The Vote

Eight of the nine original petitioners were still around for the June 9th vote, along with seven new summer canvassers. Office director Jason Tipton announced the upcoming union vote on the preceding Friday night, June 2. At this time, Tipton also announced a meeting that coming Monday night, the 6th, to discuss unionizing. Thus far, we hadn't any indication as to where our office directors stood on the union issue. This would change Monday night.

During cash-out that evening, Tipton, rather than announce the beginning of the meeting to the entire office, very quietly took aside the seven new canvassers one at a time and, careful not be noticed by the eight petitioners who were busy with that night's paperwork, herded the new canvassers into the next room, where he began lecturing the new canvassers on how inappropriate a union would be for this office, how especially inappropriate the Teamsters would be, and how the office and the organization would be financially crushed by the burden of canvassers with union protection. Only when two of the petitioning canvassers happened to look up from their paperwork and notice the meeting in progress did an opposing viewpoint enter the room, and have a chance to respond to Tipton's lies, misconceptions and exaggerations about the Teamsters, and about Unions in general. For more on what was said by Tipton at this meeting, and also by others later in the summer, see FAQs.

Despite Tipton’s shameful efforts over the next two days to perpetuate the same basic misinformation and scare everyone away from unionizing, the LA door canvassing office voted 13-2 in favor. This includes a 5-2 vote among the new canvassers, who, in the space of only a couple of weeks, had seen enough to know that this organization, for all the noble causes they professed to support, needed some real help.

After we won our vote 13-2, we thought the job was done. We assumed that FFPIR would be forced to cooperate immediately. In reality, winning the vote only means that your union efforts were not DOA.  Only after you have won the vote does the real, prolonged battle begin.