Working to Improve Milwaukee Workplaces

×

Expand

Photo via Juan Miguel Martinez

Juan Miguel Martinez is a union organizer and community correspondent with Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization (MASH), an initiative that focuses on improving employment and workplace standards in various Milwaukee industries. MASH launched in 2018 specifically to implement provisions for employees at the Fiserv Forum; their agreement included $15 an hour wages, half of all jobs at the arena filled by residents of targeted neighborhoods by ZIP code, requiring that employers source a pipeline of employees through MASH’s hiring hall, and protecting workers’ rights to fairly organize a union.

To start, I’d love it if you gave some history about how you got involved in union organizing.

I’ve been through a lot of jobs throughout my life since I was 16 years old. I think the one that I had most consistently was call center jobs, and call centers are absolute hell on earth (laughs). It’s the absolute worst; it’s very mentally abusive and the wages are not good at all, plus they hold a lot of stuff over your head with metrics and things like that. There’s always that threat of corrective action if you don’t be a machine exactly how they want you to be.

I was working during COVID, and I was at a place that I’m not going to say the name of ... but basically they had said that they were going to send everybody home except for my department, and my department was the one that was on phones. They said they would let us all work two days out of the week from home but we’d work three days at the office.

That struck me as kind of weird, and I think I had just had enough of call centers at that point (laughs). I called everybody at work that night and said that there’s really no sense in us working three days at the office and then two days from home—I mean we might as well be working all five days at the office.

I said that tomorrow morning we’ll march into the supervisor’s office and let them know that we demand to be let work from home. Everybody agreed, but right when we got up the next morning, the supervisor was already running around with her laptop and told us all to please sit down because she knew what we were trying to do.

So that’s something that’ll always happen with organizing—there’s going to be a snitch in your group. But we were able to get our computers to go home, which was cool. I don’t know how it happened, but then my friend Lindsay Adams—whom I’ve known since I was a teenager—had called me and asked if I was interested in organizing at all, because I had been writing a little bit about labor issues in a couple of papers. She had read some of my pieces and after that strike it had seemed only natural...that’s when I joined MASH.

Awesome, and you’re currently still working with them now?

Correct. We represent the workers at the Fiserv Forum and Deer District. We’re also working with Bounce Milwaukee and Ryan Clancy. We work with a lot of SEIU campaigns as well.

So, in terms of union busting, which you’re bound to run into—what are some common misconceptions that get espoused when you try establishing unions?

Basically, how a lot of companies try to dissuade people from forming unions is how they’ll say you’re going to be paying more than you should be paying and that unions will try to take money from you. It’s sort of this pity campaign that they run on themselves; they say that the business won’t thrive if a union comes and takes everything from them, because then the workers aren’t giving themselves fully to the company. It’s a lot of stuff like that. Back in the old days they would pull one aside and tell them they’d put an extra $50 on their check for them to run an anti-union campaign with the workers.

What has MASH’s work been like during COVID?

Well, we’ve mostly been working with the arena. This last wave of COVID we worked with the janitors—that was an SEIU campaign to get their $15 an hour wage floor. Before that we were trying to work with a lot of service employees here in Milwaukee getting a union for servers, bussers—things like that. 

So, what is the unionization process like if workers wanted to start one?

If workers want to unionize, the most important thing is that they speak with each other and everybody gets on the same page. Everybody has complaints about work and agrees on things that need to change. If there’s 20 workers, you’ll want at least 12 to 15, and then after you all talk, that’s when you’ll start to scout and shop for a union. It’s the workers’ language that goes into those contracts; a lot of it is they themselves demanding a fair wage, benefits and vacation days.

What are some endeavors that you’re working on now?

The most recent one is completing the janitor campaign; we’d be working on that all summer. The contract has been completed; they got $14.80 with a $15 an hour wage by the end of the second year of their contract. Right now, we’re working with the nurses’ campaign in Madison. Basically, we’re trying to get the UW Health Ward to voluntarily recognize the nurses’ union. There’s 2,000 nurses that work for the ward and their board is telling them that they cannot form a union, but SEIU hired a lawyer that specializes in labor language to say that there’s absolutely nothing that says they are not allowed to form a union in Act 10.

It appears that a lot of workers have been recognizing their worth, and that they deserve to have a voice in their workplace, especially in the last year with lockdown and quarantine where they’re getting paid more from unemployment than employers. There’s been a tipping point, or at least we’re going through some semblance of a tipping point. We’re changing the conversations about workplace relations and conditions. From your perspective, how have you observed new ways workers are making themselves heard?

Communities of color were disproportionately affected by COVID, and it’s because we were the ones who were most forced to keep working during the pandemic. People are coming together; that’s why you see a lot of walkouts, like the Nabisco strike that’s going on right now or the McDonald’s strike—they don’t even have unions and they were just walking out of work demanding that they get their wages.

I can say personally from the janitors’ campaign that there were three janitors who passed away from COVID while working. They can’t say if they definitely caught it at work but they did die during the pandemic. That’s something that really opened peoples’ eyes, because the capitalist class definitely weren’t affected in the way everybody else was. They could sit back while everybody did the work for them. People realized that and now we’re on the precipice of something big here.

For more information about MASH, visit PEOPLE'S PANDEMIC RESPONSE - MASH (mashworkers.org).