AFSCME: Lost Its Way

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is a union with a proud history. It led the way in actively organizing Black people. It battled for workers who were legally forbidden to unionize. It inspired many with its spirited struggles.

Dr. Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech amidst proud AFSCME workers. Dr. King gave his life supporting AFSCME members on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Clearly, AFSCME made its mark standing with people of color and others on the outside of the predominant society.

September 12, 2007, ADAPT, a national organization of people with disabilities (PWDs) shut down the Illinois headquarters of AFSCME.

So What’s the Problem?

Why would an organization that represents the interests of people on the outside of society shutdown the headquarters of an organization that has a history of representing people also on the outside?

People with disabilities have always been excluded from the mainstream of society. Until the middle of the nineteenth century PWD’s were hidden in attics, sent out to beg, or left to die of neglect. Reformers encouraged the establishment of institutions for PWDs, where they could live and perhaps receive medical care. For 100 years, institutionalization was the primary way people with disabilities were treated. Inspired by the civil rights struggles of the late 1950’-early 1960’s, PWDs started agitating for their own rights. Among these rights were to live independently, outside of institutions.

There were and still are powerful forces that resist closing institutions. You have the owners and other people who make a living from these institutions; Doctors who commit people to places where they hold a financial stake. Then there is AFSCME.

AFSCME members spilled blood organizing the low paid and underappreciated workers. They succeeded in raising the pay and standard of living of these workers. But now, they perceive the job security of these employees and dues paying members in jeopardy by the struggle of PWDs to escape the claws of the institution.

“Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Institutions Have to Go”

AFSCME’s reputation is at stake.

Not only does AFSCME want to keep these monuments to the nineteenth century open; they even want to increase funding to these places where people are held against their will (interesting, AFSCME represents a large number of prison guards as well).

AFSCME refuses to support legislation to increase spending on home and community based services for PWDs. Henry Bayer, the leader of AFSCME in Illinois pledged his support for more federal spending on community care if ADAPT would agree to fight for MORE funding for institutions! AFSCME lobbied long and hard that institutions such as the Lincoln Developmental Center in Lincoln, Illinois and Bellfontaine in St. Louis, Missouri, remain open.

AFSCME does not see PWDs as human beings. To them, we are a source of jobs. More jobs will result in creating community settings for people with disabilities, not less. But AFSCME cannot see that. Instead of hanging on to an outmoded, demeaning, and shameful model of treating PWDs, AFSCME should be looking to the future.

AFSCME is leading other organizations who should know better. “Jobs with Justice” uncritically supports the institutionalization of PWDs. Their justification for this is supporting AFSCME members job security over the freedom for those incarcerated in state institutions.

Sadly, the leadership of AFSCME is exposing its back pedaling on basic trade union issues.

AFSCME is throwing away its militant history along with its progressive principles.

How many times has the AFSCME rank and file heard these words?

“…we could accomplish more by finding common ground and being productive rather than being divisive and confrontational.”

This is not management talking. This is AFSCME’s whining about the ADAPT demonstration.

Martin Luther King, III spoke at a national meeting of ADAPT several years ago. He spoke of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and compared it to the struggle of PWDs. His message: “Our struggles are entwined”.

Randy Alexander, Memphis ADAPT Organizer said of AFSCME;

"For an organization that has its roots in the civil rights movement, their treatment of people with disabilities is even more despicable. The union and its members make a lot of money by advocating keeping people with disabilities and older folks stuck in nursing homes and other institutions instead of being able to live in their own homes like other people. It's unconscionable that the union fights for workers' rights at the expense of our rights. In ADAPT, we know that you can't have one without the other."

AFSCME can no be considered a progressive organization as long as it stands in the doorway of progress.

Disability and the Left, Part Deux

Note: This article is a reaction to a paper by Bill Fletcher, Jr. You can read it here.

I want to thank Bill Fletcher, Jr. for his recent note concerning mental health concerns. Coming from an individual as well respected as Brother Fletcher I hope his message will not be lost.

Yet even a person as respected as Bill has to start his paper on mental health by asking people to take what he says seriously…to hear him out before laughing.

Mental illness, cognitive and physical disabilities have not and are not taken seriously by the left. In fact, most all on the left do not see any place for people with disabilities (PWDs) except as wards of the state.

Last year at the annual meeting of Jobs with Justice in St. Louis the National Action planned a demonstration in favor of keeping a state institution for people with disabilities open. One of Jobs with Justice’s major supporters, AFCSME, wants to keep these state run institutions open as the employees are AFSCME members. When challenged whether this was in the best interest of the residents, comrades and friends deferred to a parent’s organization that supported the institutionalization of their children. Parents often do not represent the wants and needs of their children, disabled or not. But, one can hardly fault the parents for their thinking. The financial and emotional stigma attached to raising children with severe disabilities is multiplied by the lack of supports available for the care takers. Unfortunately, AFSCME’s interest and the interests of some parents took precedent over the desires and needs of the prisoners in these state institutions. No one contacted the residents, nor were any disability advocacy organizations, it was enough to get some parents approval.

Locking people with disabilities up in institutions has a history. The initial establishment of these institutions was progressive. Now they have become regressive. In the 1960s, faced with shrinking budgets, many state institutions were closed and the residents kicked out with no supports whatsoever. These closings and evictions had nothing to do with the welfare of the people with disabilities. They were simply measure taken in accord with capitalism. Economically they were unable to justify their existence.

We know now, however, that the overwhelming numbers of people with disabilities thrive outside traditional state institutions when they receive appropriate supports. In fact, a major goal of the disability rights movement is implementing “Olmstead” legislation (after a Supreme Court Cast of a couple of years ago). The Olmstead decision orders that money spent on an individual incarceration in a state institution should follow each person into the community and appropriate supports follow them.

The upsurge in the struggle for the civil rights of Black people in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s inspired many liberation movements. PWDs were also inspired. Berkeley, California gave rise to the Independent Living Movement. First fighting to gain admittance to the University and then facing many hurdles in being able to attend classes, people with disabilities took on the Administration and the attitudes of the campus community. Inspired by their success, Independent Living movements sprang up all across the USA. People in wheelchairs and their supporters took on public transportation. Chaining themselves to busses in cities from San Francisco, to Chicago, to Boston, access to so-called public transportation began to increase. In state after state, city after city struggles such as to make voting stations accessible, to allow people with disabilities to attend court without the humiliation of being carried up flights of stairs, for an end to segregated schools. People with disabilities fought for basic democratic rights. We support the struggle for Democratic Rights. We are active participants in many such struggles. For the most part though, we are absent from the struggles of PWDs. Why are PWDs fighting these struggles without the broad support of a concerned people? Because of the stigma attached to people with disabilities. It’s similar to white skin privilege. “At least I have it better than that poor soul” is what we say when we send money in to “Jerry’s kids” every Labor Day. We look at people with deformities, developmental disabilities, injuries and illnesses and turn away.

Today, especially after the tragedy at Virginia Tech there is more fear being spread about how dangerous people with disabilities are along with cries that more people need to be housed in state run institutions as a matter of public safety. Increasing louder voices call for preventive detention for people with mental disorders. Where is the left in opposing democratic rights?

I know there are revolutionaries and progressives who work with PWDs. I know there are progressives working with SEIU and AFSCME or are trying to organize the workers who serve PWDs. We should be uniting with the aspirations of the people who we work for and be very careful about the unity we have with those who profit off the institutionalization of PWDs.

I am not going to attempt a full-blown declaration concerning the disability rights movement here. It is long and complex. In fact, my own disability does not allow me the concentration needed to write much more.

Do some research. I suggest these books Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment by James I. Charlton, or Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract by Marta Russell. Google Disability rights and see what comes up. Check out my wife’s blog, mybignoise.blogspot.com/

Left has blind spot on disability issues

There is a struggle going on and we are on the wrong side. On September 23, as part of the Jobs with Justice national meeting, there was a demonstration that put JwJ squarely on the side of the oppressors and exploiters.

The Bellefontaine Habilitation Center outside St. Louis is a nearly 100 year old institution built to separate people with disabilities away from mainstream society. It is one of many such institutions built in a time when locking people with disabilities up was what passed for treatment.

Across the country rank and file activists are fighting for liberation; to tear down the walls of places like Bellefontaine that keeps an entire class of people living separate and apart from family and friends. The disability rights movement is engaged in a battle to shut down state-run institutions that segregate and imprison people with disabilities.

The primary aspect is not jobs but to continue the apartheid of people with disabilities. Would Jobs with Justice join with AFSCME in fighting for more prisons? After all, AFSCME stands to gain members with each additional jail guard position. So what is so progressive about places like Bellefontaine?

People on the left should familiarize themselves with disability issues and the disability rights movement. After all, many of us are starting to think about if our futures are going to be in some nursing home or other place of care or confinement.

The disability rights movement has a history. We have our own “Brown v Board of Education”. In July 1999, the Supreme Court issued the Olmstead v. L.C. decision. The court’s decision in that case decreed that Federal, state and local governments develop more opportunities for individuals with disabilities through more integrated housing options. The Olmstead decision requires that the states administer their services, programs and activities “in the most integrated setting appropriate…”

Let me offer a quote from Marta Russell in her book “Beyond Ramps”,

THE FINAL (PROFITABLE) SOLUTION-- MODERN INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF DISABILITY

Nobody wants to go into a nursing home. That should tell us something. . .

-Wade Blank, co~founder of ADAPT

The truth has always been dangerous to the rule of the rogue, the exploiter, the robber. So the truth must be suppressed.

-Eugene Debs

The question for the entrepreneurial nation remained, what to do with the "unproductive," those not exploitable as laborers? And ultimately, how can disabled people be made of use to the economic order? The solution has been to make disablement big business.

Under the Money Model of disability, the disabled human being is a commodity around which social policies are created or rejected based on their market value. The corporate "solution" to disablement-institutionalization in a nursing home-evolved from the cold realization that disabled people could be commodified; we could be made to serve profit because federal financing (Medicaid funds 60 percent, Medicare 15 percent, private insurance 25 percent) guarantees an endless source of revenue. Disabled people are "worth" more to the Gross Domestic Product when we occupy a "bed" instead of a home. When we individually generate $30,000~$82,000 in annual revenues, the electronic brokers on Wall Street count us as assets and we contribute to companies' net worth. The "final solution"--corporate dominion over disability policy-measures a person's "worth" by its dollar value to the economy.

In order to optimize profits, the nursing home industry must maintain control over the lives of the disabled. Our current public policy predicament is an acknowledgement that the Money Model is well in place-but the prisoners of profit are intent upon revolt.

THE JAIL BREAK

Wade Blank, co-founder of ADAPT, Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, began his long career as a disability advocate while he was employed by a Denver, Colorado, nursing home to set up a ward for young disabled people. His short-lived nursing home career fell within the years when legislatures were ending the old form of institutionalization by closing the doors of state institutions for the disabled, and nursing homes were finding that housing the displaced individuals could be very profitable.

The old sort, well documented by Wolf Wolfensberger in The Origin and Nature of Our Institutional Models, ran the gamut on social "solutions" for disability. Wolfensberger traces the original societal goals of institutions for mentally disabled people: first the professional's goal was to make the "deviant" un-deviant through behavior modification; that gave way to sheltering the deviant from society by isolation; and next, the goal was to protect society from the deviant through inexpensive warehousing, segregation, and sterilization. But eventually experience and research led professionals to a loss of rationale for all of the above practices. Wolfensberger concluded, "Today, of course, we know that most retarded adults make an adequate adjustment in the community, and that they are more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of social injustice." The experts realized that "deviance" was largely a social construct.

Disability historian Dr. Paul Longmore explains that the first widely held view of physical disability is the "moral model;" that is, society believed that disablement was a "deviance," caused by a lack of moral character or intervening supernatural forces, in any case, dangerous to society. The next historical view is the medical model-that disability is biological by nature but must be con~ trolled by curing the "defects "-and resulted in medical and paternalistic social intervention such as sterilization, segregation, and institutionalization…

Jobs with Justice and AFSCME come down on the other side, praising state legislators for halting the creation of community based group homes in favor of keeping Bellefontaine open. Our progressives make a point in that the Governor of Missouri is a right wing asshole and his policies must be opposed. But it was Lenin who said; “Even a broken clock is right two times a day”.

I would suggest that people read “Beyond Ramps” by Marta Russell and check out a couple of on line sites like http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/ or the mainstream http://www.dredf.org/

afscme sells out disabled

The Illinois League of Advocates for the Developmentally Disabled misses the boat in their recent letter defending the institutionalizing of people with disabilities. The only advocacy that this group does is to keep institutions like in Lincoln Developmental Center open. Is this to benefit the inmates of such places or is it to insure that dues money from the employees there continues to flow into the coffers of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

For some reason the leadership of AFSCME is betraying the union ideal of fighting for a better society in their efforts to keep these establishments open. The top leadership of AFSCME has been oblivious to the advances being made in how best to liberate people with disabilities from huge tax eating “Developmental Centers”. AFSCME should learn from the Service Employees International Union that also has had many of its members providing care for people with disabilities. Within the SEIU a number of leaders saw that Institutions were a vestige of the past and saw the need for union representation of people who provide care in community settings or as personal assistants. In Illinois SEIU local 880 just received recognition as the bargaining agent for these workers and is developing a working relationship with real disability rights organizations. It is interesting that after years of ignoring this fertile new area to be organized, AFSCME petitioned to be part of the statewide recognition vote. The national leadership of the AFL-CIO slapped down Illinois’ AFSCME leaders and AFSCME was taken off the workers’ ballot.

It is too bad that the leadership of AFSCME has led them to create organizations like the Illinois League of Advocates for the Developmentally Disabled, to try to hold on to the status quo rather that look to the future. If AFSCME devoted more of its energy to organizing the unorganized and for an egalitarian future they would recognize that the interests of their members and the lives of people with disabilities are not antagonistic. AFSCME can do the right thing and still have its membership grow.