How did the Midwest Joint Board of UNITE come to affiliate with the Labor Party?
Our midwest region actually introduced a resolution at the ACTWU convention in 1983 in Detroit, calling for an independent political party. So we’ve been on the record in favor of this for a long time. And our Joint Board over the years has done a lot of workshops and discussion groups on the necessity of workers having an independent political position. So when the original Labor Party Advocates came along, I attended a couple of meetings, and we just followed it. We sent four or five observers to the Labor Party’s founding convention in Cleveland. I deliberately sent observers with very different political perspectives and backgrounds, and they came back unanimous in their opinion that this was genuine and that it was going to go somewhere. So it’s really something that’s been imbued in our political culture for 15 years. Who does the Midwest Joint Board represent? We represent all the workers in UNITE locals in five states — Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We als
