Minutes, PWJ meeting, 6-11-06, L’Orange underground gallery

Present: Joe (facilitating), Jim F., Bonnie, Paul, Marg, Linda, Sally, Rich (his first time)

We began at 2:50 with checkins, and reviewed Joe’s agenda. Our mission for the meeting was to review old/hear new proposals for our next project, and choose one.

Rich (new to Walker) spoke about his interest in seeing Walker take initiative to foster dialog between Christians and Muslims. He suggested that this could begin with a group of us visiting a mosque, and inviting some of its members to visit Walker; later, joint work on a community project. The goal would be to break down barriers between the two religions here. After questions and brief discussion, there seemed to be some consensus that this project idea might not fall within our (PWJ’s) scope. We agreed not to pursue it at this time.
Walker Methodist Health Center (WMHC, a.k.a. the Walker Home) project (proposer: Joe): At 3:05, AFSCME union organizer Jeff Fowler arrived, and spoke for about 15 minutes on the Walker Methodist Health Center unionization project.

Goal of project: to get management to bargain with the union
Strategy: focus attention (of Methodists, the surrounding neighborhood, and the community) on WMHC’s management’s refusal to bargain with the union, including their having retained (probably at great expense) a union-busting legal firm during the 2003 (?) unionization drive.
Current situation: the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), currently dominated by Bush administration appointees, recently made a regressive ruling that it wants to see become part of general U.S. labor law. Called the "Kentucky River decision", it bars employees in a supervisory role of any kind (including the LPNs at WMHC) from being part of the same union as the employees they supervise. Apparent rationale: supervisory staff could pressure their supervisees in union matters, including the decision to form or join the union. Under this decision, WMHC management successfully petitioned the NLRB to set aside the results of the vote by their employees to unionize. This has stalemated the unionization effort there for the past two or three years. Moreover, most (all?) of the employees who led that effort were later fired. The result, said Jeff, is that "the workers are scared to death."

PWJers asked Jeff about the possibility of a new unionization effort and vote being mounted for the non-supervisory employees only. Jeff didn’t have a definite answer yet, but said he could look into this.

"The Children’s Platform" – Paris had written up and emailed everyone his proposal, which was read aloud by Paul. He proposed that PWJ get involved with this campaign, which is s ponsored nationally by an org. called "Every Child Matters", and in MN is a coalition of 67 organizations. The campaign’s objective is to have every candidate on the ballot in MN make concern for children’s issues a part of their platform; to raise voters’ awareness of children’s issues prior to the election; and with the momentum created, to bring the winning candidates back to the table after the election to develop policy. For more details, see Paris’ email.

Most of those present were not enthusiastic about this proposal. Objections raised included a sense that it’s too vague, since any candidate could say they’re for children’s issues but then vote wrong later on; and that the campaign is very big-picture/suburban-oriented, whereas many of us want to be involved on a more local level, after the statewide focus of our health care amendment campaign.

Sally proposed a new project focusing on Walker Church’s immediate neighborhood. She talked about two situations:

A shooting at 31^st and Bloomington in which a female bicyclist was hit and fell off her bike. TV news and several squad cars appeared. The weapon that turned out to have been a BB gun, but the incident has raised concerns about public safety among our neighbors and others.
There have been reports of younger kids hanging out with older kids who are known to be involved in drug dealing.

During the discussion of these concerns, Sally came up with three concrete actions that we (PWJ) could take:

Contact all block clubs in the area (Sally agreed with Jim’s suggestion that we define the target area as the block within one block of Walker – Lake to 32^nd St, and Bloomington Ave to 17^th Ave). Find out what their issues are and what Walker Church might be able to do.
Participate in National Night Out on Walker’s (and other?) block(s)
Identify the "hot spots" in our target area, talk with police, find out what we can do about them

Objections to the proposal included:

It’s not about systemic change – more of a social service project
It could be endless, and burn us out – so we would need to set a time limit on it (several people liked the idea of limiting it to this summer only, perhaps through mid-Sept.)

Points in favor of the proposal included:

The project is in Walker’s self-interest as a church in a troubled neighborhood; if the surrounding area is seen as unsafe, potential Walker members might be deterred from coming to Walker
Violence causes a downward spiral. People need to reclaim their neighborhoods from violence/drugs, and organizing is key to this
Shootings like this can affect people’s sense of safety throughout the neighborhood
Rich mentioned the idea of bringing in FNVW’s Alternatives to Violence project

After discussion, we voted:

Neighborhood – 4

Walker Home – 3

Abstaining – 1

Because of the close vote, we decided not to make the decision based on this vote, but instead to poll those not present and include their votes. Joe volunteered to do this. (Also, one of those who voted for the Neighborhood proposal (Paul) later changed his vote to an abstention, since he may well be too involved in an election campaign to participate very actively in PWJ projects this summer/fall.)

We decided to meet again in a week and a half, on Wed. 6/21, at Bonnie and Joe’s. (Bonnie and Joe are leaving the following Saturday for a 2½-week trip to Alaska.)

The meeting ended at about 4:45.