an integral part of a hugely successful summer, but rather to send in a director who had no conscientious objection to firing long-term canvassers simply because they refused to offer FFPIR total and unconditional blind faith and trust, and no longer tolerated their abusive antics.

In the third week of April, Jason Tipton, the upcoming LA door office director, was visiting the office for a couple of weeks that month to help. His official tenure in LA would not begin until May. During this time, Jason switched (wisely) six core staff members from a fledging Environment California campaign to HRC. One of these canvassers was Tiffiney Petherbridge, LA door canvasser of over a year, and, the core staff here will testify, the best, most enthusiastic and hardest working field manager this office has seen in years. After she missed quota her first two consecutive days upon switching campaigns, Petherbridge was told by Tipton that if she missed quota that third day, that he would “have to decide what to do with (her).” He did not ask her what the problem was, what he could do to help, or even offer to switch her to Sierra Club. Anyone who has canvassed here long enough knows an ultimatum when they hear one.

At this point, the core staff understood what was happening, and knew that if any of us wanted to ensure job security, we needed to organize. After discussing the situation with a former FFPIR director, and a former LA door office canvasser who now organizes for SEIU, we decided to approach the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. We initially made this decision based on the variety of occupations the Teamsters represents, but we have since become increasingly satisfied with our choice, based on the extreme, irrational and often self-destructive measures FFPIR has resorted to in its attempts to squash our union efforts. There can be no doubt that this or any FFPIR office wishing to unionize needs the most powerful, aggressive and uncompromising union they can find, and I cannot imagine having gone through this process with anyone other than our union representative, Emilio Arias, without whom this effort would been killed during the petitioning stage.