“You can withstand. You will overcome. You will have the voice you need and deserve. You will inspire workers across this country.” Fred Ross, Jr.

I’ve been moved by the wonderful remembrances and tributes to Fred Ross, Jr. As one of many people transformed by Fred during his 50-year career in movements for justice, I remain in awe of the scope and depth of his work. But as any organizer knows, those 50 years are made of daily interactions with other organizers and people struggling to make their jobs, lives, and our world better. I’m sharing my story about working with Fred in an effort to honor what he taught me and some of what I believe Fred’s life and work has to teach all of us.

Fred was an organizer’s organizer. He approached this work with rigor, joy, passion and an unwavering belief in people and our ability to do incredible, seemingly impossible things.

In my time as organizer at SEIU Local 250 and then SEIU United Healthcare Workers – West, I had the joy of working with Fred from 2004 through 2009. I also had the privilege of being led by him throughout 2006, 2007 and 2008. 

Fred and I (along with many others) worked together with workers from Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (“Memorial”) and workers from other Catholic hospitals around California that were part of the Saint Joseph Health System (SJHS).  SJHS was the only non-union statewide hospital system in California. I was 22 years old and less than six months into my career as an organizer when I first met with workers from Memorial. In 2004, workers at Memorial had filed for an election to join Local 250 but made the difficult decision to withdraw that petition in early 2005 in the face of a vicious anti-union campaign. 

After cancelling the election, we quickly moved to begin a campaign calling on Memorial to agree to ground rules for a free and fair election, like California’s largest Catholic hospital system, Catholic Healthcare West, had done a few years prior. 

The campaign became part of a national effort by SEIU to hold Catholic hospital systems to the Church’s stated values and to refrain from the standard anti-union tactics common in any contested organizing drive. We believed that victory was possible at Memorial and SJHS in part because the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Orange – the otherwise progressive order who founded the hospitals – still had a majority of seats on the corporate board and the Sisters had demonstrated their willingness to overrule the lay corporate leadership. 

By the time I began working with Fred, I was a green Lead Organizer, responsible for leading a team of other organizers and the day-to-day activities of the campaign. For four years workers at Memorial, undertook a campaign of escalating public actions aimed at building an ever-growing chorus of voices important to the sisters. Eventually Memorial workers were joined by other SJHS hospitals in Northern California and Orange County (Southern California) in demonstrating workers’ unrelenting demand for a voice at work and a fair process for organizing.

Fred took his role as a trainer and mentor as seriously as anyone I’ve ever worked with. Even at the time, it was clear to me that he deeply felt the responsibility of training the next generation of organizers. At each of our – at least weekly – one-on-one meetings, Fred would sit down with his omnipresent yellow legal pad, and I would glance with no small amount anxiety at the list of items we had to discuss in each meeting. That list seemed to get longer every week. (Now that I’ve spent 20 years working in the labor movement, I’ve learned that list never stops getting longer.)

Because he believed in our campaign, and my ability to lead a piece of it, Fred had high expectations of me. I remember my first time leading a meeting of our organizing committee. I had written an agenda that probably wasn’t very good and sent it to Fred. Late into the evening Fred spent over an hour walking me through changes. He was clear about the changes he thought were important; but led me through that conversation by not just telling me what to do, but by interrogating and challenging me to come up with something that met the needs of the campaign.

Fred had similarly high expectations of what the worker leaders who made up the organizing committee were capable of and was equally invested in their development. In any long campaign it’s normal for a certain amount of fatigue to set in, so we were constantly strategizing with workers at Memorial about how to reinspire and motivate their coworkers.

By the fall of 2007, workers had organizing committees in the three Orange County hospitals as well as Santa Rosa and Petaluma and we were planning two consecutive weekends of marches to the hospitals, calling on SJHS to agree to a free and fair election. To ensure strong participation, Fred suggested a series of house meetings led by the committee. I would learn this was classic Fred Ross, Jr. The organizing committee members would invite coworkers from their department to their homes and lead them through an agenda developed by the committee designed to reground them in why they were organizing, inspire them about the progress we had made, and get their commitment to attend the march in Santa Rosa. 

One by one, members of the committee did turnout to their house meetings, led the agenda, and got their coworkers committed to attend this march from downtown Santa Rosa to Memorial Hospital. On that day the energy was electric. The march was led by the Memorial workers and joined by other union hospital workers and community supporters. When we started the march, it was like someone fired a starting pistol. The Memorial workers took off at such a pace that I had to run to the front of the march to slow them down so that the rest of the marchers could catch up.

Fred trusted workers to make decisions and know that their power was key to victory. He knew there was no winning without workers driving the campaign. Early in our time working together we organized a majority of workers at Memorial to sign on to a letter calling for a fair process. I remember Fred telling me about a conversation he had with another senior leader of SEIU who was organizing Catholic hospitals who asked, “Fred, why are you wasting time getting a majority in Santa Rosa?” Fred’s response was simple, “Because we can, so we should.” I came to learn that was an important lesson about the centrality of workers to their own campaign. A view I would learn was not shared by all of Fred’s peers at the SEIU International Union.

“They did what good organizers do best, listen and engage.“

By the summer of 2008 we were ready for another escalation, this time focused directly on the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Orange themselves. To pull off an action directed at an order of nuns would require no small amount of finesse. Fred, with leaders like Glenn Goldstein from our local – by then, SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West – and his organizing partner Eileen Purcell, had spent significant time coming up with an action plan that would strike the right balance of militancy and moral suasion. Drawing on his formative experiences in the United Farm Workers, and echoing Cesar Chavez’s historic fast in 1968, Fred proposed a series of fasts at the different hospitals.

Santa Rosa remained our strongest shop, so we knew for this plan to work, the leaders at Memorial would have to embrace it. On a rainy weekend in late spring, we gathered the top leaders, a committee that had been organizing for five years and were the hardest core of union support in the entire company. After a discussion of the progress we had made and where we saw potential to move the company, Fred laid out the idea for the fast.

It went over like lead balloon. Reactions ranged from uncomfortable silence to incredulity, “you want us to do what?!” Eventually, one of the committee members – a phlebotomist who had been one of the first people to contact the union – said “I’ve been on board with everything we’ve done in this campaign and If we decide to do this, I’ll probably do it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Fred and the other staff didn’t try to force a fake consensus or ram through a decision. They did what good organizers do best, listen and engage, arriving at a plan to hold a week of action outside the Sisters’ Motherhouse, during an anniversary celebration that would be attended by current and former members of the order, several of whom had become allies of the workers over the preceding years.

The week of action was classic Fred.  Exploiting decades of relationships and contacts, Fred enlisted those that would carry weight with the Sisters to join the rallies, vigils, and art projects, and even the evening communion on the sidewalk outside the gates to the Motherhouse.

Then Attorney General (and future Governor) Jerry Brown, National Farmer Worker Ministry founder Chris Hartmire and former UAW leader Paul Schrade all joined workers in calling on the Sisters to return to their values and respect hospital workers’ right to a free and fair election. The week culminated in an enormous march with workers making the trip down from Santa Rosa to join their sisters and brothers in Orange County, well over 400 miles south. The power that workers had built was evident when several weeks later the company reached out to begin negotiations for a fair election in Santa Rosa, that would set a pattern for all 9,000 SJHS employees around the state. Unfortunately, those negotiations would not bear fruit for reasons that would only become clear later.

Simultaneous to this campaign, another campaign was being waged by the Andy Stern lead SEIU against the very local that the SJHS workers were fighting to join: SEIU-United Healthcare Workers – West. Stern’s campaign led to the trusteeship of SEIU-UHW in January of 2009 and the suspension of SEIU’s campaign in Santa Rosa. However, the members and leaders of SEIU-UHW founded a new union – the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) – to carry on the tradition of militant, democratic unionism that had become impossible inside SEIU.

The workers in Santa Rosa were faced with a choice:
1) Wait and see if SEIU would resume their campaign
2) Stop organizing altogether
3) Organize with NUHW, a newly created union with no members and little to no resources, to take on what would inevitably be a fight with one of the largest unions in the US, as well as the employer who had been fighting us for nearly 6 years. 

Many of the same core leaders, committee members who less than a year before had gathered to plan a key escalation in a growing and powerful campaign, met in a common room at the condo complex where one of them lived. They made the hard decision to organize with NUHW. Without the principled leadership of organizers like Fred, I don’t know if they would have felt empowered to make that choice.

While Fred had worked with us at SEIU-UHW on the SJHS campaign, he was employed by SEIU International and had deep relationships with SEIU’s national leadership.

Learning of the SEIU’s betrayal of workers in Santa Rosa and that union’s attacks on UNITE HERE, Fred resigned from the SEIU International in March of 2009 to stand with those who had decided to organize with the NUHW.  As Fred would write in a December 2009 letter to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital workers, as they prepared for an election to join NUHW: 

These are painful memories of a deeply ugly time in our movement and part of me is reluctant to share them in what is a celebration of the life and work of someone to whom I owe so much. But I know that Fred was motivated by his abiding faith in our ability to do hard and courageous things when we are called to do so. That lesson of integrity in and dedication to building true popular power is one I hope to live up to in my life and work.

But even in that moment of darkness, Fred ended his letter to Memorial workers on a note of hope: 

“Keep your eyes on the prize. You can withstand SJHS’s anti-union campaign. You will overcome SEIU’s campaign of smear, fear and futility. By voting for NUHW, Memorial Employees will have the voice you need and deserve for yourselves and your patients. It will also send a powerful message to SJHS and SEIU and inspire workers in the rest of SJHS and in Catholic hospitals across this country.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knew him that Fred’s prediction was right. Workers at Memorial won their election, NUHW: 283, SEIU: 13, No Union: 263. And after lengthy legal delays brought by their employer, they won a first contract in 2012. Workers at three other SJHS hospitals in Northern California went on to organize their union with NUHW.

Looking back at the closing paragraph of Fred’s letter, I see a mantra that defines Fred’s attitude towards every campaign, election, strike or fight for justice. Words that exemplify his belief in workers and everyday people: Keep your eyes on the prize. You can withstand. You will overcome. You will have the voice you need and deserve. You will inspire workers across this country.

FRED ROSS, JR, PRESENTE!

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Fred’s last campaign was organizing financial support for an upcoming documentary about his father, Fred Ross, Sr. Take a minute to visit www.fredrossproject.org and make a contribution.

A memorial for Fed Ross, Jr. is scheduled for February 26^th, 2023 at Delancey Street.  Time to be determined.  Delancey Street is at: 600 Embarcadero San Francisco, CA 94107.

If you would like to attend, please RSVP to: fredrossjrmemorial@gmail.com

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