Union organizer

And what we did in response is we organized.

And the beautiful thing about union organizing is that you do not have to agree with all of your members on every single issue if you did nothing would ever get done if i had to agree with with every guy in my union on every issue we would not have been able to organize the custer gallatin and make sure the last non-union forest passed a unionization vote two to one and got the protections of a contract and that's the way i'm running this campaign too i mean And we've got to get back to a place as a country where we can sit down across the table from someone who we don't agree with on everything and find common ground because we agree on 80 percent of the issues.

But nothing is getting done right now.

We at this point have five former Republican legislators endorsing this campaign, a former Republican governor.

We have an exceptional show.

Uh, coming up a little later, we have a union organizer.

We also have a hotelier.

Oh, I wonder if they're on opposite ends of whatever, uh, the organization is.

Fantastic.

Well, we're gonna take a break.

Uh, when we come back, we'll have a union organizer, we'll also have a hotelier, and we'll have more with Domhnall Gleeson.

We'll be right back with more Comedy Bang Bang after this.

This piece first aired in 2022.

Finally, local labor organizer Sean Collins shares his journey to union organizing and discusses the complicated factors that come with organizing in the nonprofit sector.

I am Eric Morser, professor of history at Skidmore College and founder of the Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive, a project that documents the stories of working people in the greater capital region.

Skidmore College students conducted these oral histories as part of my American Labor History course.

In the following story, we will hear the voice of Sean Collins, a union representative and organizer with Service Employees International Union, Local 200 United.

He is also a delegate president of the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Here, Sean will share his journey to union organizing and then discuss some of the complicated factors going into organizing in the nonprofit sector.

This interview was recorded in November of 2022, so keep that in mind when listening to this story.

in, in, in Canada, so it's always, uh, impressive to hear how, uh, bigger groups, bigger immigrant groups kind of, uh, operate and organize.

Um, I, I think something I wanna know more about is like, I think, can you tell me about like what industries you find a lot of Filipino workers, you know? What's, what do you think is the importance of labor organizing among Filipinos in Canada?

Uh, we find them a lot in retail s- um, sector, manufacturing, a lot of them are in healthcare obviously, nurses, uh, caregivers, and as well as like nannies in Westmount, in Montreal.

Um, a lot of us are, in Anakbayan Montreal right now, are cultural workers too, as well as there's some PABs or some, like, um, people getting into social work or nonprofit work, so we're able to bridge that, our experiences into that easily.