Campus Workers Unmask Scheme to Privatize All Tennessee Property
Governor Bill Haslam concocted the biggest privatization scheme you’ve never heard of.
By Melanie Barron , Jeffrey Lichtenstein /
Portside
October 9, 2016
Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture / Flickr Creative Commons
Every state has a procurement office. Have you checked what yours is up to?
In Tennessee it was through this office, charged with overseeing the state’s purchases and contracts, that Governor Bill Haslam concocted the biggest privatization scheme you’ve never heard of.
And he would have gotten away with it, too—if it weren’t for a tough campus-workers union that discovered his plans and launched a raucous fight.
Haslam, with a net worth of $2 billion, is America’s richest elected politician. His family owns the Pilot Flying J chain of truck stops. In 2014 he began taking quiet steps to outsource more than 10,000 state workers.
Several well-paid consultants joined his administration, including one who gets paid more per hour than any other state employee. They began work in the little-known, slickly titled Office of Customer Focused Government.
The plan they cooked up was unprecedented. Management and maintenance of literally every piece of state property would be privatized—campuses, parks, even armories—costing the jobs of 1 in 5 state workers.
Billions in revenue would be funneled to a single private company. It’s rumored that one of the top contenders is Jones Lang LaSalle, already a state contractor and a company where Haslam has a record of personal investment.
Equally shocking, instead of battling it out in the legislature, Haslam’s plan would rely on executive authority. An approach called “vested outsourcing” meant that the most favored corporations would help write the request for proposals.
STATEWIDE REBELLION
As soon as UCW heard about the privatization scheme in August 2015, it leaked the plan to the press and launched a campaign called “Tennessee Is Not for Sale.”
A town-hall phone call for members attracted hundreds of participants. Days later, 200 workers, students, and community allies lined the main avenue that cuts across the flagship campus in Knoxville. The union brought some signs and banners, but the best ones came from facilities workers, who showed up to the Thursday-afternoon rally in uniform.
Of all the workers on a campus, we’ve found facilities workers to be some of the toughest to organize. They cover a variety of shops—carpentry, air conditioning, electrical, painting, custodial, housekeeping, and clerical and administrative support staff. They tend to be a tight-knit group, and sometimes insular.
But this crisis inspired record numbers of facilities workers to mobilize, and many to join the union.
AMBUSHING THE GOVERNOR
Excitement from this rally fueled more actions across the state, as images of the protest circulated on Facebook and in the news. Members held signs on university sidewalks in Memphis and Johnson City.
Sympathetic lawmakers did a “fact-finding tour,” visiting campuses in Knoxville and Chattanooga where they invited workers to speak on panels about the governor’s scheme. A paper and online petition drew 6,000 signatures.
At every opportunity, members confronted the governor personally and posted the videos on social media. We tracked him down at events where he might have expected a friendly crowd—including a Chamber of Commerce meeting, the opening of a new business institute at UT, and even his high school alma mater’s homecoming football game.
Each time, our members gleefully rained on his parade, ruined his photo-ops, and
forced him to flee to his armored car.
Our earlier coalition work for “Put the People First” paid off. Community groups in several areas hosted their own town-hall meetings and passed resolutions against the plan. We built the broadest possible front, even allying with several key Republication legislators, atypical friends in Tennessee’s hostile-to-labor political environment.
DECISIVE MOMENT
These months of action generated a steady drumbeat of embarrassing media coverage for the governor. It all crescendoed to March 8, when 100 union members converged on the Capitol steps with students and allies from environmental, health care, and workers’ rights groups.
We rallied, we lobbied—and then we occupied a hallway, just outside a Senate committee room where outsourcing operatives were scheduled to talk. Union members unfurled three giant rolls of paper, dozens of feet long, with thousands of petition signatures. Chanting workers and students took up the rest of the space.
Later, members packed the same committee room and were gratified to hear several legislators, including Republicans, speak out against the outsourcing. UCW had split the state’s ruling coalition on this issue.
“We forced Republican members of the legislature to side with their constituents,” said Dalton Brown, a leader in the carpentry shop at the UT Health Science Center in Memphis. “Whatever plan the governor may have had to get the legislature to give him some cover from the clear popular and media opposition—that was gone.”
[...]
But so far, workers and the public aren’t buying it, in part because Haslam’s credibility has already been so damaged by the campaign. Our message, “Tennessee Is Not for Sale,” is clear and direct. People get it.
The governor’s other tactic is to drag out the process, hoping the public will lapse into fatigue and forgetfulness. Originally the outsourcing would have been implemented already, in July. Now the contract is expected to be signed next February, and implementation could begin as soon as March.
[...]
http://www.alternet.org/labor/privitazing-all-tennessee-property
Gratifying. An interesting tale of how people power trumps corporate greed.
Using executive authority. That way, the governor's signature is sufficient without any input from the legislature. Clever boy. Psychopaths always rely on tricks. But the unions were cleverer when they embarrassed the governor in public.
I am sure that the governor found a distressing retreat in his armored car.
The unions are the life blood of USA.
