Organized Labor

He was maybe 20 years old, African-American, a little better than medium height, with close-cut hair and an attempt at a beard speckled across round cheeks. In black on his red T-shirt was a stylized encircled acorn, for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. It was campaign season for the 2008 November election. I was walking from home to shop at the Excelsior Safeway. He was concentrating on something on a clipboard. Then he mounted stairs to a home and rang the doorbell.

I walked on, thinking, Tough job for him, canvassing voters. Our neighborhood is as racially mixed as any, but a young African-American male stranger risks getting quickly discouraged trying to get doors to open to him anywhere.

Almost an hour later, though, as I returned with my groceries, he was still checking the clipboard, still climbing stairs, still trying.
This is what ACORN has done across the country: It has involved in the political process communities and individuals that have often felt severed from it, and it has worked to keep them involved.

It has done something else important: It has listened. As Lennar’s Hunters Point project was moving through initial approvals and some “progressives” were pressing for its residences to be rentals, ACORN went into low-income communities in the Southeast of the City and asked, What do you want? It heard, Opportunities for home ownership.

When the San Francisco Labor Council sought partners to negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement with Lennar, then, ACORN joined it, and the agreement they and the San Francisco Organizing Project obtained increases opportunities for home ownership for low-income and moderate-income residents.

ACORN has organized demonstrations against foreclosures. It has helped the poor and working class restructure debt and reduce payments. It has provided a free alternative to pricey tax services. With unions, it has advocated raises in the minimum wage and paid sick days. It has submitted more than a million voter registration applications.

The fight against foreclosures and the aid in restructuring debt are sure to have irked bankers. The advocacies for higher minimum wage and for sick days are just as sure to have angered Business more broadly. The low-income voters ACORN registers are much more likely to declare “Democrat” than “Republican.”

The Republican Party and its allies have long been eager to use any available line of attack against those it views as opponents, as well as against those who would put any restraints on Business. We in unions have suffered those attacks. In fact, Glen Beck of FOX News has tied ACORN to unions in his attacks.

Unfortunately ACORN opened gates to its attackers.

Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN’s founder, was found by the organization to have embezzled almost one million dollars from it. He was not reported to authorities, or even to most of ACORN’s board of directors, but agreed to restitution over a period of years while being kept on staff. He had repaid $210,000 when reports of the embezzlement became public in 2008 and he was forced to resign (New York Times 9 July 2008).

ACORN was accused of submitting false voter registrations. By ACORN’s own admission, a bit less than two percent of the voter applications it submitted were fraudulent, the result, it said, of canvassers wanting to inflate their numbers (New York Times 18 September 2009).

And then came the infamous videos of conservative activists posing as pimp and hooker shown receiving advice from ACORN workers in Baltimore and Washington on buying a house to use as a brothel for underage Salvadorans. ACORN replied that the same activists had been turned away from offices in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia, and it fired the offending Baltimore and Washington employees.

Through all this, ACORN has done much good work. The ACORN representatives I have known here have been serious and dedicated. They have offered services of real benefit to our members. In this economy, we need their services.

ACORN has brought former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger in to conduct an independent investigation into its organization and to make public the results. He will produce “a written assessment of the program with a set of recommendations to allow the organization to run intake and service programs in an ethical, professional and effective manner.”

I am confident that ACORN will learn from its mistakes and continue its good work.

And I am certain of this: If the same conservative activists had searched for wrongdoing by bank mortgage officers or mortgage brokers during the housing bubble those businesses created, they would not have had to work nearly so hard to find it.