National Labor Federation

The National Labor Federation (NATLFED) is a network of local community associations, run exclusively by volunteers, that aim to organize workers excluded from collective bargaining protections by U.S. labor law. NATLFED consists of several dozen mutual benefit associations which conduct canvassing in poor neighborhoods and operate assistance programs for working poor members of the associations. According to literature printed by the groups, these benefit programs entitle members to emergency food, clothing, medical and dental care, legal advice, child care, and job referrals. The groups have denied having a political affiliation, but have been been described by some former members as a deceptive, destructive political cult. Press accounts of the groups affiliated with NATLFED sometimes praise their social work, sometimes raise concerns about their lack of transparency , and sometimes condemn the organizations for harsh treatment of volunteers.

History

Strata Organizing

Despite government sanctioned efforts like the dues checkoff system for union funding, the unionization rate has fallen to 8.1% of non-public-sector employment, and continues to decline. NATLFED contends that since few US workers are still employed in large scale factory operations, new methods are needed to go beyond historic organizing tactics issued from the factory gate.(ed. note: gate is a technical term from electrical engineering) Employing the method of Systemic Organizing, described in the peer reviewed paper, "Strata Organizing: A Proven Method for Organizing Unrecognized Workers", NATLFED organizers claim to be uniting unrecognized workers on a national scale despite obstacles

Union workers are kept in separate bargaining units and not permitted to exercise time-honored methods of collective action based on community backing and mutual aid. As a result US workers labor for longer hours under more dangerous conditions for less pay and often without health and pension benefits. A new approach is needed

The Essential Organizer, a manuscript describing the techniques of "systemic organizing" purports to teach participants an approach for unrecognized workers to obtain benefits that are needed and are rightfully theirs in a manner consistent with their best overall interest. At the same time unrecognized workers can materially see the benefits of organization in general as well as how to build their own organizations in specific.

The only thing that really makes sense is the local community-based associations that reach unrecognized workers and unite them with current and former union workers, retired workers, local business leaders, professionals and others who share a common concern for the long-term future of our communities.

Origins

The organization grew out of the Eastern Farm Workers Association in Suffolk County, NY, founded in 1972 by Gino Perente and others.

Perente had worked at the New York office of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in 1971 or 1972 and, according to Dolores Huerta, "...created a lot of problems for the union, attacking us in the press. Then he went off and formed his own group...."

He and his followers headed to migrant labor camps in rural Long Island, New York from an office in office in Bellport, NY in 1972 to organize agricultural workers. The EFWA received a modest amount of press attention in its early days attempting to organize farm workers at the I.M. Young company. Perente claimed to have organized 800 farm workers with 30 full-time EFWA staff and 70 volunteers in December 1972. NATLFED claims that this was the first union of agricultural workers on the East Coast and that the U.S. Department of Labor determined that EFWA was not a labor organization as defined by federal law.

The story of the 1972 strike against the potato grower I.M. Young and Company remains a central part of the various entities' volunteer training process. There is little independent information about the early years of the EFWA, and it is not clear what labor organizing successes, if any, the network can claim.

Perente was by all accounts a charismatic and manipulative personality. He inspired volunteers with revolutionary rhetoric and established rigid, military-like discipline among the organizing drive's cadre. Later accounts identified him as Gerald William Doeden, a former disc jockey from California with a reputation as a small-time con artist.

Growth

In the mid-1970s, Perente removed himself from public view, but he directed his followers to expand the scope of the initial organizing drives. He established an office in Brooklyn to direct the growing network he called the National Labor Federation (NATLFED), and refined an elaborate system to train and ensure the loyalty of volunteers by founding the Provisional Communist Party, a secret society of Perente's cohorts. Perente gave lectures, often running late into the night offering idiosyncratic interpretations of the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin to the audience of cadre at the NATLFED office.

Perente's movement used its core of cadre to expand, sending recruiters to other cities and towns, starting about twenty mutual benefit associations and perhaps as many related support organizations by the late 1970s. The new organizing drives were built closely after the model of the EFWA, even using their 1973 organizational handbook. The entities are managed by full-time volunteers, called cadre, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the movement.

In 1973, the California Homemakers Association pressured Sacramento County and won wage increases for attendant care workers. Subsequently the county agreed to bargain with CHA over the terms of individual contracts with its home care workers. CHA organizer David Shapiro hailed the agreement as "the first time that household workers have achieved the right to bargain."

NATLFED entities

Main article: List of NATLFED entities

NATLFED operates about thirty offices, called entities around the US, with concentrations in California and the Northeast. The Eastern Farm Workers Association (now in Bellport, NY and Syracuse, NY) and California Homemakers Association (in Sacramento, California) were founded in the early seventies, and were followed by Eastern Service Workers Association, Western Service Workers Association, Western Massachusetts Labor Action in Pittsfield, MA, Western Farm Workers Association in Stockton, CA and Hillsboro, OR, Friends of Seasonal and Service Workers in Portland, OR and Northwest Seasonal Workers Association in Medford, OR.

Since Perente's death, several new entities have opened, including Midwest Workers Association in Chicago, IL , Alaska Workers Association in Anchorage, AK, and Mid-Ohio Workers Association in Columbus, OH.

Public scrutiny and controversy

The NATLFED groups have kept a low profile, operating with little public attention for ten years, and journalists writing about the various groups have both praised and condemned the organizing drives.

In the early 1980s several journalists wrote highly critical articles about several groups in the federation. One such article, written for the Christian Century magazine, described changes in the leadership of the Commission for Voluntary Service and Action (CVSA). Originally a church-affiliated nonprofit organization, the CVSA had annually printed a catalog of volunteer opportunities called Invest Yourself: a Catalog of Volunteer Opportunities since 1946. A number of full-time NATLFED organizers had taken leadership positions within CVSA's board. In the early 1980s, when CVSA was struggling financially, NATLFED took responsibility and control of its operations, leaving some of the church leadership bitter. As many as 50 NATLFED entities were listed among about 200 service organizations in the catalog during the 1980s and 1990s. This number has slowly dropped since then; fewer than ten NATLFED entities were listed in the 2004 edition.

Invest Yourself:A Catalog of Volunteer Opportunities, edited by Susan G. Agnus, is among the publications affiliated with NATLFED.

The political investigative magazine The Public Eye published two articles about NATLFED. The first, by Harvey Kahn in 1977 alleged an obscure but friendly relationship between Perente's NATLFED and Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees. Tourish and Wohlforth report a similarly tenuous but longer-lived alliance between NATLFED and Fred Newman's new International Workers Party in the mid-70s. Perente became head of the IWP-organized Nationwide Unemployment League, and soon after dissolved it.

The Public Eye published a longer exposé by former volunteer Jeff Whitnack in 1984 in which Whitnack identified Perente as Doeden and interviewed some of Doeden's friends in California. Whitnack concluded that the whole operation was a scam punctuated with drama and hints of violence.

The FBI raided a law office and the NOC headquarters at 1107 Carroll Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on February 17, 1984 on tips that they "...had planned a series of violent acts..." Some firearms were seized, and one lawyer who was among the cadre in the organization was convicted of making a false statement to obtain a handgun. Kit Decious, Kathleen Paolo, and Daniel P. Foster, three other lawyers among the organization's cadre, were convicted of felony larceny and possession of forged documents relating to the 1984 departure of Mia Prior, a member of ten years; they were disbarred in New York following their convictions in the 1980s.

The NYPD raided the NOC again on November 11, 1996, on an anonymous complaint that children were being abused in the office. The police seized 49 antique firearms, $42 000 in cash, and arrested 35 people. Newspapers around the country briefly ran columns about the group. Two of the organizers, Susan Agnus and Diane Garrett, were initially convicted of misdemeanor possession of weapons, but the appeals court overturned the convictions because the search was improperly conducted without a warrant.

Shortly after the 1996 raid in New York, an anonymously created website appeared by "an informal network of people" who were "frightened" by the effect NATLFED entities on their loved ones. This website condemned NATLFED, but also archived many news articles and other stories about them. The site, http://users.rcn.com/xnatlfed, disappeared from its original host in 2004 and is mirrored on the Wayback machine: http://users.rcn.com/xnatlfed/

Recent activities

Since Perente's death in 1995, and the raid on their headquarters in 1996, there has been little information about how NATLFED is run, although Margaret Ribar is reported to have assumed leadership.

The Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) operates on numerous college and university campuses in the Northeast, quietly recruiting student volunteers through the service-learning offices available to all students. The ESWA is thriving in Boston, Massachusetts and Rochester, New York , with assistance from several local churches and businesses who may or may not be aware of the group's practices or connection to NATLFED.

The Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals participated in a successful class-action lawsuit on behalf of migrant farm workers in California in 2004, and West-coast entities participated in demonstrations against Physician Assisted Suicide in 2005.

Operational patterns

It is difficult to get information about NATLFED and its entities because the organization is institutionally secretive. An internal memo quoted in the East Bay Express in 1984 gave the following instructions on withholding information from outsiders

We regard outside inquiry from a position of distrust.. Never ask to know more than you need to know if you agree with the goals and strategy of the group. It's unfair to burden a comrade with unneeded information, and also unprofessional. The standard answer to any question you have not been instructed to answer is 'It's not my department.'

At times entity operations managers have been directed not to give interviews to reporters; other times managers insisted that reporters volunteer with the organization to get a story on it.; other times volunteers gave reporters a runaround.

Most NATLFED entities produce regular newspapers to inform supporters and volunteers, and to generate revenue from advertising. The Women's Press Collective, for example, prints the magazine Collective Endeavor about media reform and topics concerning women, and the CCLP and CCMP each publish the quarterly newsletters, The Gavel and The Verdict.

Mutual benefit associations

New entities are started by recruiters from the cadre armed with lists of contacts. These recruiters approach community and business leaders with their mission statement and ask for support to help with the founding of the entity. An organizing committee is created including community leaders willing to lend their names to the new effort, and the recruiters solicit donated office space until they can purchase an office.

The entities establish a benefit program which may provide services to members free of charge and soon start door-to-door campaigns to recruit volunteers and recruit low-income workers. Available benefits and the scope of the program vary from entity to entity, but usually include food, clothing, and holiday events for children. Some entities provide more involved services for members such as medical, legal, and dental services for volunteers and low-income members. Critics of the organizations contend that the 11-point benefit program promises far more than the entities can deliver. Supporters use criticisms of the paucity of resources to motivate volunteers to take action to expand these resources.

Critics and supporters of the organizations agree that some of the food, clothing and other goods collected for the poor is consumed by the cadre.

Volunteers for the entities' canvass poor residential areas to recruit low income members, knocking on doors and delivering a door-to-door pitch. This pitch includes a brief explanation of organization, promises benefits, and asks for participation. Poor members are asked to contribute 62 US cents a month as membership dues, an amount said to be the average hourly pay for potato workers at I. M. Young and Company in 1972. New members also sign an authorization form giving the association a vague authority to bargain on behalf of the member. The groups also solicit resources (funds, food, clothing, medical services and legal aid) from professionals, business owners, and volunteers willing to contribute to the cause.

Cadre recruitment

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the NATLFED entities is their aggressive recruitment of new cadre from the ranks of volunteers who participate. The NATLFED entities send speakers to churches, residential neighborhoods, shopping centers, university campuses, music festivals, and other venues introducing themselves and soliciting volunteers and resources. At these events, organizers will read a brief introduction to the organization to new volunteers and try to schedule visits to their office and participation in volunteer run activities.

For recruitment purposes, NATLFED entities keep extensive records of all their contacts on index cards. Drawers of these cards contain detailed information about any sort of contact the group has with volunteers, members, donors, and other supporters. Whitnack has claimed that this elaborate paperwork is unnecessary, inefficient, and intended to exhaust the volunteers, in order to keep them in a suggestible state.

NATLFED also has an elaborate system for persuading volunteers to further the organization's goals by becoming roles of authority themselves, and the social pressure they apply convinces some volunteers to de-emphasize goals of their own. Regular volunteers are periodically interviewed and asked to increase their commitment to the organization.

The story of the 1972 strike against the potato grower I.M. Young and Company remains a central part of the various entities' volunteer training process.

Cadre (from the French; pronounced /kɑdʀ/, CAH-druh) are the backbone of an organization, usually a political organization. The assumption of the cadre model is that this small core of ultra-committed people are capable of recreating the organization's structure and ideological direction even if the current organizational form has been destroyed and all other members have been killed or imprisoned.

Former members claim that deception and psychological manipulation mix with the sensation some new recruits experience of an of intellectual awakening as stories of past labor struggles explain the underside of U.S. history, and classes in Dialectical Materialism provide a coherent, if stilted, world view. The commitment of NATLFED converts is solidified by the emotional impact of working to exhaustion surrounded by others who constantly reinforce the groups message and beliefs.

Critics deride NATLFED's focus on the indigent, claiming that it is merely cover for more sinister activity. Jeff Whitnack told the Boston Globe that "They are like political Moonies. They use poor people as flypaper to attract members."

Cult accusations

NATLFED and its entities are often labeled as a cult, are listed on cult watch websites, and have been described as a cult by social scientists and journalists. NATLFED supporters and organizers contest the label as loaded and misleading.

Volunteers have reportedly encouraged students to drop out of school, pressured volunteers to quit their jobs, and encouraged volunteers to break ties with family and friends outside the organization in order to volunteer full-time for the group. The cadre work seven days a week and have little time to spend apart from the organization. Janja Lalich, a sociologist studying cults, said

As political cults go, NATLFED is a very, very extreme cult. Not so much in terms of its acting out publicly, but in its control of its members. Most groups would allow you to return home for the holidays or a wedding or a funeral. This group will try to keep you from leaving. Once you're in, you don't see the light of day.

Critics also charge that the organizations target young people because they lack experience against which to evaluate NATLFED's strategy and tactics. Chip Berlet, who studies totalitarian groups, has said "The saddest thing about this group is they are luring in people who otherwise would be doing a lot of good things."

Governance and financial questions

The individual entities describe themselves as independent, locally-chartered membership associations. The organizations claim to accept only those private donations that come "with no strings attached," and claim to be answerable only to their organizing committee and to their membership.

The individual organizations are neither themselves labor unions nor are they nonprofit charitable organizations.The various entities identify themselves with the labor movement for the purpose of attracting volunteers and supporters, but when describing their organization make it clear that they do not advocate the formation of trade unions per se, calling themselves "labor organizations of a new type."

Except for the National Equal Justice Association and the CVSA, none of the NATLFED entities are registered 501(c)3 non-profit associations. In a 1984 interview, Diane Ramirez, then-operations manager of EFWA said the group chose not to seek non-profit status "...in order to create the type of organization that suits us. I don't think the government is sympathetic to attempts to organize poor people." Consequently, donations to NATLFED entities are not tax-deductible and NATLFED entities don't have financial openness procedures required by the U.S. tax code. NATLFED entities have denied requests about their finances from community allies and journalists.

The entities are not labor unions and do not comply with the governance and financial openness requirements of the the LMRDA or the United States Department of Labor.

The decision-making processes of the entities are obscure - the organizations don't have publicly-available internal constitutions or by-laws, do not follow Robert's Rules of Order in their meetings, and there are no public minutes of committee or membership meetings.

Critics and some former volunteers assert that the entities are actually closely managed from the national headquarters. One source told the Williams Record in 1995 that the then-operations manager of Western Masachusetts Labor Action received orders from the national headquarters every day. This lack of independence and lack of openness about the operation of the entities has led some to call the entities front groups. Confronted by accusations of cult-like behavior, WMLA administrative assistant Carol Rogers denied a direct connection to NATLFED beyond selling NATLFED calendars as a fundraiser.

Efficiency

NATLFED supporters claim that the entities efficiently provide services to needy populations. Critics and many former members say that the entities are highly inefficient - they claim that the cadre consume much of the cash, food and clothing they purport to collect for the poor, and part-time volunteers spend much of their time filling out paperwork instead of providing direct services to the indigent. The exact percentage of donations to NATLFED entities that makes its way to the poor is not publicly reported by any NATLFED entity.

Conclusions differ

The various organizations in the NATLFED network have nearly identical rhetoric and training procedures, though they are spread out in many cities. Many of their donors and supporters speak up in defense of the services they provide for their communities. Among cadre who have left, though, there are some who remain concerned about the drives. Former NATLFED cadre Robin Spellman-Fahlberg, who was an operations manager with Upstate NY EFWA for a decade, said in 2004 that in addition to helping in the most disenfranchised communities,

There is also a hidden, for want of a better description, evil, side of NATLFED. When I was there, and from what I've heard continues to be the case, there were manipulative people in powerful positions. Full-timers were subjected to an increasingly severe mental abuse and subjugation... They felt the only way to help poor people was through Natlfed, that there was no possible success for them after leaving, and/or they were subject to physical threats if they did.

The balance of benefit to the community and toll on the volunteers, between the assistance they claim to provide and the actual assistance provided to the working poor, and the secrecy surrounding entity finances and operations, continue to make discussions about the NATLFED groups contentious.

See also

• Provisional Communist Party
• Gino Perente

References

• Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais (1955). Labor's Untold Story The adventure story of the battles, betrayals and victories of American working men and women. One Gateway Center, Suite 1400, Pittsburgh, PA 15222-1416: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. ISBN 0916180018.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)

External links

• Archive of 1996 anti-NATLFED site: Cached xnatlfed
• 2006 anti-NATLFED site (in blog format): Politicalcults.blogspot.com
• FBI file 100-486-889 on NATLFED/EFWA/ESWA/Provisional Communist Party
• Boston IMC discussion: Watch out--Stalinist cult in Roxbury!
• Portland IMC discussion: Authoritarian 'cult' organizing at portland universities
• Portland IMC discussion: Continuing the Discussion of Gino Perente and NATLFED