Month: October 2004

When Melissa Howard joined the Wal-Mart store in New Castle, Indiana, in 1992, she received a blue vest, a red, white and blue nametag, six bucks an hour, and the title of “electronics department manager.” Howard hoped to climb the corporate ladder, accept greater responsibility and take home a fatter paycheck.

 So she worked diligently and her performance evaluations reflected that: The reviews rated much of her work as “exceeds expectations,” the top ranking allowed. Howard says that in the space set aside for her comments, “I wrote that my long-term goals were to work my way up the ladder to store manager, district manager and ultimately regional manager.”

 After several years at Wal-Mart, Howard became a store manager, joining a small group of women who held that title. Not only was she a store manager by 1999, she was asked to open a brand new Supercenter in Bluffton, Indiana. “The Supercenter was the up-and-coming thing,” Howard says. To be asked to open one meant “prestige.” She likened it to the difference between driving a Ford and a Cadillac. “It was just a major accomplishment.”

 She was now on the top rung of responsibility inside a store, yet she wasn’t earning the top salary. That honor went to two men who reported to Howard as co-managers at the Supercenter. One man with no Wal-Mart work experience, she claims, was making $15,000 more a year and getting three weeks of vacation, a perk Howard only got after seven years at Wal-Mart. The other man, Howard says, was “hired off the street for $10,000 more than I was making.”

 Although the store opening was successful, Howard’s own career was headed for trouble. In March 2000, some stores in her district were experiencing high shrink, and inventory was disappearing because of theft or sloppy paperwork. She was told her Supercenter wasn’t a problem, but a store she’d managed months earlier was struggling with inventory loss.

 Several managers, district managers and loss prevention managers were summoned to the corporate offices in Bentonville, Arkansas, for a meeting. On the trip, some of the men decided to stop at a roadside strip club. Despite her instincts, Howard says she felt it best to go into the club rather than sit alone in a dark parking lot off a highway.

 “I tried to ignore the show, but at one point,” Howard says in an affidavit, “I was approached by one of the strippers and District Manager Kevin Washburn proposed that he pay one of the strippers $50 to have a ‘threesome out back’ with me.”

 Shocked, she refused. But she didn’t complain to higher-ups at Wal-Mart. Managers, she alleges, routinely went to strip clubs during annual meetings. Moreover, she says, the last time she objected, in 1994, to what she felt was belittling treatment from John Waters, a regional vice president, she was told she needed to learn to “take the shit and let it roll.”

 In any case, the return trip wasn’t much different. There was another stop at a strip club in Missouri and, she says, some of the men planned to visit a massage parlor.

 

Step down “voluntarily”

Two months later, Howard realized that lap dances, massage parlors and invitations to a threesome would be the least of her problems. That’s when John Waters was named as her new district manager. (He’d been demoted from regional vice president.) “At our first meeting, he made a point of telling me, in a less than friendly tone, that he ‘remembered’ me,” claims Howard.

 On June 16, 2000, she says, he called her and told her she needed to step down. Howard drove 30 miles to meet with him. In an affidavit, Howard recalls: “He told me that a woman should not be running a Wal-Mart store and that I ‘needed to be home raising my daughter.’ He instructed me to step down ‘voluntarily’ and to tell my employees at the morning meeting that having this new Supercenter was too stressful for a single parent and that I needed to take a break.”

 Though her store was “running in the black”—unusual for a new Supercenter—she says Waters wanted her out. If she didn’t quit, she alleges that he told her he’d make her life “hell.”

 “I had no choice but to step down,” Howard says.

 He also wanted her out of his district. She was assigned to a co-manager position in a store 120 miles away. Meanwhile, she claims the regional personnel manager told her to stay away from her old Supercenter; her presence in the store was undermining the new store manager’s “ability to succeed.”

 Soon after, Howard says Waters accused her of having sex with an employee, something forbidden by Wal-Mart’s anti-fraternization rules. She vehemently denied the claim. The company investigated and cleared her of any wrongdoing.

 By late summer of 2000, Howard felt battered: She had stepped down as a store manager, left the Supercenter she’d worked hard to open, been assigned a two-hour commute, and endured a humiliating investigation into her sexual conduct.

 Howard was no longer able to take the shit and roll with it. “I knew at that point that I had to leave Wal-Mart,” she says. And so she did.

 

“Retail is for Housewives”

Less than a year after Howard resigned, a gender discrimination class action lawsuit was filed against Wal-Mart in San Francisco federal court. It claims that Wal-Mart discriminated against female employees and that women were paid less than men in similar positions, even with higher performance ratings and more seniority. And it claims that women weren’t promoted to in-store management positions as often as men and when they were, they waited longer to advance.

 In short, it says that Wal-Mart has two career ladders—a well-paying, far-reaching one for men and a limited, lower-wage one for women. Affidavits filed in court by women allege that:

 

• Women with years of experience and good work records were repeatedly passed over for promotions in favor of men with little or no experience.

• Women seeking advancement were treated differently than men; they were asked to work night shifts for two years as assistant manager before being considered for store manager or were asked to show they could repeatedly lift 50-pound bags of dry dog food.

• Women working in personnel were fired when they complained that men were consistently paid more than women for the same job.

• Some women were told men were being paid more because men had “families to support” or that “men are here to make a career and women aren’t. Retail isfor housewives who just need to earn extra money.”

 

The plaintiffs also compiled compelling statistics: Among cashiers and greeters, 65 percent were women; among salaried assistant managers, a more modest 35 percent were women; among co-managers, less than 25 percent. And among store managers, only 14 percent were women. And they filed expert testimony that there is a clear record of under-promoting women in “nearly every geographic region,” and that the women of Wal-Mart are paid less than men nationwide. For hourly employees, the wage gap is $1,100 and among salaried jobs, women make $14,500 less than men. Statistics are the backbone of a request for class action status; in this case, the class could mean 1.6 million women, making it the largest such suit ever certified.

 Wal-Mart’s response has been somewhat predictable: The numbers are flawed because comparisons should be made store-by-store or within each department of each store, and not company-wide. And incredibly, Wal-Mart, a company that critics charge routinely uses its sheer size to get what it wants, argues that the big class of plaintiffs makes the case unmanageable. In other words, Wal-Mart was suggesting a size cap on class-action lawsuits.

 U.S. District Court Judge Martin J. Jenkins didn’t buy it. In his opinion handed down in June, he wrote, “Insulating our nation’s largest employers from allegations that they have engaged in a pattern and practice of gender or racial discrimination—simply because they are large—would seriously undermine these imperatives.”

 Jenkins handed the women a significant victory, granting class action status for all women working at any Wal-Mart retail store in the United States since December 26, 1998, who have been, or might be, subject to the alleged discriminatory pay and promotion practices.

 Wal-Mart immediately released a statement: “Let’s keep in mind that today’s ruling has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the case. Judge Jenkins is simply saying he thinks it meets the legal requirements necessary to move forward as a class action. We strongly disagree with his decision and will seek an appeal.”

 When we contacted Wal-Mart for this story and submitted written questions as asked, we received no response.

 

The dog food bag test

When Claudia Renati took a job in 1993 as a membership team leader for Pace Membership Warehouse, Inc., in Roseville, California, her family needed the paycheck. She’d been working in real estate when the market dropped off. Her husband was out of work for a year because of a job-related injury. The work meant regular income and, she hoped, advancement opportunities.

 Soon after she started, Wal-Mart bought Pace and converted the store to a Sam’s Club, and “they made you believe that it was even so much easier and a much better organization that you could, that anybody could, move up and be in management and move on to running your own club if you wanted to,” Renati says.

 The reality proved different for her. For several years she appealed in vain to Wal-Mart’s management for a promotion. She says she had above average or exceptional evaluations, no disciplinary action, and time records that were “squeaky clean.” But it was never good enough to get promoted. “There was constantly a barrier,” she claims.

 In 1994, after the regional sales manager left the company, Renati was put in charge of “running the region and doing all the ads and marketing programs. I completed all the tasks of a Regional Sales Manager for two years without the proper title or pay.”

 Yet, when she approached the director of operations about a promotion, Renati says she was told that she couldn’t have it because she hadn’t completed the management-training program. When she asked about entering the program, she alleges, “He told me that I would have to be willing to sell my house and move to Alaska.”

 Wal-Mart has a policy of requiring people to move around the country if they want to move up in the company. But with a husband who had 30 years invested in his job, Renati says moving wasn’t a real option, so she remained the marketing team leader. By 2000, she had trained approximately 20 marketing managers, “all of whom were male and many of whom never went through the training program.”

 But then Wal-Mart violated its own policy, she says, when several men in her store climbed up the management ranks without moving—to Alaska or anywhere else. A meat cutter became a general manager, a floor team leader was promoted to general manager, a team leader became a merchandise manager. And she watched a number of management training candidates filter through Sam’s Club. The candidate profile, Renati claims, is “usually a white male between 27 and 35.”

 In 2000, while out for six weeks for knee surgery, Renati says she was told that her department was being combined with another and that a man would head the new department. Her job was being eliminated. Her new post was as a meat wrapper. But while out on sick leave later that year, she was replaced by a man and moved to the membership desk.

 There, she got a not-so-pleasant surprise. “I discovered that my supervisor at the membership desk was someone whom I had previously supervised for six years,” she says. Fed up, she quit.

 Then, in 2001, she was asked to return and sell credit at the membership desk. When she asked about promotional opportunities, she was told she’d be given a chance. She signed up to work.

 In 2002 she asked to become the photo manager, but a male cashier with six months of experience got the job. When she approached the operations director and explained that she’d spent nine years at Sam’s Club and had little advancement, she says he asked if she could stack 50-pound bags of dog food. She could not.

 “He told me there was nothing he could do for me because before I could become a manager, I would have to be Floor Team Leader and that requires stacking 50-pound bags of dog food,” Renati claims.

 And yet she knew of several male managers who didn’t have to be a floor team leader first or were not required to pass the 50-pound dog food bags test.

 In 2002, Renati quit a second and final time. She says of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club: “It is run by good old boys. They make and break their money off the backs of the women employees.”

 

 

Pro-subsidy, anti-union

Ironically, founder Sam Walton’s rules for building a retail business include valuing “associates” and sharing rewards. Last year, Wal-Mart generated $265 billion in revenue and had about $9.1 billion in net income. Today there are 5,000 stores in 10 countries, including Argentina, South Korea and China. When Walton died in 1992, he was second only to Bill Gates for title of the world’s richest man.

 The impressive growth has come at a high price. In May, Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research center that promotes corporate and government accountability, released a report showing Wal-Mart received more than $1 billion in subsidies from local and state governments, including sales tax rebates, free or reduced-priced land, tax-increment-financing, state corporate income tax credits and property tax abatements. The study was partially funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

 Labor unions have their own fight to pick with Wal-Mart. Although the UFCW recently won accreditation and the right to represent employees in a Quebec Wal-Mart, it has yet to successfully organize in the United States. In 2000, meat cutters in a Jacksonville, Texas, store voted to organize and shortly after that the company announced it was closing the department. Wal-Mart’s official position on unions is: “We do not believe there is a need for third-party representation.”

 Represented or not, workers have leveled other charges against Wal-Mart. The company has been hit by a wave of class action suits alleging that it requires its employees to work “off the clock,” a violation of the Fair Labor Standards and Practices Act. Wal-Mart is also being sued in several courts over its practice of taking out life insurance policies on Wal-Mart employees. Under the company’s Corporate-Owned Life Insurance program, the company—not the employee’s surviving family—is financially compensated if the worker dies. Wal-Mart settled lawsuits in Texas and New Hampshire but others are pending.

 And in August, the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkeley released a report claiming that Wal-Mart’s low wages and inadequate benefits in California cost the state $86 million a year in state aid.

 But eclipsing them all is Dukes et al. vs. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the class action gender discrimination suit that includes women like Melissa Howard and Claudia Renati. This is a case that could do serious damage to the company. In its annual report released before the class certification ruling earlier this summer, Wal-Mart warned that if the class is certified, a settlement is reached, or it loses the case, “the resulting liability could be material to the Company, as could employment-related injunctive measures, which would result in increased costs of operation on an ongoing basis.”

 

The fight goes on

Melissa Howard and Claudia Renati have found there is life beyond Wal-Mart. Howard is a customer-relations specialist in Indianapolis making less than what she did when she stepped down as a Supercenter store manager. A single mom, Howard says, “it has not been the easiest, but I did what I had to do.”

 Renati is now the executive director of Lincoln Arts, a nonprofit public arts organization in Lincoln, California. Says Renati: “This is the 21st Century, this is not the 1950s coming out of World War II.” Women “need to be recognized as being intelligent, smart individuals who can run an organization—because I do here.”

 Since the case was filed in 2001, Wal-Mart has made a few changes—some substantive, some in public relations. It scrapped the “tap on the shoulder” method for deciding who gets to join the management-in-training program and has set up a formal application process. The company opened a diversity office which is supposed to help it “recruit and promote from all segments of society,” according to its annual report. And it launched a PR campaign touting Wal-Mart as a great place for advancement and a good paycheck.

 That’s not what Debra Smith hears these days. A staff attorney with the San Francisco-based Equal Rights Advocates, one of the firms representing women in the lawsuit, Smith says that current Wal-Mart employees who are involved in the suit are “very scared.”

 Says Smith: “I have several who call me once a month or once a quarter who tell me about the latest incident that they’re afraid is going to get them terminated and they feel they’re being set up for termination.”

 And some of those stories may end up in the court file as the case moves towards a trial.

 

 

Cents and sensibility
Social justice values aside, there’s no denying the good deals at Wal-Mart. Pay your money, make your choice

Fifty dollars. It’ll buy dinner out for two, sans appetizers, alcohol and dessert. You can play a round of golf at Birdwood or fill up your SUV. Doesn’t seem like all that much, does it?

 But point that SUV north on Route 29, hang a left on Hilton Heights Road and before you can say Ulysses S. Grant, you’re searching for a parking spot in the immense lot of Wal-Mart, where 50 bucks still means something.

 On a recent Tuesday morning, the place is jammed with hundreds of the Wal-Mart faithful. And we in Charlottesville aren’t the only ones on the prowl for a bargain or two. The retail behemoth averages more than 100 million customers a week, and at last count, there were 5,000 Wal-Mart stores in 10 countries. Last year, the chain netted about $9.1 billion on $265 billion in sales. Its electronic doors slide open every day at 6am, and don’t stop whooshing back and forth until midnight.

 Once inside those doors, a friendly senior citizen welcomes me, and, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a four-foot-tall plastic skeleton break into a dancing rendition of “Super Freak.” Halloween candy, I think, and take my first right.

 I’m immediately waylaid, however, by a display of Diet Coke (12 cans for $2.50, compared with $4.29 at Giant). Also into my cart goes a box of Special K cereal ($2.50), Chunky chicken noodle soup ($1.50 a can), a pound of Kraft mini marshmallows ($1.27), a 34.5-ounce can of Maxwell House Master Blend coffee ($3.97) and a gallon of Hawaiian Punch ($1.97). And then there’s the Halloween candy (a pound of mini Hershey bars for $3.94).

 I can’t resist a $1.50 pair of panties and a $2.50 bra. I grab a bottle of Dawn dish soap ($1.97), Purex laundry detergent (100 ounces for $2.74), Lysol toilet bowl cleaner ($1.66), Kleenex tissues ($1.88 for 120), a roll of Mardi Gras paper towels (97¢), a four-pack of soft white light bulbs (77¢) and zipper seal sandwich bags (50 for 97¢). I strain my back hoisting 25 pounds of kitty litter ($2.76) into my cart, followed by 20 pounds of Ol’ Roy dog food ($6.97).

 Before heading for the checkout, I snag some hunter’s knit gloves (two six-packs for $4) and Remington plastic 20-gauge shotgun shells ($2.98 for a box of 25). I’ve got to be certain about these babies, though, because a sign above them warns me “all ammunition sales are final.”

 According to my calculations, I should have enough of my $50 bill left over for a couple of gumballs from the machines near the exit.—Susan Sorensen

 

Writings on the Wal
Want to know more about the class action sex discrimination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart?

 Check these URLs out and inform yourself.

www.walmartclass.com/walmartclass94.pl

This is the official Wal-Mart Class Website. Any female employee who has worked at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club since December 26, 1998, can refer to this website to determine whether she has legal claims in the class action sex discrimination lawsuit. The suit alleges discrimination against women in promotions, jobs assignments, training and pay. Keep track of the lawsuit and view press releases, complaints and answers to frequently asked questions here. Informative profiles of the seven firms and numerous attorneys working on this case are also available.

 
www.walmartstores.com/wmstore/wmstores/HomePage.jsp

The class action lawsuit is mentioned on the official Wal-Mart homepage. Enter the website and click on the “Investor Information” tab. Then find the 2004 Annual Report (bottom right-hand corner). Chapter 8, “Litigation,” contains the company’s response to investors’ concerns: “The complaint seeks, among other things, injunctive relief, compensatory damages including front pay and back pay, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees… If the court certifies a class in this action and there is an adverse verdict on the merits, or in the event of a negotiated settlement of the action, the resulting liability could be material to the Company, as could employment-related injunctive measures, which would result in increased costs of operations on an ongoing basis.”

 

www.goodjobsfirst.org/

Good Jobs First is a nonprofit research center based in Washington D.C., that helps policy-makers ensure economic development subsidies are accountable and effective. The article, “Shopping for Subsidies: How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance its Never-Ending Growth,” provides the full report claiming that Wal-Mart has received more than $1 billion in subsidies from local and state governments, including sales tax rebates, free or reduced-priced land, tax-increment-financing, state corporate income tax credits and property tax abatements. The study was partially funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which has targeted Wal-Mart.—Compiled by Kelly Quinley

—Wyclef Pawn

A: Well, Wyclef, as we all know, this little old One-Nation-Under-God is doing its damndest to make sure that no Miss Nelson is missing and every little Mohammad and Jesus can “See Spot run.”

 And, if you’ve noticed our fresh-off-the-boat Somali Bantu refugees wandering down Preston looking a little dazed and confused, then you know Charlottesville’s popular with our world’s downtrodden. In the past year alone, the International Rescue Committee has relocated approximately 200 refugees—hailing from Afghanistan to Burma—to Charlottesville, says Susan Donovan, regional resettlement director for the Charlottesville IRC office.

 But if they look out of place on Preston, imagine how the children of these refugees feel sitting in the lunchroom next to the kid eating Gogurt in a Power Rangers t-shirt. So, down to beeswax. What about those standardized tests?

 In short, under the federal government’s current guidelines, each and every little Dolie (a popular Somali name) must take standardized tests, just like little Jane who grew up in Greenbrier (even though it typically takes seven to 10 years to become proficient in a foreign language). But the tests aren’t always exactly the same.

 According to both Bev Catlin, instruction coordinator for the city schools and Jean Wollenberg, international/ESOL coordinator for the county schools, students with the English language skills of babies can substitute their scores from SELP (Stanford English Language Proficiency tests, designed to test English language progress) for the reading portion of their SOLs. As for the math, students can opt to take that portion in plain English—meaning its instructions are given in more basic English. Once they’re talking in paragraphs, it’s sink or swim, kids. Hope you packed your floaties.

 As for being ready to accommodate these students, they’re trying! Along with initial screenings, both city and county schools provide special, pull-out instruction for ESOL students.

 So, Wyclef, at the very least, there are lifeguards on the beach at the Education Ocean. And, should our ESOL students go swimming in rough waters, there are lifeguards on hand to take note if little Dolie is, as the poet said, “not waving but drowning.”

Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo Sr. is no slave overseer. But he knows the specter of the slave patrol colors the way some people see police officers.

 In early September, Longo addressed about 15 people attending this fall’s Citizens Police Academy. The annual 10-session class trains neighborhood residents in the basics of police work. In the process, Longo gives the trainees a frank lesson on why “community policing” is one of the toughest jobs in the city.

 Longo said last month that a “slave patrol” is the “oldest model of a police-like force.”

 In a later interview with C-VILLE, Longo said he used the slave patrol example to acknowledge that many people, particularly African-Americans, look at police against a backdrop of deeply ingrained history and culture. The view, he admits, is often negative.

 “In my opinion, the slave patrol met a policing function. That’s what they did,” Longo says. “You just don’t forget that. That doesn’t change overnight.”

 As a strategy, “community policing” has been tossed around the Charlottesville Police Department for a decade. It refers to a style of policing where officers work with neighborhood residents, gathering tips that make crimes easier to solve and, ideally, preventing some crimes altogether. As a practice, community policing began in earnest when the City hired Longo, a Baltimore police veteran, in February 2001.

 In the past several months, two much-publicized incidents—uproar in April over a DNA dragnet of black men, and the shooting of an unarmed 31-year-old black man, Kerry Cook, by a white police officer at Friendship Court in August—brought the issues of race relations and law enforcement again to the foreground in Charlottesville. Opinions varied, with some defending Longo and his department, while others declared race relations were worse than anytime since the 1960s.

 The stakes are high, and the pressure on Longo seems tremendous. After all, the City has pinned its economic future on luring middle-class homebuyers into Charlottesville neighborhoods, including those traditionally home to low-income African-Americans. Longo believes making those neighborhoods safe for current and prospective residents demands a close relationship between police and neighbors.

 “There are going to be entire communities that I’m going to have to win the trust of,” Longo said to the Citizens Police Academy’s attendees. “I’m not sure we’re there yet. I think we’re a whole lot closer than we were.”

 

 

DNA disputes

Last spring, the national news media descended on Charlottesville, and for once it didn’t have anything to do with Sally Hemings, Dave Matthews or a new “No. 1” ranking.

 Chief Longo was in a tight spot. News of a serial rapist, responsible for a series of violent attacks across seven years, had people wondering: “Why can’t the police catch this guy?”

 Each new attack heaped more scrutiny on the department. Police posted composite sketches of the rapist—described as a muscular black man in his late 20s—and pleaded for citizen tips, but to no avail.

 Under pressure to crack the case, Longo ordered a DNA dragnet. By seeking voluntary DNA samples (taken by swabbing the inner cheek) from 195 black men, police kicked open a hornet’s nest.

 The backlash began when police asked Steven Turner, a black graduate student at UVA’s Curry School of Education, for a DNA sample in March. It was the second time police had approached Turner for a sample. He refused both requests—one of only 10 men who rejected the swab—and began loudly blasting the dragnet.

 Turner caught the attention of local and national media, and received backing from local African-American leaders, among them Dr. Rick Turner, no relation, UVA’s outspoken Dean of African-American Affairs, and Pastor Bruce Beard of Transformational Ministries First Baptist Church.

 Critics argued that the voluntary samples amounted to racial profiling, claiming that police were taking samples from men who looked nothing like the composite, or who hadn’t been in the area long enough to have committed the first rape, in 1997. Others said the chief should have at least conferred with black leaders to explain the dragnet and ask for their help before officers started demanding swabs.

 If Longo caught hell for not trying hard enough to catch the rapist, he caught twice as much hell for trying too hard. It wasn’t long before Longo ended up live on CNN, sitting next to Steven Turner to defend the dragnet. During one frenzied week in April, Longo fielded calls from network TV producers, held a feisty town hall meeting and, eventually, suspended the DNA sample collection.

 When Longo revived the dragnet a few days later, he applied much stricter guidelines to when and how to collect a sample. He also reiterated the promise that samples would be destroyed after being checked against the perp’s DNA. The new plan met largely with approval from black leaders. Dean Turner, Beard, the ACLU and others praised Longo’s response to the furor.

 But not everyone was slapping Longo on the back. Some local blacks grumbled that they’d been complaining about the dragnet since it first began, but nobody paid any attention until a UVA student started fussing.

 “Until it made national news, it was fine and dandy,” says Raymond Mason, a fierce critic of the DNA dragnet. He attended Longo’s town hall meeting, and says police shouldn’t be asking people to submit their DNA more or less at random.

 “I know someone who got stopped twice. He didn’t fit the description at all,” says Mason. “They told him, ‘Why don’t you prove yourself innocent?’

 “According to the Constitution, you’re innocent until proven guilty. They flipped the script,” Mason says.

 

 

Escalating force

On August 21, a single gunshot on a summer night sent another shockwave through the city’s African-American neighborhoods.

 That night two officers, while responding to a 911 call from a woman in an apartment in Friendship Court, had a violent confrontation with Kerry Cook, the woman’s ex-boyfriend. Cook, a Fluvanna resident, was wanted on several fairly minor warrants, but had a lengthy rap sheet and violent past. He had also previously been arrested by Officer William Sclafani, one of the two officers who responded to the call at the subsidized housing complex on Garrett Street.

 According to a police statement, after the two officers used “escalating force” while trying to subdue Cook, Sclafani then shot Cook once in the stomach. Witnesses say police repeatedly hit Cook in the head with their batons, adding that the fight lasted for several minutes and that perhaps 100 residents witnessed at least some of the violence.

 Civil rights attorney Deborah Wyatt represented Cook’s family in the shooting’s aftermath, and appeared likely to take some form of legal action on the behalf of Craig Lawson, 36, claiming that he was unfairly swept up and arrested in the chaos of that night at Friendship Court. Lawson was charged with a felony assault of a police officer, disorderly conduct, obstructing justice and crossing a police line. Wyatt is also handling a harassment lawsuit against City police over the DNA dragnet. A man who claims he does not fit the serial rapist’s description and therefore should not have been asked to provide a DNA sample filed the suit.

 Police and the City Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office are still investigating the Cook incident. Cook, who went into a coma after being shot, spent more than three weeks recovering at the UVA Medical Center. He is now being held at the Albemarle/Charlottesville Regional Jail.

 Cook’s mother, Patricia Cook, complains that her son was released to the custody of the jail too quickly, saying he still has a fever and can’t walk or eat.

 “We’re afraid this man is actually going to die in there,” Cook says.

 Taken together, the DNA dragnet and the shooting incident had some local African-Americans fearing a backward slide toward the bad old days, when cops and black people stood on opposite sides of a battle line. When asked about those incidents, nobody was talking much about community policing.

 “A lot of people don’t trust the police,” said Harold Foley, who works for Public Housing Association of Residents, in the days after the shooting. “The trust has broke down.”

 That’s not what Chief Longo wants to hear. The central tenet of Longo’s strategic plan, which he introduced six months after assuming the post in February 2001, is to sink deep roots in historically high-crime neighborhoods, many of which are mostly black.

 

 

“Whachya gonna do when they come for you?”

Before Longo arrived, community policing was more of a catch phrase than a serious strategy.

 The department’s first stab at such a policy was in 1994, when the City hired North Carolina native John Wolford to replace longtime chief John “Deke” Bowen.

 Bowen’s so-called community policing initiative had involved putting officers on horseback. It made for good PR, but many cops didn’t understand how riding high in the saddle would help them to make inroads in high-crime neighborhoods, according to City Police Captain J.E. “Chip“ Harding, who in 2000 wrote a report on community policing.

 Wolford had his own ideas about community policing. When he took over, he created a team of officers to work in troubled neighborhoods for three months at a time. That didn’t solve the problem, says Harding.

 Wolford resigned after less than three years, when one-third of his officers and 90 percent of supervisors signed a letter questioning the chief’s credibility and management style.

 Next came former police lieutenant J.W. “Buddy” Rittenhouse, who took over for Wolford. “He wasn’t very high on the whole concept of community policing,” says Harding.

 The Rittenhouse method for cleaning up crime was a tactic called “saturation deployment.” For about three consecutive days, the department would send in a posse of officers and bust as many bad guys as possible.

 “Like they do on ‘Cops’,” Longo says, before singing “Bad boys, bad boys” in homage to the show’s theme.

 This approach may make for good television, but it doesn’t do much for ridding a city of drug dealing, gunplay, petty theft or even vandalism—a crime community policing believers tag as a the start of the slippery slope that leads to a neighborhood’s worsening decay.

 Longo likens the outcome of saturation deployment to squeezing a balloon—by pushing on one neighborhood, crime shrinks there and swells somewhere else.

 “You’ll never fix the problem that way,” Longo says. “A long-term strategy means a long-term commitment.”

 While speaking at the Citizens Police Academy, Longo described the old-school policing style by leaning back, wrist draped over an imaginary steering wheel, pantomiming an officer who scans the sidewalk for bad guys as he rolls by in his cruiser.

 Under Rittenhouse, the force was a “very military-style, highly structured, traditional form of policing,” says Harding, a 20-year veteran who served under Rittenhouse.

 Near the end of his tenure, City Hall pressured Rittenhouse to try community policing. He created a five-officer squad to roam undercover around neighborhoods with a reputation for high crime, such as 10th and Page, Hardy Drive and Prospect Avenue, similar to the Neighborhood Task Force former chief Wolford had installed. In true Rittenhouse style, he dubbed his community policing squad the “Street Hawks” because, he reportedly said, the Neighborhood Task Force sounded “too Mr. Rogers.”

 The predatory moniker was a curious choice, particularly for a squad that was supposed to reach out to minority groups, and its mention provokes a chuckle from Longo. Like other community policing squads, the Street Hawks came and went mostly because no one in the department had a clear idea of what they were supposed to do. “They were just kind of set off to the side,” says Harding.

 The “here today, gone tomorrow” history of community policing in Charlottesville made Longo’s job even harder, because African-Americans were justifiably suspicious of any grand strategies and big promises from a new chief.

 But as director of the Quality Community Council (QCC), Karen Waters was ready to give Longo’s strategy a chance. The QCC works on community-centered solutions to public safety, housing and other common problems in its target neighborhoods, most of which have large black populations. The group was formed in response to a random shooting on Prospect Avenue in 1999 and is funded by the City and private sources.

 Waters defends Chief Longo, touting his positive influence on the force. Though Waters admits that the two incidents have upset people, she says Longo has worked hard to reach out to black neighborhoods.

 “Are there individual officers that do things that are not just or correct? Yes,” Waters says, but adds, “I don’t recall ever being invited to sit down with Buddy Rittenhouse and being asked about the concerns of the African-American community.”

 

 

New day rising?

Not everyone shares Karen Waters’ view.

 Mary Carey is president of the Friendship Court Neighborhood Association, and has lived in the apartment complex for 22 years. Carey is angry. She can’t talk about the recent police shooting that occurred 75 feet from her apartment without raising her voice.

 “These people will never forget that night,” Carey says of the shooting. “I can see that cop shooting him…I can’t get it out of my mind.”

 Carey’s loud denunciations of the police force were heard all over local media, angering some cops, who thought her superheated charges were not representative of a community they say they’ve worked hard to get to know.

 Carey says the shooting was a turning point for her faith in Longo and police.

 “I used to feel like Longo would make a difference, but now, I don’t know,” she says.

 The day after the shooting, two detectives came looking for Carey at the Food Lion on Fifth Street, where she works. They wanted a statement from her about the shooting, but she wasn’t in that day. Carey says the detectives’ visit was “humiliating” and “almost damaged my credibility with my employer.”

 She left an angry phone message with Longo, accusing him of crossing the line. The next day, a detective came to apologize for the Food Lion visit, she says, but the apology didn’t curb her anger.

 “I grew up with this shit back in the ’60s. I’m not going back,” Carey says.

 Asked about missteps that may have a racial angle, Captain Harding says Longo has vigorously stressed respect among officers in their dealings with citizens, and within the force.

 “Yeah, you’re going to have people messing up occasionally…Anytime you’ve got 120 sworn police officers there’s always going to a knucklehead in the group somewhere doing something sometime,” Harding says. He says the difference is that the 41-year-old Longo—who holds a law degree and sports an impressive career in which he rose from a cadet to a colonel in 18 years with the Baltimore police force—sets the tone for a culture that does not tolerate insensitive behavior. Longo’s example, Harding says, is “permeating the whole environment.”

 Even so, some residents, particularly in black neighborhoods, aren’t buying that it’s a new day over at the police station. The tension between African-Americans and the police reaches deeper than any particular chief, policy, or specific incident, says DNA dragnet critic Raymond Mason.

 “The problem is not just the chief, or the police department. It’s the community itself,” says Mason. “Charlottesville just got named the best place to live, but for black people that’s just not true. It’s the same way in every city.”

 Echoing a fact the chief himself explained to the Citizens Police Academy, Mason says that a suspicion of white society, including police and government, has long been part of African-American culture.

 “It’s not just resentment against the police department,” says Mason. “It’s resentment against white society.”

 That’s not what Charlottesville likes to hear about itself. Whether such resentment is fair, both police and African-American leaders admit Mason’s point of view is not uncommon; indeed, it’s a fact that both blacks and whites must recognize and confront if any progress is to be made in Charlottesville’s race relations.

 Mason is a convicted felon, guilty of cocaine distribution and heroin possession, and he now works for Gaston Wyatt, a woodworking company. He says his first encounter with police was when he was 11 or 12. A white woman accused him—falsely, he says—of stealing her pocketbook. An officer apprehended him, twisted his arm behind his back and hollered to his buddies, “Yep, I caught another one.”

 Mason says he escaped prosecution when the woman couldn’t positively identify him. “She said, ‘You know, judge, they all look alike.’”

 Mason points to little examples—the way a police car cruises by a group of black men standing on the corner, then turns around and cruises by again, slowly. It’s the condescending attitude he says some officers exude towards black people.

 “Cops talk to white people, and they say ‘Sir, is there a problem,’” says Mason. “They talk to black people and say ‘Hey, what’s the problem here?’”

 Mason says he recently gave an officer roadside directions. “He said, ‘You ‘da man!’ I’m not the man. You don’t have to talk black to me. Just be respectful.”

 Another incident—recently two plainclothes police officers were walking along UVA’s Corner district when a young white man drove past in an SUV blaring hip hop. “Hey, you’re white!” one of the officers yelled to the driver, mockingly, unaware that a C-VILLE reporter was walking behind them.

 It’s unclear whether they were City officers. But their badges and guns were clearly on display, and so was the kind of cocky swagger that many people find offensive. It’s what Harding would call “knucklehead” behavior, and it reinforces the deeply ingrained stereotypes that Longo is striving to overcome.

 “There are always going to be people that say, ‘You know what, I’ve been hurt too many times. I’ve seen things too many times. [Police] are not going to change my mind,’” Longo says. “You can’t [further] alienate that person. You just gotta accept that and move on—with or without them.”

 Longo put this belief into action on a recent day, when he returned a call from Mary Carey about setting up a meeting. Still steamed, Carey plays the Longo’s message for a reporter. His voice is business-like, but friendly, as he says he looks forward to meeting with her.

 

 

A matter of perception

Safety—no politician can promise it, no police program can guarantee it. Safety is more than just a function of crime statistics or number of officers on the street. It’s also a subjective feeling that depends on how people perceive their environment.

 To illustrate that point, Longo describes what he says is the No. 1 complaint his department receives. It’s laughable—when people complain to Longo about crime, the place they talk about the most frequently is that bourgeois bastion, the Downtown Mall.

 Longo himself sometimes patrols the Mall on Friday nights, and says the typical troublemaker he runs into is a loud teenager who might be sitting ona planter.

 “I hear all the time that people don’t feel safe on the Downtown Mall,” Longo says. “But the reality of it is that you don’t read about a lot of crimes happening there.”

 Yet some residents say police should be arresting more of those unruly teenagers and other alleged Mall troublemakers—many of whom are black. At a recent meeting of the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville, several merchants gave City Police Lt. Gary Pleasants an earful about crime on the Mall, claiming that officers are allegedly issuing warnings rather than arresting Mall urchins.

 Sometimes, police can’t catch a break. Last year Charlottesville saw a 10 percent dip in reported, serious crimes, yet critics continue to harp on the department for not being able to catch the serial rapist—the proverbial needle in the haystack. While some business owners and real estate developers push police to “lock ‘em up,” minority neighborhood leaders say aggressive tactics only alienate the people whose help police most need.

 When Longo moved into his office three years, ago, his problems went even deeper than inconsistent notions of community policing. The City’s police department constantly struggles to retain officers tempted by higher-paying jobs, and the chronic officer shortfall (currently, the department is seven officers short) means community policing units are perpetually shorthanded.

 “Rather than just take a bunch of cops and throw them at a neighborhood, we started small,” Longo says. “And we picked 10th and Page first.”

 In addition to the two cops at 10th and Page, who are set up in a substation, City police have two officers at a substation in the Orangedale/Prospect Avenue neighborhood. Longo says the first priority for these four officers is meeting people and building relationships.

 “If it takes you 10 years, then prepare to say here 10 years,” Longo says of the neighborhood cops’ marching orders.

 To help restore faith in local government, police hold regular meetings in target neighborhoods, giving residents a chance to make requests for amenities—repair for a broken sidewalk, a speed bump, a new stop sign. Then police go to City Hall and make it happen.

 The thinking is that if these officers can earn neighbor’s trust, maybe cops will be steered toward big problems, such as when an out-of-town drug dealer moves into the area. Because, as Longo says, people are far more likely to phone in a tip to a cop they know and trust.

 “I wish we could just wave a magic wand and expand [community policing],” says Waters of the Quality Community Council.

 Though Waters admits that this year has posed challenges for police in working with the black community, she says Longo’s plan has definitely improved peoples’ opinions of cops, and City government. Furthermore, Waters actually thinks the DNA flap could help get people engaged with police, claiming that her office gained several volunteers who signed up because of outrage over the incident.

 “Crisis is what forms leadership,” Waters says.

 Cyndi Richardson, a lifelong resident of Sixth Street S.W., is enrolled in this fall’s Citizens Police Academy. She says she’s excited about talking to local drug enforcement, SWAT and internal affairs officers. She’s also looking forward to seeing the firing range, but wouldn’t mind missing the tour of the jail.

 Richardson currently serves as an informal block rep for police, a role she says grew out of her concern over drug dealing on her street in the mid ’90s. The dealers moved to her street when police cracked down on an open-air drug market in 10th and Page.

 “Now, it’s gone,” Richardson says of the imported drug problem.

 Richardson says she praises police to her neighbors, defending their actions with “a clear conscience”—a stance that isn’t always easy.

 “I’ve gotten flack for it,” Richardson says, noting that she supports police because “I’ve worked with the police department.”

 Even as community policing apparently makes slow but steady inroads into the African-American community, the system is still hampered by budget issues. While the federal government feeds departments across the country millions of dollars for guns and gas masks to fight drugs and terrorists, federal and State budget cuts have left localities strapped for cash.

 For example, The Washington Post reported last week that the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services Program (COPS), which helped local departments boost their ranks with 118,000 officers nationwide, would no longer fund new hires. The move comes after years of cuts from the Bush Administration. Since 1995, the COPS program gave the Charlottesville Police Department $662,069, allowing it to bring on 14 new officers.

 Budget woes mean Charlottesville is often short on police officers. The seven-officer shortage in Charlottesville has left four vacancies in the department’s Neighborhood Services Bureau. That means two neighborhoods, including Friendship Court where Kerry Cook was shot, are denied a community policing squad. Furthermore, Harding says, the department is constantly losing officers to higher salaries in other cities or to jobs with the Drug Enforcement Agency, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau, and FBI. And in a new twist, Harding says three experienced officers have been lured away from Charlottesville in the last six months by local sheriffs’ departments that offered the bonus of a take-home police car.

 “We get discouraged,” says Harding.

 Police work, it seems, is often an exercise in dealing with frustration. Money’s tight, demands are high, and sometimes the progress seems to come in drops while setbacks seem to come in torrents.

 “You’ve just got to be patient,” says Longo. “You can’t just throw your hands up and say, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ You’ve got to stay the course. You’ve got to show people that this is for real.”

Welcome to the neighborhood
COMMUNITY POLICING HITS THE STREETS

Lt. Mike Dean of the Charlottesville Police Department is an ex-Marine who worked for the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement squad for 15 years. During that time, he says, busting dealers was “my singular focus.”

 So it was a major shift for Dean when he was promoted in 2002 to run the CPD’s Neighborhood Services Bureau, which directs the department’s “community policing” efforts from a headquarters in the former Frank Ix building. Since then, Dean has become a true believer in the hands-on approach of working with residents to stop crime.

 “Community policing is about leveraging all our resources, because police can’t do it alone” Dean says. “What we think the problems in the community are, are not always what people in the neighborhood think the biggest problems are,” Dean adds.

 To better learn what’s going on around town, City police hold monthly meetings with a group of 30 informal block reps from primarily low-income neighborhoods, also drawing City officials to the huddles.

 Police also go door-to-door delivering surveys in historically high-crime neighborhoods. Among the questions on the straightforward questionnaire are whether people think police are respectful, whether they feel safe and what they think are the biggest ills in the neighborhood, with choices ranging from gun violence to littering. Dean flips through a big book that contains detailed results from the survey, saying they help City cops know where work needs to be done.

 Many of the tactics used in community policing arose in the early ’90s in New York City, during Rudy Giuliani’s stint as mayor, a time in which the NYPD orchestrated a remarkable decrease in crime. The strategy is about far more than, as Police Captain J.E. “Chip” Harding says, “just birthday cakes and gifts for children.” When it’s working, community policing garners a steady stream of tips about crime and also helps one hand talk to the other, so to speak, on the force.

 One tactic local cops have taken from the NYPD’s community policing playbook is a regular meeting to track crime trends. At the meeting, Chief Longo says shift commanders and sergeants huddle at a round table with detectives, school resources officers and neighborhood cops to look at clusters of “calls for service” on a map up on the wall. Longo says the group can focus on specific streets and ask questions such as, “Why do we have three domestic calls here and what are you doing to stop it? Have you booked them into counseling?”

 Longo says the approach gives cops a fuller picture of likely criminals. It’s part of a far more comprehensive crime fighting plan than what Charlottesville’s finest have used in the past, which Longo describes as, “Go in there guys, be real aggressive policing, lock some people up, kick down some doors, execute some search warrants, get some people off the corner, you know, board up some houses and then once it’s stabilized, O.K. 10th and Page, you’re on your own.

 “This is different,” Longo says. “It could take years.”—P.F.

Back in black
THE CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT STRUGGLES TO RECRUIT AFRICAN-AMERICAN OFFICERS

An obvious way for the Charlottesville Police Department to better relations with black citizens is to have more black cops patrolling the city. But with only 13 black officers on the 112-member police force, the percentage of black cops is about half the percentage of African-American residents in Charlottesville proper, which is 22 percent.

 Chief Timothy Longo says this relatively low number is not for lack of trying, citing “focused minority recruitment” of blacks, Hispanics and women.

 “The problem with recruiting African-Americans, particularly African-American males, is that it’s not a popular profession,” Longo says, with understatement. “There’s a certain stigma.”

 With the force not having much luck recruiting black men, Longo decided to call for backup. About 18 months ago, he sent a letter to 35 local black leaders.

 “Basically what I was asking for is help,” Longo says.

 With only a handful of phone calls and a few meetings resulting, the response to the letter was disappointing.

 Asked what might turn things around, spurring local leaders to help and bringing minority recruits to his door, Longo says, “People are just going to have to see that this is a department in which they feel respected and valued.”—P.F.

Police salaries

Police work is rarely easy, no matter what city you live in. Charlottesville cops endure the same frustrations and dangers as officers elsewhere, but they get far less in return.

 Statistics show that Charlottesville’s men and women in blue earn less than their counterparts in other cities. The chart below compares starting salaries for patrol officers in Charlottesville and other Virginia cities and elsewhere nationwide.

 In the past six months, Charlottesville’s police department has lost three officers to other departments with higher pay, according to City Police Captain J.E. “Chip” Harding. The department is currently short seven officers, with four vacancies in the community-policing bureau. It’s frustrating, Harding says, because it’s usually the most talented officers who leave.

 Last spring, in the thick of budget season and City Council campaigns, there seemed to be no dearth of rhetoric about how raising salaries would help the City retain good officers. What does seem in short supply, however, is money.—J.B.

 

STARTING SALARIES FOR POLICE OFFICERS IN VIRGINIA

Charlottesville $29,250

Albemarle County $28,888

Virginia Beach $36,622

Danville $27,951 (without college degree), $30,746 (without college degree)

Arlington $38,126

For nearly three years, the tenacious Jan Cornell has been the backbone of the Staff Union at UVA (SUUVA). Taking on the region’s largest employer as the only full-time member of SUUVA is taking its toll on her, though. As alarmed workers look to Cornell to explain the school’s quest for charter status, will she have what it takes to lead SUUVA through the union’s most important chapter to date?

 

WE THE WILLING

Even her typing sounds militant.

 It’s 10am on a recent Monday morning, and Jan Cornell is firing off an e-mail toa SUUVA member in UVA’s Facilities Management department. At noon, UVA Vice President Leonard Sandridge would appear in the FM lunchroom, speaking and taking questions on UVA’s quest for financial freedom from the Commonwealth of Virginia.

 “I wanted our guy in Facilities to be there,” Cornell says. “I’ve already been to two of these forums. If I keep asking the questions, they say ‘Oh, that’s just Jan.’ We need to get new faces out there.”

 So Cornell typed furiously, the click of her keystrokes echoing through the hallway and empty rooms of SUUVA’s office at 327 W. Main St., where it’s just her and a roomful of a brightly colored picket signs, with their frozen outrage, from past protests: United we stand, divided we beg. There is no context for the “N” word.

 Taped to the cream-colored metal filing cabinet adjacent to her desk, Cornell keeps a sheet of paper tacked up, the unofficial union mantra: We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.

 “The willing is the union. The ungrateful are the workers. The unknowing is UVA,” she says. “The impossible is trying to start a union at UVA. Everyone has told me I’ve taken on an impossible task.”

 Yet Cornell seems to thrive under the weight of impossibility. She’s channeling that feeling right now, it seems, as she writes to SUUVA’s guy in Facilities. She wants him to press Sandridge on how charter status would affect UVA’s 17,000 workers and their families.

 So she shoots off the bullet points. “Benefits is the big thing,” she says. “Our big emphasis is that the new employees aren’t going to have much. We’re afraid they’re going to bring in the same personnel policies as the Medical Center… they have terrible personnel policies.”

 Then the sound of her keystrokes thunders through the empty office, down the stairwell, the question resonating: What does it mean for the workers?

 Despite Cornell’s attempts to transmit her passion via e-mail, it would turn out the guy in Facilities never made it to the meeting. He went to the gym instead.

 “I was furious,” Cornell says later. “That’s the most frustrating thing with this job. I can’t be everywhere and do everything.

 “Sometimes I feel like I’m the Lone Ranger here.”

 

FIGHTING CHARTER

SUUVA marks the evolution of labor activism that began at UVA in the late 1990s. A group of faculty, students and a few workers formed the Labor Action Group and demanded the school raise its lowest hourly wage to $8 from $6.50. Administrators, their arms twisted by noisy protests and bad press, complied.

 Susan Fraiman, a UVA English professor and founding member of LAG, says Cornell was one of the first and most staunch staff members to get involved with the Labor Action Group. “The climate was so intimidating that there were a very few staff workers involved. She was one of the early brave ones to break the silence.

 “Now, she can speak out with a little bit more impunity,” says Fraiman.

 Members of LAG formed SUUVA in late 2001 to protest firings of innocent workers after a series of patient rapes were linked to a Medical Center employee. In May 2002, Cornell quit her job as an editor at UVA’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and went to work as a full-time organizer for the Communication Workers of America, the powerful national union that backs SUUVA.

 “It was a tremendous show of courage and dedication to the cause, if you will,” says Richard Verlander, a CWA organizer and Cornell’s boss. “Jan has been thrust into a role where she’s an outspoken advocate for workers, being in the media all the time, going up against very powerful people.

 “Now that she’s got a couple years experience, she’s a much more confident leader.”

 Cornell is UVA’s chief watchdog—a job she says she was born to do, ever since she learned about unions from her grandfather in Ohio. When employees want to do something about potential fire hazards or racial epithets, they talk to Cornell. If she can’t fix the problem with an e-mail or a phone call, then she’ll pass out the picket signs and make her case with a bullhorn.

 “I’ve always stood up for the worker,” says Cornell. “I hate people who beat up on people who can’t fight back. I hate that. I hate the big company that can beat up on the worker who needs their job.”

 SUUVA showed that a lot can be accomplished by a small group with a cause and some picket signs. Charter, however, is a different kind of fight for Cornell and the union.

 For the past year, three of the Commonwealth’s flagship schools—UVA, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and The College of William and Mary—have pushed the State to grant them charter status. This year, the State underfunded the schools by a combined $89 million; UVA’s allotment of $365 million was $39.3 million short.

 In drawing up their own charters, the schools would set their own terms with the State. UVA would likely request less money from Richmond, and in exchange the General Assembly would grant the Board of Visitors (basically the school’s board of directors) the power to raise tuition and float bonds.

 Legislators must give UVA permission to draw up a charter. “Everybody I’ve talked to has liked the concept,” says State Representative Mitch Van Yahres (D-Charlottesville). “But the old story, you know… the devil is in the details.”

 Van Yahres sits on a legislative committee to consider the charter question. He hasn’t seen any specific proposals from UVA, though.

 SUUVA opposes charter, citing a comment by UVA President John Casteen that UVA under charter would be comparable to the Medical Center under codified autonomy. Given that several of SUUVA’s picket lines formed on the brick sidewalks outside the hospital, this was not a popular analogy among union members.

 With about 300 members, SUUVA represents a small percentage of UVA’s 17,000 employees. Many workers worry about charter’s potential impacts, judging by the overflow attendance and pointed questions at recent forums. UVA’s own communications department has plugged the forums and posted charter news on nearly every flat surface around campus, yet administrators have released no details about exactly what would happen under charter.

 “It’s not reassuring to people. If it was all on the up and up, they would have brought it out,” Cornell says.

 

TOUGH ROOM

Even though her guy in Facilities didn’t show up to question Sandridge, Cornell would be glad to know that the vice prez still heard plenty of tough questions after his talk in the Facilities Management Lunchroom.

 On Monday, October 18, the tables in FM’s lunchroom were pulled out into the parking lot. Inside, workers packed into rows of chairs set up facing a podium, where Sandridge stood, speaking into a microphone that broadcast his voice to the back of the lunchroom and outside, into the parking lot. People sat at the tables, eating lunch and listening to speakers mounted on tall tripods.

 Sandridge talked for about 30 minutes. He explained how the Commonwealth had been shirking its fiduciary duty to higher education. He said “frankly” and “candidly” a lot, but the words that followed could never exactly answer people’s main question.

 People approached microphones in the lunchroom or outside. Most people wanted some clarification about how UVA’s charter would affect them.

 Since UVA has announced very few details about what a charter might actually mean, Sandridge is left to say, “Until there’s a change, things will stay the way they are. Am I saying trust us a little bit? Well, yes I am. Does that sell? No, it doesn’t.”

 Indeed. These answers didn’t seem to sit well with many employees. Brad Sayler, a computer technician for the Civil Engineering department, told Sandridge: “It’s the wolves watching the sheep here. Are we still going to be able to see what the fat cats are making around here?”

 Sayler wanted Sandridge to guarantee workers would have a voice in their affairs under charter. Sandridge replied that it would not be in the administration’s best interest to irritate its workers.

 Sayler says via e-mail he had heard of SUUVA, but feels they have little power because they can’t strike or collectively bargain. “I do think that through editorials in the local media, they have had an effect on the debate by helping to make the general public aware of the issues concerning UVA’s move to Charter status,” he says.

 Indeed, the newspaper is where Lou Persinger gets most of his information about charter. During the Facilities Management lunch meeting with Sandridge, he stood up from his bowl of cheeseburger macaroni to ask whether UVA would permit unions under charter.

 Persinger, an electrician, says working at UVA is “one of the better jobs I’ve had.” It’s less challenging than work at Dominion’s Bremo power station, but with better benefits and security than the private sector usually offers. He heard about charter from UVA, he says, but “the real eye-opener was public newspapers.

 “As an electrician, there’s plenty of work out there,” says Persinger. “Smaller contractors don’t provide holidays and health care.” At UVA, he says, “you schedule when you want to be off, and you’re off,” which means he can coach tee-ball, as he’s done for his 6-year-old during the past two seasons.

 “If I was working for a smaller contracting company, the boss could say, ‘Guess what buddy, I need you here.’”

 Persinger doesn’t favor unions. He joined one at Bremo, because all his co-workers were members, but when layoffs came he got hit because he had only worked there for two years, and lacked seniority. “It didn’t matter if I was the good or the best, I was the junior guy so I got cut.

 “I don’t think we need a union,” he says. “There’s some places where you need a union, at the slave shops, but this is no slave shop.”

 Persinger is cautiously optimistic that charter might help, or at least not hurt, his situation. Others aren’t so sure.

 Diane Rush is a cook at UVA and a member of the Employee Council—a group of employees from various departments that meets with administrators to discuss employee policies. During Sandridge’s speech, she sat three rows back from the podium, arms folded across her blue uniform, her eyes fixed on Sandridge and her face set in a skeptical glower.

 After the meeting, she walks with two coworkers. None feel particularly reassured by Sandridge’s remarks.

 “They just won’t tell us anything,” Rush says.

 The CWA’s Verlander says Cornell sometimes feels that if charter goes through, it will be a defeat for SUUVA. Verlander, though, says employees are watching the administration closely and speaking up for themselves—and that’s good for the union.

 “There’s no doubt in my mind that they wouldn’t be holding all these town hall meetings if Jan hadn’t made such an outcry,” he says. “Now there’s lots of questions being asked. I view that as a victory.”

 

THEY CALL ME A MADWOMAN

When I called Carol Wood and asked her about SUUVA’s effect on the charter debate, the first answer I got was uncomfortable silence.

 “I haven’t seen where that’s had an influence,” says Wood, who directs public communications for UVA and who then proceeds to list various ways UVA’s communications office has reached out to employees—flyers, e-mails, ads in The Cavalier Daily and notices in University-published paper InsideUVA, plus audio and video from charter briefings posted on the school’s charter website (www.virginia.edu/chartereduniversities/), which also allows employees to make anonymous comments.

 UVA would have done all this anyway, regardless of SUUVA, says Wood.

 “The only impact I have witnessed,” Wood wrote later in an e-mail, “is that during some of the briefings several questioners identified themselves as being aligned with SUUVA and their questions were peppered with statements based on misinformation.”

 Perhaps Wood was referring to a meeting on Tuesday, October 19, when SUUVA member Dena Bowers stood up to question Sandridge during a forum at Jordan Hall in the Medical Center.

 Drawing on Casteen’s statement that the Medical Center’s 1996 switch to “codified autonomy” represented the best model of what charter status would look like at the rest of UVA, Bowers suggested that some employees would be hurt if UVA’s benefits package matched that of the Medical Center.

 “I think you are potentially confusing people here,” said Sandridge. “I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment of what we’re doing.”

 Bowers said later that she was trying to make a point. “Because they haven’t told us anything else, all we had to go by was codified autonomy. That’s what I’m doing when I make these comparisons.”

 SUUVA’s members don’t speak to UVA through the so-called proper channels—they confront, argue and shout through bullhorns instead of asking polite questions or sending anonymous e-mails—so the school’s administration has tended to dismiss the union as a band of misfits.

 “I’ve not heard any mention of [SUUVA] in the charter process,” says William Crutchfield, a member of UVA’s Board of Visitors. “My understanding is that they represent a very small number of people.”

 What derision UVA bestows on SUUVA, Jan Cornell wears like a badge. While they may not talk about SUUVA publicly, Cornell says she hears about insults administrators hurl in private meetings. “I heard one of them called me a madwoman,” Cornell says. “I said, ‘That’s good!’”

 Cornell’s fellow union members have different ways to describe her leadership.

 “She’s tough, she fearless,” says Sue Herndon, one of the original members of SUUVA. “It’s such an intense emotional commitment for her, it’s part of her whole makeup.”

 Herndon says she was among the people telling Cornell that they might as well accept charter, because it’s going to happen no matter what. “She said ‘no,’” says Herndon. “She won’t let it die. It’s so intense for her.”

 Her intensity, Cornell says, comes from her life experience.

 Born in Minneapolis in 1950 and raised in Ohio by what she calls “straight Republican” parents, Cornell learned about unions from her grandfather, a carpenter.

 “I learned that I wanted to go be a union organizer,” she says. “And I learned that a lot of people don’t like unions.”

 After switching her major from language to business and graduating from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Cornell married at 23, had a child and lived all over the United States. She divorced a year later and went to Phoenix, Arizona, where her parents had retired. Her hard edge, her particular brand of class anger, she says, comes from life experience.

 “I know what it’s like to be abandoned by a husband, to work for $3.25 an hour with a 1-year-old and no child support,” she says. “I know what it’s like to be on welfare.”

 Cornell remarried, and her job transferred her from Phoenix to northern Virginia in 1980. The “rat race,” she says, got to her, so she and her husband moved to Fluvanna County. She worked odd jobs before taking a job as a secretary at UVA in 1989.

 She worked her way up, eventually becoming editor for all her department’s publications and earning the nickname “eagle eye” around the office. At the same time, she joined UVA’s Employee Council, which she now calls “ineffective” because she says administrators don’t really take employee viewpoints into consideration.

 “I worked there for 12 years,” she says of her time at UVA. “I was happy there. I had a great job. I never had a problem working for UVA.”

 Cornell was working as an editor for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies when SUUVA had one of its first rallies. Cornell’s picture landed on the front page of the next day’s Daily Progress.

 “I thought, ‘The shit’s going to hit the fan now,’” Cornell says. Her supervisor, Sandra Stallard, called Cornell into her office for a meeting with her and two associate deans, Cornell says.

 Stallard, she continues, was “nice.”

 “She said, ‘You can’t worry about what anybody thinks,’” says Cornell. “I always knew I wasn’t going to get in trouble. Without her support, I couldn’t have done the things I’ve accomplished. I hated leaving there.”

 

NOT A DONE DEAL

There’s no doubt, says SUUVA vice president Elizabeth Coles, that the union is having an effect on working conditions.

 Coles, a Medical Center employee, joined SUUVA after an incident in her office in which Coles says she was unfairly punished. With SUUVA’s help, Coles filed a grievance and won her case.

 The power of Cornell’s voice was evident recently, says Coles, in a situation that occurred in a hospital room where old mammography films are stored. A worker there had been complaining for months to her supervisor about conditions in the storage room—mildew growing on the rafters, film stored on the floor or piled so high that it touched the lights, broken ladders. Coles said she made a list and e-mailed it to Cornell, who forwarded the list to a Medical Center supervisor.

 “I was very polite,” says Cornell. “I just said these things should be fixed, and if not I could call the OSHA.”

 Two days later, Coles says “they had people with suits and ties on down there. Everything is corrected now.”

 Coles says she recently sent Cornell an e-mail, thanking her for her work.

 “I wanted her to know that if it wasn’t for her being so persistent, sending out e-mails and keeping us on top of everything, we would be so much in the dark,” says Coles. “Jan does feel overwhelmed sometimes. She feels like she’s going up against a wall. We try to assure her and support her.”

 It will take more than e-mails to derail charter, but last week Cornell did hear what she considered to be good news from the governor.

 On Tuesday, October 26, the Richmond Times-Dispatch carried the news that charter status won’t be as easy to attain as it once might have seemed.

 In a meeting with about 75 leaders of Virginia colleges, the first of six planned forums on the charter proposal, Governor Mark Warner expressed reservations about the plan. According to the report, Warner seemed especially concerned that smaller colleges would suffer if the Commonwealth’s three flagship universities pulled away from the State.

 Reached by C-VILLE Weekly, Warner flak Ellen Qualls said the governor has “tossed out how it will impact the state work force,” mostly from the point of view of smaller colleges. Schools like VCU and Longwood University say that without the lobbying muscle of the three flagship schools, higher education will continue to get less funding from the State.

 Warner also advocated a new research university in economically depressed southern Virginia, and he seemed concerned that charter might hurt that plan. “We just wanted to slow the conversation down a bit, and make sure all these voices get heard,” says Qualls.

 Cornell, who met with Warner last spring to express her concerns about how charter might affect employees, says Warner is “the only one who has said one word about employees” in the charter debate.

 “Why weren’t the employees at the meeting?” Cornell wonders. “Why are employees so insignificant? Everyone is sloughing them off, saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry about them.’ Well, somebody’s got to worry about them.”

 

LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL
Fast facts about the Staff Union at UVA

Membership: About 300 staff andclassified employees

Affiliation: SUUVA and the Graduate Labor Union (for UVA grad students)affiliated with Communication Workers of America in January 2002.

Dues: $10.70/month for full-time employees, $5.35/month for part-time employees

Meetings: Every other Tuesday

Fringe benefits: According to the www.suuva.org, card-carrying union members enjoy, among other benefits, extended happy hours at Baja Bean and four-cent copies at ALC.

What does “right to work” mean? Virginia is a “right to work” state,meaning that unions cannot forceworkers to join.—JB