By SHERRY HALBROOK
When you build a house, you start with a design and blueprints, and then you dig and pour the foundation. It’s the least glamorous part of the job and the least visible when the house is built, but it’s also arguably the most crucial.
And that’s the stage three PEF retirees working as “heroes” for the Service Employees International Union to get out the vote on November 2 in New Hampshire are at.
“We’re doing the grind work now,” said Neil Tallon, who, along with Natalie Williams and Lynn Tillotson, has been working out of a basement office in Concord since late April.
“We’re very busy calling people and reaching out to SEIU leaders at their worksites,” Williams said.
They have been visiting worksites once or twice a week to identify and establish contacts with local activists.
“We are working as a team to compile lists of activists who will be willing to help us get voters registered and out to the polls,” Tallon said.
Voter registration is especially important, they said, because 28 percent of SEIU members in New Hampshire are not registered.
“Voter registration works differently here than in New York,” Tallon said. “You either have to go to your town (or city) clerk’s office to register, or you can register on election day at the polls, if you bring the proper identification with you. We don’t want people to wait until election day, we will try to get them registered well before that.”
They are focusing mainly on PEF’s counterpart, SEIU Local 1984 — the State Employees Association of New Hampshire — which has approximately 8,000 members and is in a head-to-head contract battle with the governor.
“The members here don’t seem to be as accustomed as PEF members are to these prolonged and difficult contract struggles, and this is definitely a hot-button issue for them,” Tallon said. “So, we helped their union mail them ‘No Confidence (in the governor) ballots.’ Of the more than 3,200 that came back, only 47 indicated they had confidence in the governor, and most people wrote comments about why they don’t have confidence in him.”
The PEF team is using those ballots and their comments to identify SEIU members with strong feelings about what is going on and is calling them to ask if they are willing to help mobilize the vote in November, when the governor as well as the president must stand for re-election.
The team members are visiting worksites and participating in other SEIU and AFL-CIO mobilizing and voter canvassing events looking for contacts they can work with on their voter mobilization campaign.
“We’re trying to find people who can help us get people out to the polls in November,” Tallon said.
The next step in their campaign is to hold worksite meetings for SEIU members to educate them about the campaign issues.
“We want them to know their interests, and vote their interests in November,” Tallon said.
The
Communicator July/August 04
Inside This Issue
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Close corporate tax loopholes
Contract Update: Progress...
OCFS anti-privatization bill
Legislation
budget bottleneck
PEF, DOP salute parole officers
Foreign nurses
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Dell elected to PEF E. Board
Operation ICE, a mobilization....
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