10/1 Weekly Email + Hispanic Heritage Month
Hi all,
I have a few new updates and reminders, in the following order this week.
October Virtual Meeting
TPDN Updates
UAEA Nonprofit
ASU Football Discounts
Adopt a Path Updates
Podcast Updates
Hispanic Heritage Month
1. September Virtual Meeting: Here is a link to both a video and transcript of our September 24th virtual meeting. If you are interested in viewing either you will need to request access - this ensures that we are only sharing the content with members.
2. TPDN Updates: The Tempe Professional Development Network (TPDN) let me know about two upcoming events they’re hosting, and asked me to pass them onto members. For those who are unaware, TPDN is a City group that helps City staff network and develop the skills needed for career advancement. More information on TPDN can be found on the Bridge - if you’re interested, they have a list of perks and other upcoming events through the end of the year.
First, TPDN is celebrating National Coffee Day on October 1st at the Tempe Social Bean (715 S McClintock) from 7-8AM. Attendees can meet TPDN members and enter a raffle for a chance to win a free giftcard.
Second, TPDN is also doing a pickleball social on Wednesday, October 14th, from 5:30-7:30PM at the Electric Pickle in South Tempe. This is a casual networking event with free food and drinks meant for TPDN members, but anyone who signs up between now and then will be able to attend.
3. UAEA Nonprofit: If interested in sitting in a UAEA non-profit board, please fill out the following form by tonight. If you have any additional questions about our tentative nonprofit plans, please feel free to reach out to president@uaeatempe.com.
4. ASU Football Discounts: ASU is offering City staff discounted tickets for 5 upcoming Home Football games. Tickets are 33% off base prices and available in a range of sections across the Sun Devil Stadium. More information can be found at this link.
Oct 3 (Sat) v Baylor
Oct 10 (Sat) v Hawaii
Oct 24 (Sat) v Kansas State
Nov 7 (Sat) v Colorado
Nov 21 (Sat) v Oklahoma State
5. Adopt-a-Path: Thank you to the members who came out and helped with our Adopt-a-Path on Saturday morning. It was a cool morning with a light breeze and we were able to finish everything in about 1.5 hours. Our next cleanup is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, November 21st - we’ll send out more information about it in late October.
6: Podcast Updates: UAEA has published our first-ever podcast episode! A copy of the episode can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts - you can also add the RSS feed to your current podcast or music app by using this link.
This first episode covers what we did/discussed with members in September and reviews the list of Member Resources we’ve been posting at the bottom of each weekly email. Our current plan is to release an episode roughly once a month that will cover the previous month’s activities and provide an overview of either a UAEA or City resource.
7. Hispanic Heritage Month: September 15th - October 15th is Hispanic Heritage Month so I wanted to once again highlight a few Hispanic labor icons. I’ve highlighted some famous ones like Dolores Huerta, Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, Bert Corona, Santiago Iglesias Pantin, and Luisa Moreno in prior emails - you can read about those people on our blog. As a reminder from last year, this historic month starts in the middle of September and runs through October 15th so it can include the Independence Days of countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico.
Linda Chavez-Thompson (1944-present): I took most of this information from an interview Linda gave in 2004 - it’s a great interview that goes into depth about the struggles she faced, the difficulties of balancing family life with union work, and her insights into organizing - you can find the whole thing here.
Linda was born in Texas to a sharecropper family - her father raised cotton on other farmer’s lands. Linda was born “Lydia” but had her name Anglicized to “Linda” by a teacher when she entered school - the same was done to her brother Felipe, who became “Philip,” and her brother Jose, who became “Joe.” In 1954 her father was unable to get a sharecropping contract and instead began weeding cotton fields, something Linda started to help with at age 10 during her summer breaks. At age 15 her family encouraged her to drop out of school so she could weed cotton full time. She continued her education with textbooks that her family members brought home and taught herself how to read and write Spanish - up until that point, she had only been able to speak it. In later interviews she said that her greatest hope as a child was to be a Sales Clerk for Sears, Roebuck, seeing that as one of the only opportunities for someone from her background and with her skills.
At age 19 Linda switched to housecleaning during the non-growing season and continued that for several years until 1967 when she was hired as a secretary for the Construction Laborer's Local 1253 in Lubbock. She had no background in secretarial work but was bilingual and could clearly communicate between members, 60% of whom only spoke Spanish, and management, the majority of whom spoke English. She was passionate about the opportunities presented to union members and the benefits that union work had, and slowly became involved with other groups like the AFL-CIO and AFSCME as opportunities presented themselves (one of her first outside roles was organizing resources after some tornados devastated Texas in 1970). She actively organized local city staff, ran union work on a daily basis, and helped create coalitions across Texas and other southwestern states, including the Public Employee Council of San Antonio and Bexar Counties. She became the Executive Director of her local AFSCME chapter in 1977 and became an International Vice President of AFSCME in 1988, the first Latina woman elected to both roles. While she was thrilled at both roles, she frequently faced barriers, and had to learn the subtle art of national union politics to exert influence and draw attention to the needs of the southwest. Many national unions paid little attention to southwestern delegates in the 1970s and 1980s due to the fact most of the states were “right-to-work,” - organizing was both costly and often unproductive. Linda pushed back against this by directing attention towards state races where national support could yield major pro-union changes to state policy.
In 1993 Linda was the first Latina woman elected to the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO, then was elected as the first-ever Executive Vice-President of the AFL-CIO in 1995 after a heated internal election, and remained in the role through 2009. She helped push a number of national campaigns throughout the 1990s, including one to raise America’s minimum wage, something which eventually occurred in 1996 and 1997. She later served on a number of non-profit and governmental groups to advance labor and Hispanic interests, including working with the National Committee for Community and Justice, the President’s Commission for Diversity, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, United Way of America, and ORIT, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers. I could not find a lot of information about Linda from 2009 to present, but I believe she is still organizing today at the age of 82.
Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984): Ernesto was born in the Nayarit state of Mexico - his family immigrated to the US when he was 6 to escape the impacts of the Mexican Revolution, but lost both his mother and uncle to influenza. His remaining uncle pushed him to focus on education even as they worked as laborers in Sacramento - when Ernesto was only 8, he reportedly spoke better English than most of the men in their laborer camp, and became an advocate to fight against their poor working conditions and contaminated drinking water. Ernesto slowly gained work experience as a messenger, clerk, court interpreter, and cannery worker, and won a scholarship to attend Occidental College in 1923. He continued to do field and cannery work during the summers while he attended school. After completing his first degree at Occidental, he gained a Masters in History from Standord, and then finished his education in 1944 with a PhD in Economics from Columbia. He was then recruited by the National Farm Labor Union, an early agricultural organizing union, to conduct research and education in 1948.
While he certainly assisted with their education efforts, Ernesto also remained involved in organizing, and helped plan and execute 20 farm strikes between 1948 and 1959. While he was happy with some of the successes, he felt that the labor movement’s efficacy was hindered by the exploitative nature of the working environment. Agricultural workers were often immigrants who were part of the “braceros” program, a temporary federal initiative to allow migrant workers into the US for brief periods each year during picking seasons. These workers lived isolated from towns and cities on private land and could not be reached by organizers - since they were also temporary workers, it was easy for organizations to abuse them since they knew they would only be around for a few months at most. This also meant that domestic farm workers had difficulty getting fair wages since farmers could undercut them with braceros. Ernesto proceeded to study and write about the abuses of the program, and published “Merchants of Labor” in 1964. This was an in-depth look at the discrimination, low wages, dangerous pesticide exposure, terrible living conditions, and other abuses of the program. This book is largely credited with changing public perception of the program, and the federal government canceled the whole initiative later that year. This made it much easier for labor groups to start organizing agricultural workers, and the surge in agricultural unions throughout the 1960s and 1970s is, in turn, partially attributable to this.
Ernesto continued to research and study labor and Hispanic policy issues throughout his life, and is credited on over 100 research papers or books. Ernesto was highly respected for his insights into labor and work-on-the-ground studying labor issues, and he worked throughout his later life as a professor at the University of Notre Dame, San Jose State University, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Multiple schools and academic buildings around Southern California are now named after him.
Member Meeting Updates: UAEA has confirmed 2 Tempe City Council Members will be attending our October Member’s Meeting. Councilmembers Brooke St. George and Bobby Nichols have confirmed they will be attending and Vice Mayor Arlene Chin has expressed interest (but is currently unclear on availability). We have asked the attendees to talk about what they’re working on in Council and answer questions from members - we’ll then summarize the meeting in a weekly email in case members are unable to attend.
Please submit any questions you have for the City Council Members in advance at this link. Please remember that Council does not exhibit direct oversight over the daily operations of Tempe departments (and are effectively barred from doing so under Tempe law) - questions about department operations may be better directed to the City Manager. City Council’s primary role is setting Tempe policy/strategic objectives, approving budgets, and exhibiting oversight over roles like that of the City Manager, City Clerk, and City Attorney. More information about the distinction between City Council and the City Manager’s roles can be found in Article 2 of the Tempe City Code.
As a reminder, the October In-Person Members Meeting will be on Thursday, October 15th from 12-1PM at the Don Cassano Room on the second floor of the Tempe Transportation Center (200 E 5th St, Tempe, AZ, 85281). There is one hour free parking in the City Hall Parking Garage or free parking on 6th St if you arrive in a City vehicle. You can rsvp at this link until Thursday, October 8th at 5PM.
The October Virtual Members Meeting will be on Wednesday, October 21st, from 12-1PM. You can rsvp for that here until Thursday, October 15th at 5PM.
Retirement Expo: Tempe will be hosting its annual retirement expo from 10-2PM on October 20th at the Tempe Library’s lower level. Representatives from Tempe HR, Nationwide, AZRS, and Galloway will be there to answer questions and give presentations. This is a useful event for all City staff, regardless of how close you are to retiring - proper planning now can make retirement come much sooner or be far more comfortable. No rsvp is needed to attend.
Tempe Pride Parade: Tempe PRIDE is once again participating in the Phoenix Pride parade this October 11th. Employees and their families are welcome to attend whether or not they are active members of Tempe PRIDE - you can either ride on the float or walk alongside. If interested, you can rsvp here.
Blood Drive: The next Tempe Blood Drive will be on Wednesday, October 7th, from 9AM-12PM at the Escalante Community Center. Employees can register here. The American Red Cross declared a state of emergency in July over critically-low blood donation levels - you can help support sick and injured people across the US by donating. As usual, the good deed can be reward enough, but Vitalant also awards points for donations that can be redeemed for giftcards or movie tickets.
UAEA Nonprofit: The UAEA Board has been tentatively exploring the possibility in recent months of creating and running a nonprofit (501c3) in tandem with our existing organization. Nonprofits offer several advantages that our current corporate structure cannot provide, including the ability to accept tax-deductible donations or gifts and the ability to run many of our annual events and initiatives tax-free. Many Police and Fire Unions around the country have non-profit wings that they use for fundraising, and we think establishing one would greatly assist our organization’s resilience in the long term.
With that said…nonprofits are also a lot of additional work, and would require an additional governing board beyond the current UAEA Board. While there could be some overlap between our current board members and the board of a non-profit, the non-profit would need to have some additional people sitting in board seats. Before we make any major organizational changes we would like to see if any of our members are interested in participating on the non-profit board - if we can’t get interest, we’ll probably table the idea for the time being.
Non-profit participation would be a great resume builder as well as an opportunity to positively shape UAEA for years to come. While we couldn’t guarantee this in the first year, our longterm plan would be to get all board members both a monthly stipend and UB hours to do union business. We estimate the total time commitment would be no more than a few hours per month, and major responsibilities like accounting would be handled by a professional accountant serving as the treasurer.
If interested in sitting in a UAEA non-profit board, please fill out the following form by Thursday, October 1st. If you have any additional questions about our tentative nonprofit plans, please feel free to reach out to president@uaeatempe.com.
Group Chat: If you are interested in being a part of a UAEA group chat, please fill out this form. Please make sure you have reviewed our rules and policies concerning conduct and content. Signups will be open indefinitely and we will put out some resource guides showing how people can download, install, and use the app once we have a better idea of how many want to participate.
Personal Cellphone/Email: If you would like UAEA updates to be sent to your personal email or phone number, please fill out this survey. We’ll get you added within a week or two to our contact lists.
UAEA Member Retirements: UAEA’s Board would like to start recognizing the retirements of UAEA members. If you’re planning to retire, please feel free to shoot us an email or fill out this form and we’ll send you some nice thoughts to close out your time at the City. If you’d like, we’d also appreciate if you could fill out our exit survey before you go - there’s an option to indicate interest in that in the survey as well.
Free/Discounted Summer Activities: If you’re looking for free or discounted things to do with friends or family this summer, this webpage has a list of activities in and around Phoenix.
Besides free days at certain museums, don’t forget about the Culture Passes offered by Maricopa County libraries. These offer free entry for up to 2 people at places like the Desert Botanical Garden, the Arizona Heritage Center, Reid Park Zoo, and the Phoenix Art Museum. Passes are first-come, first-served, for library patrons, but I just learned that their websites can tell you which are available at every branch.
Community Resources: UAEA is aware of rising fuel prices and how this is impacting members. We are having some internal city discussions about possible workplace changes, but also wanted to post some resources for members who may be struggling to make ends meet. This is a similar list to what we posted in November with a few new additions. Please feel to reach out if you have additional recommendations about local resources.
AZ Food Bank Network: This link contains information about dozens of food banks and assistance sites across Arizona. You can search by the directory and the zipcodes they provide services for to find food banks in your areas.
AZ Medical and Nutrition Assistance: This is an Arizona-State run program that can help connect people with Arizona State programs that provide assistance for people who need medical coverage, WIC support, or additional access to nutrition. I do not know all that the program entails.
Maricopa County Utility Support: This is a Maricopa County program that can help people receive assistance paying for utilities. Some cities have unique offerings while others are covered under one umbrella program.
AZ 211: This is a Arizona-State run help line that can help people connect with a variety of resources and support they may be unaware of in their area.
Tempe Employee Relief Fund: This is a Tempe-run program (paid for by employee donations) that can provide support of up to $1,200 to assist Tempe employees with unplanned emergency bills (housing, mortgage, utilities, etc).
Employee Assistance Program: If you have insurance through the City of Tempe, you can take advantage of the EAP, a group of resources which can provide free therapy, legal consultations, or classes on stress management.
Cheap Recipe Guides: These are two free cookbooks designed for cooking high-nutrition and easy meals on a budget. Even if you’re not a fan of the recipes, there are some good tips on stocking a kitchen with affordable and long-lasting staples.
Free Transit Pass: This contains information on how to obtain your free bus, streetcar, and lightrail pass as a Tempe employee.
Sun Bucks: This program offers direct payments in the summer to families whose children receive free or reduced cost school lunches
Discount Grocery Stores: This link provides a few examples of discount/salvage grocery stores around Phoenix that resell food that supermarket chains don’t want (everything is still good, usually stores get rid of items that are out of season or past their best-by date, even if still viable).
First Time Homebuyer Assistance: These links provide information on a few programs designed to help municipal or low-income employees purchase homes for the first time. Some are loans, some are down-payment assistance, some are direct financial support. The first link is an Arizona program meant for home buying in Maricopa County, but the same program is also available to Pima County residents.
Thanks for a great week, everyone!