Part 1 – The Many

“Shields – take your end of the line around the corner onto Ellis.”
“What about the chanting?”
“Everyone on a bullhorn will do the call. The monitors will do the response”.

Clare was right. As the room cleaners hit the picket line, we had to keep moving or risk arrest.

Chito and I dove in halfway through the three hundred people on the right side of the main entrance to the hotel. We directed half of them to follow us around the corner.

“Swing around Chito down there”, I yelled to the workers, “and back around the sign at this end”.

The people we left behind gradually formed into a new oval, while our group of a hundred and fifty chanting hotel workers formed a new section of the line on Ellis Street.

I took my position on the corner, watching our lead chanter Alphonso, now fifty yards to my left and Chito, our chant responder, around the corner on the right.

What do we want?
Contract!

“Alphonso!”, Clare shouted, “Make sure everyone can see you. We need to keep the chanting together.”

Alphonso pivoted as he did the calls, so we on the bullhorns to his left and right could see him.

When do we want it?
Now!

What do we want?
Contract!

When do we want it?
Now!

We had succeeded, the turnout was enormous. But to win, we needed strong, unified mass chanting to project our power, the workers’ power, up to the executive suites of the hotel. That was getting harder to do with every additional hundred people that hit the line.

What do we want?
Contract!

When do we want it?
Now!

I could see Alphonso, pivoting as Clare had instructed, but I was too far away now to hear him. By the time his sound reached me, he was already a couple of syllables ahead. This made it hard for Chito and me to keep our folks chanting in time with the main line around the corner.

Our power was dissipating as we moved out of sync:
What do we want?
What do we want?
Contract!
Contract!

When do we
When do we……
want it?…
…want it?…

Now!
Now!

It hadn’t started this way. An hour ago, we had been tight – a lean, mean fifty person-chanting machine. Besides adding another nine hundred fifty people to the line, where did we go astray?

“Have you no shame? Check out now! Scab!”

For two years, the Parc’s workers had been fighting for the right to bargain for good pay and a voice on the job. Thus far, no deal.

So for the past week, we’d been preparing the next in our series of actions designed to move the campaign along. We made picket signs and chant sheets, did last-minute turnout calls and cafeteria visits and solidified our labor-community support. We let everyone know we were taking it to the next level.

Early the morning of the action, we assigned staff and members their tasks and loaded everything onto the pickup truck.

“Shields, you and Chito will be in charge of the upper line”, said Clare, lead organizer for the action. “You’ll chant-lead and Chito will lead the responses and oversee the sign-ins. We may have as many as a thousand people.”

“What happens if there’s too many for the front of the hotel?”, I asked.

“We’ll wrap around the corner and activate backup chanters. Chito?”

“We should be good. Send me the Latina room cleaners. I’ll make sure they know what’s happening”, he responded.

Okay, but a thousand people? Holy shit.

Rolling up to the hotel, we set up the truck, placed the signs in strategic piles along what would become the expanding line, rechecked the bullhorns, positioned our monitors, passed out the sign-in cards, checked in with the police, and started a small line with the early bird arrivals.

We ran through our chant repertory:

What do we want?
Contract…

Do you like the union?
Yes!…

Se ve, se siente,
La union esta presente.

Primed and prepared, we waited.

As the day shift ended in the hotels, the workers arrived. With each new group of ten or twenty, we lengthened both sections of the picket line further down the sidewalk from the hotel’s main entrance.

In the middle, at the entrance, we leafleted customers as they entered or left the hotel, hollering at them to stay someplace else:

“Have you no shame? Check out now! Scab!”

We weren’t committing civil disobedience today, so we couldn’t block them. We needed sound to power the boycott. If done right, our audio uproar would drive away millions of dollars in bookings.

In the early stages of the action, with fewer numbers, we did more complex chants.

“Union conga!”, shouted Alphonso.

Do you like the union?
Yes! (thrusting our picket signs up)
Do you like the union?
Yes! (signs up)

Do you like the bosses?
No! (signs down)
Do you like the bosses?
No! (signs down)

Union-bashing’s got to go!

Tightly knit, choreographed, we danced down the line. But then, wave after wave of maids poured in from the downtown hotels, joined by cooks, food servers, bussers, bartenders and bellmen. Soon came the other unions – the sign and display workers, the teachers, the carpenters, the long shore and health workers, then the church and community people, the politicians and the North-of- Hollywood movie stars.

We had to simplify.

All this in a concrete canyon in downtown San Francisco, a kaleidoscope of rush-hour traffic, clanging fire engines, people rushing for BART, the guy with the “Twelve Galaxies” sign who was at every protest in the city, the usual assembly of hurting, hollering street folks and the looming, hulking presence of a corporate hotel that had dared open nonunion, in our town.

To be heard, our wall of sound had to absorb every noise thrown at us from the rush hour city and turn it against the hotel. That meant tighter, synchronized chanting by larger and larger numbers of people.

We’d had it down, up to a point – two, three, four hundred people on the
expanding line. At five hundred, we were spread out farther than we were used to. Clare feverishly adjusted monitors, chant leaders, responders, leafletters.

“More chant sheets!”, shouted Chito.

At eight hundred, we began to wobble out of unison.

Do you like the bosses?
Do you like…
No!
No…

Union bashing’s…
bashing’s…
Got to…
Got to…

Go…
Go…

Now the half-way house guys hit the line, another hundred-fifty, beefed up from years pumping iron in the joint.

“Here are the sheets”, Clare shouted to Chito. “Tomenlos”, Chito said to the Latina room cleaners. “Mabuhay”, I heard the Filipinas shout, “Tuánjié”, from the Chinese.

We were reaching flood tide.

A shuttle bus pulled up in front of the hotel, in the middle of our two gigantic, main sections of line. As the passengers disembarked the leafletters thrust their flyers at them over the blocking arms of hotel security, “Check out now!”, they shouted, check out now!” Some on the line joined them, others continued as before:

Check out now!
What do we want?
Check out now!
Contract!
Check out…
When do we want it…
…now!
…..now!

It was call-and-response chaos.

The guests fled into the hotel. Management screamed. “Back off”, said the cops.

We were teetering on the edge.

“Get back together!”, shouted Clare.

I’m chanting with my whole body now, struggling to get us in sync.

What do we want?
What do we want?
Pushing the sound back together:

Contract!
Contract!

Driving it like an offensive lineman:

When do we want it?
When do we want it?

Until finally:

Now!!!

We’d done it. The cops back off – a thousand people are chanting as one.
They can hear us in tour-planning offices around the world.

Then, something unusual starts to happen. Flowing up the sides of the hotel and the buildings across the street, the thundering storm of unison chanting begins to generate something else, something other-worldly, a layer of under and overtones that reverberates in all directions and up into the sky.

What do we want?
Contract, act, act…
When do we want it?
Now, ow, ow, ow!…

I heard something like this once, in my avant-garde theater days on the East Coast, when some experimental music guy who’d studied Tibetan Buddhist chanting claimed he could sing three notes at the same time. Apparently, so could we. We reached the level of triple-toned, mass-chanting, high-picket-line art.

We’d created a transcendent symphony of sound that said, “These streets belong to us and you better give us a damn contract.”

Contract now, ow, ow…!
Contract now, ow, ow…!
Contract now, ow, ow…!

At the peak of our multidimensional, transformational chant-fest, we stopped. It was six, and people had other things to do.

A committee member said a few words, as did a worker from another hotel, a member of the Board of Supervisors and then San Francisco’s fighting labor priest.

Speeches done, we turned towards the hotel. Leading a group a thousand strong, Alphonso called out,

“Let’s tell them what they already know”

We’ll be back, ck, ck , ck!….
We’ll be back, ck, ck , ck!!….
We’ll be back, ck, ck , ck!!!….
We’ll be back, ck, ck , ck, ck!!!!….

Until we won.

After today, I knew we would.

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