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IBEW Leaders Win Awards for Diversity Efforts

(IBEW)IBEW members have long played an influential role in two AFL-CIO constituency organizations, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and the A. Philip Randolph Institute, named for the legendary African-American leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

This summer, both groups held conferences which brought together veteran and young minority activists to extend the reach of organized labor deeper into their communities. 

At APALA’s 10th biennial convention in Las Vegas in July and at APRI’s 40th educational conference in Phoenix in August, veteran IBEW leaders were presented with awards for their commitment to cultivating organized labor’s diversity.

Victor Uno, business manager, Dublin, Calif., Local 595, a founding member of APALA, was awarded the Art Takei Award, named for a pioneering Japanese American leader of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Los Angeles who passed away in 1997. 

“APALA fights for workers without voices and without unions,” says Uno, who has united with San Francisco Local 6 Business Manager John O’Rourke and APALA activists to challenge NBC, a nonunion general contractor that was charged with 48 felony counts for underpaying Chinese immigrant workers. (See upcoming story, October issue, The Electrical Worker).

 “I’m proud that IBEW was a founding union of APALA,” says Uno, a journeyman inside wireman, who serves as president of the Oakland Port Authority and director of the Asian Health Services Board, a community clinic that serves 15,000 people.
Uno’s mentorship has furnished APALA with a dynamic, young leader.  His son Malcolm, who worked on construction in an IBEW summer program before entering college, serves as the group’s executive director. “From my father and my mother (Josie Camacho, political director, Alameda County Central Labor Council), I saw what the labor movement provides in income and the value of hard work,” says Malcolm Uno.  “I learned the value of solidarity with co-workers to fight for what working people deserve.  We’re much stronger if we’re able to stand together.”

Carolyn Williams, director, IBEW Human Services Department, was awarded the Rosina Tucker Award by the APRI. Tucker, who died in 1987 at the age of 105, rallied the wives of Pullman porters to support their husbands’ organizing efforts and remained active in civil rights for generations.

“Like Rosina Tucker, Carolyn Williams speaks her mind quite liberally and is a person who doesn’t complain, but looks to develop real programs to make a difference,” says Clayola Brown, president of the APRI, who asked Williams to be master of ceremonies at the awards ceremony.  Also receiving awards were Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Florida State Senator Anthony “Tony” Hill, actress Regina Taylor and actor Charles Dutton.

Williams’ award also recognizes her union’s progressive leadership, says Brown. “The IBEW and President Hill have been phenomenal in addressing diversity in a positive way and in supporting our goal of pushing forward on health care reform and overcoming disparities faced by minorities in health care,” says Brown.

“I was proud to receive the Rosina Tucker Award on behalf of the IBEW,” says Williams, an Atlanta, Ga., Local 613 journeyman wireman.  “But I was also humbled to look around the room and see IBEW members and others who don’t have full-time positions in unions but volunteer so much time and effort to improve people’s lives.”