Restructuring seeks to revive WTVP public television

 Citizens group questions secret process, more

In an 8-minute meeting preceded by secret deliberations, the board of directors of Peoria’s public-TV station on Jan. 16 announced the resignations of a majority of the board and a new board chair.

Effective Feb. 13, board members resigning (and the year their terms had been scheduled to expire) are Amanda Campbell (2025), Wayne Cannon (2024), Dr. John Day (2024), Monica Hendrickson (2024), Jerry Herbstreith, (2026), Stephen Morris (2025), Andrew Rand (2026), Sid Ruckriegel (2024), Stephen Shipley (2025), Sally Snyder (2026) and Ashley Spain (2026).

According to WTVP, remaining board members (and the year they’d been scheduled to leave) are Kim Armstrong (2024), Helen Barrick (2026), Andrew Chambers (2026), Alex Crowley (2025), Dawn Dinh (2025) and Jessica Ford (2025).

“It’s a step,” commented Becky Doubleday, a former WTVP Marketing & Community Relations staffer who co-chairs a new local grassroots group, “Friends of 47,” pushing for the board’s resignation, the transparent installation of new board members, and the appointment of an executive director also on the board.

“But [the action] hasn’t satisfied those goals,” she continued following the meeting. “We don’t know anything about the new members, the new chair or the selection process.”

New board members appointed without an explanation are Heather Acerra, Dr. Andy Chiou, Pastor Martin Johnson, Rick Lavender, Dan Pearson, Win Stoller, Daysha Warr and John Wieland, who was named chair.

“At this point, we have more questions than answers,” Doubleday added, “like why them and not others? How is the new board going to develop, and what kind of transparency and communications with the community will there be?”

Also not disclosed were details about WTVP’s claim it will have access to more than $1 million from unidentified donors.

“We are seeing more diversity and geographic representation from Central Illinois,” she said. “That’s great. The board should have representation from the communities in the broadcast area.”

However, she pointed out, Pearson lives in Geneseo, served by another PBS station (Moline’s WQPT-TV).

Also, Friends of 47, which in a few weeks gathered about 50 area residents and a few organizations to participate, thinks it’s unwise to have elected officials as board members.

“I don’t think politicians on a local public broadcasting board is a good idea given that it could give the public the impression of biased political programming,” she said. “That’s a red flag.”

Acerra is a first-term City Council member in Galesburg and Stoller is a State Senator representing District 37 elected in 2020. Further, there’s concern about Johnson, lead chaplain with the Peoria Police Department.

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest when the PPD is ostensibly investigating WTVP?” Doubleday asked.

After the September departure of finance director Lin McLaughlin, the resignation of CEO Lesley Matuszak, and Matuszak’s death by suicide, financial irregularities were publicly acknowledged. Within days, the board cut 30% from its $5 million budget, suspended publication of its monthly magazine, and laid off nine employees.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) delayed a grant to WTVP until the station addresses the situation. The CPB Inspector General is monitoring what happened and what the board plans. Besides CPB and Peoria police, the Illinois Attorney General’s Charitable Trust Bureau is looking into spending that Rand called “questionable, improper or unauthorized,” and it’s possible the FBI could be interested since federal funds are involved.

It’s unclear whether there are ties between previous WTVP leadership and the new board members. Friends of 47 wonders whether the new board will be insiders since several previous board members had served together on boards of Advanced Medical Transport, Carver Center, Heartland Health Services, the Heart of Illinois United Way, and other groups.

According to WTVP’s announced structure, published in 1969, representatives from Bradley University, Illinois Central College, Lakeview Museum, Pekin Public Schools, and Peoria Public Schools were to be part of the operation. It’s unknown whether that plan was ignored or part of a charter that was circumvented by a bylaws change.

Wieland could explain, lead a turnaround, and change any sense of an influential clique supervising station operations. A successful businessman and author of “Uncommon Threads: Weaving a Life through Family, Business and Faith,” Wieland in 1994 bought MH Equipment, which he’s said has since expanded by more than 10-fold in employees and sales. Of course, that enterprise is different than a nonprofit corporation depending on community support. But in interviews Wieland’s expressed some of his management philosophy:

* “It truly is all about getting the right people on your team.”

* “It’s never healthy for someone not to be held accountable in business or life.”

* MH Equipment’s has a “ ‘filter’ question we ask ourselves when dealing with people: ‘If your customer, vendor, or fellow employee knew everything about this subject that you do, would they say they were treated fairly?’ ”

* “It takes a long time to build trust and a second to lose it.”

 

Wieland retained MH Equipment employees during 2020’s COVID pandemic, sending them to help food banks and nonprofit ministries, and donating 11,000 hours of community service, he said. Such generosity surely helped employee relations.

In contrast, WTVP asked people it laid off to sign a five-page non-disclosure agreement that releases the station from all claims of violations of various federal laws, and prohibits the disclosure of “confidential, sensitive, and proprietary information” in order to receive severance pay. The station’s written whistleblower policy directed complaints to its CEO and Board Chair, Matuszak and Rand.

Meanwhile, Wieland made $56,400 in 19 campaign contributions to local and state candidates between 2004 and 2023 – 17 to Republicans, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections. A total of $17,500 went to Stoller.

As for Friends of 47 – the loose-knit group co-chaired by Doubleday and former WTVP senior engineer Chris Anderson – Doubleday said they “didn’t want to put together a group like this. [But] people are concerned that WTVP is trying to rebuild on faulty ground.”

At press time, a WTVP board meeting set for Jan. 23 was canceled, and previously announced 2024 meetings for the board, the executive committee, and the development committee are no longer listed on WTVP’s web site.

“I got involved with Friends of 47 because I am aware of the complexities of telecommunications that the broader community might not fully understand – like Public Broadcasting System and Federal Communications Commission compliance requirements,” Anderson said. “Are compliance questions being addressed to ensure the station stays up and running? I hope so, but we just don’t know.”

Miss Laveine takes stock in her history

 This is Black History Month, when Americans remember events and people from our past and important to our future, including African American women with February birthdays: Marian Anderson, Barbara Jordan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and especially Rosa Parks, “the mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”

But witnesses to history are around us, too.

In fact, on the day Parks refused to surrender her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., a first-year teacher in Peoria celebrated her 22^nd birthday. A few weeks after Laveine Birditt celebrated her 90^th birthday at Smokin’ Notes BBQ in East Peoria, she reminisced about bus boycotts, college, teaching and Peoria – and the Way Things Were and how the country seems to be drifting back to the Bad Ol’ Days.

Her white hair accented by black frame glasses and earrings, Birditt glows in a living room as warm as the winter weather outside is arctic.

Raised in Monmouth, Birditt attended Western Illinois State College in Macomb, where she worked in the cafeteria and was required to live off campus “with a respectable Black family” while Black athletes were permitted to live in the dorm. That meant she had to walk more than a mile to campus every day.

Graduating in 1955, Birditt became one of the first Black teachers in Peoria public schools.

She taught for 55 years at Lincoln, Trewyn and Rolling Acres, 40 years full-time in different grades and 15 years part time supervising in-school suspensions.

“I preferred the 8^th grade. They understood better. I remember telling them, ‘You can do things, go on to college or some apprenticeship to be an electrician or bricklayer.’

“There was one girl who always was looking down. I finally said, ‘Lift your head up, look up and be proud’.”

More than once, she advised classes of mostly minority children that sometimes they were going to have to be better just to stay afloat.

Meticulous notes in legible longhand she shares show her demanding nature. A former Trewyn student, Terrion Williamson, author of “Scandalize My Name,” in 2017 told writer Pam Adams, “We all thought she was crazy, but she understood something about us I’m not sure we understood about ourselves. She stayed on us.”

Birditt almost begrudgingly concedes she was kindhearted. For a while, she read to Head Start youngsters and showed them affection despite others’ objections. “One teacher cussed me out for hugging the kids,” she says.

The suspended students she monitored made her realize a double standard. They were mostly minorities who had problems with drugs, she says, and they were disciplined. “But when white kids started doing drugs, all of a sudden there were programs and agencies to help.”

Peoria had outright segregation, too. In the 1950s, Thompson’s restaurant downtown was the only place that served Blacks, who were seated in the back. There were housing restrictions in Peoria. “It was the talk of the town when a Black man bought a house on Groveland Avenue.” In public housing, Harrison was whites only as was Warner Homes’ corner building on MacArthur Highway, she says. And, like her years in Macomb, she was “a single Black teacher in Peoria who had to live with a respectable Black family.”

As a teacher, she was affected by a successful boycott of Peoria’s public transit system in 1963, when the bus company had no Black workers. It was inconvenient but necessary, she recalls: “The bus boycott affected those of us with jobs, but was for a just cause,” he says.

She and friends occasionally traveled, and she faced discrimination in lodging.

“I’d get so mad, but I maintained my cool. But it still angers me,” she says.

She got around one reluctant clerk who was prohibiting her registering until she faked an accent as a foreign tourist and was then given a room.

Birditt is still determined. Despite contracting COVID twice, in 2020 and in 2022, she’s remained independent and walks – with her metal walker – at Riverplex a few times a week, weather permitting.

But her memories remind her of how uncomfortably similar Peoria’s past was to what some seem set on re-creating now.

“White supremacists are crawling out from under rocks, and you just can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, as it’s said. The more things change, the more they’re the same,” she says. “White supremacy isn’t new, but some parents haven’t explained it and made their kids aware of its dangers. I’d tell them in a heartbeat.”

She sees a troubling return to times when discrimination was tolerated, if not exactly acceptable, citing increasing restrictions on voting and backtracking on issues as different as migrants and health care to LGBTQ rights and censorship. Asked what she would have done if officials had forbidden her to teach about certain topics, she smiled slightly and said, “I would’ve sneaked it in some way or another.”

Despite her apprehension, she’s not pessimistic. “I know I have three strikes against me – I’m a woman, I’m Black and I’m Catholic,” she quips, chuckling.

“We still have a ways to go – to grow,” says Birdittt, who embraces hope by contributing to causes as varied as scholarships to Black students and Habitat for Humanity to the Center for Prevention of Abuse and the Crittenton Centers.

This month will pass, of course, like the cold, yielding to March’s Women’s History Month and more. But as calendar pages fade, lives like Laveine’s – and the impact she had on generations, the history she experienced and yearns to see recognized – go on.

“Periodically I read a little note I kept, which says something like, ‘Don’t allow the past to cause you to be hateful… That’s the Devil at work’.”

There are dangers in companies frustrating workers who unionize

One wonders whether rising rumbles and grumbles within the rank and file of new unions are warnings of a volcanic eruption of outrage.

Too many employers’ labor-relations strategy with a startup union is common – delaying and denying workers' rights – and it will take creative concerted activities to make it too costly to remain effective.

Among the challenges facing is whether the Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Chipotle and REI workers who have unionized over the past two years will get first contracts, or will anti-union employers defy the law.

The first Starbucks store unionized in December 2021 (in Buffalo, New York). Try to dismiss xx actually more than 9,000 baristas at more than 360 stores where workers have voted to unionize.

The first REI store unionized in March 2022 (in Manhattan), followed by seven other REI stores unionizing.

The first Amazon unionization was in April 2022 (a warehouse on Staten Island). Christian Smalls, who led the Amazon Labor Union’s landmark effort to organize 8,300 workers there, said that no progress has been made toward negotiating a first contract and no bargaining sessions have even occurred.

The first Apple Store to unionize (in Towson, Md.) was in June 2022, and corporate arrogance and vanity have stymied progress.

“They’re the most conceited company I’ve ever dealt with,” said Jay Wadleigh, a business representative with the Machinists’ union, which workers voted to join. “They think they have all the answers.”

(However, bargaining has stepped up since Apple hired a Walgreens executive to run negotiations, replacing attorneys from the notorious Seyfarth Shaw law firm. “I honestly don’t think they want to be compared with Starbucks or Amazon,” he said.)

Workers at Trader Joe’s in Hadley, Mass., became the first Trader Joe’s to unionize in July 2022, and now realize that nonunion workers keen on getting a union contract have to first overcome resistance and retaliation, and then try to bargain with defiant companies that boldly break the law rather than bargain.

None has a contract; few are even negotiating.

Research shows none of these examples is an outlier. In a 2009 study of five years of union elections across the United States, Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University, found that slightly more than half of unionized workplaces (52%) didn’t reach a contract within a year of first unionizing. More than one-third (37%) had no contract after two years, and 30% still had no contract after three years, according to The New Republic.

Delays have gotten worse, too. A Bloomberg Law survey showed that between 2005 and 2007, the average or mean amount of time it took to reach a first contract after unionizing was 364 days, but by 2022, the average length was 565 days.

The strategy is absurd but not insane. There are few legal consequences for violating labor law. Also, there’s an ulterior motive in dragging out negotiations. After a year following workers unionizing, the bargaining unit can legally try to decertify the union they chose.

Companies can wait out the clock.

Maeg Yosef, a Trader Joe’s worker in Hadley, told TNR. “They’re absolutely trying to wear us down.”

In Illinois, the National Labor Relations Board last month upheld the results of a union election at a Portillo’s preparation facility in Addison – where workers voted 28-20 to unionize with the Iron Workers last April – after multiple challenges by the company – which immediately said it planned to appeal once more.

Shelly Ruzicka, a spokesperson for Arise Chicago, an independent Chicago-based workers center that’s been organizing with Portillo’s workers for more than two years, described the new appeal as “yet another stall tactic for the inevitable need to sit down and negotiate with their workers.”

There are options for workers facing a company’s refusal to bargain in good faith, but none is foolproof.  “There’s essentially nothing under labor law that forces employers to bargain,” said Bronfenbrenner, co-author with Tom Juravich, of “Union Tactics Matter: The Impact of Union Tactics on Certification Elections, First Contracts, and Membership Rates” for the George Meany Center for Labor Studies.

Everyday workers’ frustration is building, and possible solutions vary:

* Change the law. For instance, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which the House passed in 2021 (but it died in the Senate because it couldn’t get the 60 votes necessary to overcome a GOP filibuster). The PRO Act says that if no first contract is reached within 90 days after negotiations begin, either side can request mediation. If mediation doesn’t succeed within 30 days, they’re to select an arbitration panel that will decide the terms of a two-year first contract.

* The NLRB and General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has ruled on multiple Unfair Labor Practice charges, displaying frustration with employer scofflaws. Abruzzo has even proposed eliminating a 1970 decision the board from imposing financial penalties on law-breaking companies. In situations where companies don’t bargain in good faith, she advocates :making employees whole with monetary relief for the lost opportunity to make gains through the collective bargaining process.”

* Go to court. In September, an NLRB judge in Seattle began a trial that could conclude this winter that could determine whether Starbucks failed to bargain in good faith. After the trial began, union organizer Liz Duran said, “It shouldn’t take a year and a half to get to the table just because they don’t like the way that we’ve all decided that we want to bargain with the company.”

* “Corporate campaigns.” Bronfenbrenner said workers “have to find a way that costs the company more not to settle than to settle”—for example, pressuring investors or blocking a company’s expansion plans or interfering with its supply chain. “Unions might have to do all of that,” she told TNR, “before companies come seriously to the table.”

A classic example was the United Farm Workers national grape boycott, a difficult action but one that eventually forced growers to reach a contract in 1970. In fact, after Starbucks workers walked out at more than 200 locations in November and the idea of a boycott was raised, Starbucks wrote to the union in December and claimed it wanted to resume negotiations. However, progress remains elusive.

Clearly, if the pressure continues to increase, more drastic, desperate responses could happen.

No employer is “earthquake proof.”

Looking back, looking ahead - organized labor had gains in 2023

In many ways, 2023 was a great year for labor.

 

There were almost 400 strikes in 2023, according to Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations “Labor Action Tracker,” and the federal Bureau of Labor Relations found that work stoppages involving at least 1,000 workers was the most in 10 years, In 2023, more than 500,000 U.S. workers hit the bricks, reported Bloomberg Law, which also said unionized workers’ wage hikes in 2023 averaged 7% – the most in 16 years.

 

 “Meanwhile, non-union employers feel pressure to raise wages to stop their workers from organizing, when for years declining union density put downward pressure on wages,” commented Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell. Also, “the groundswell of public support for unions also has strengthened labors’ hand in local and state labor policy issues.”

 

Labor increased union members by about 300,000 last year, but the total is still just 10.1% of U.S. workers. Nevertheless, a resurgence has happened before. In the 1930s, the percentage of the work force that was unionized grew from 13% to 27% in two years.

 

Unions are still buzzing about a few huge victories:

 

* Kaiser Permanente health-care workers struck for three days and ended up achieving a 6% raise and improved staffing.

* SAG/AFTRA took on the movie industry – along with the Writers Guild – and arguably won its 118-day strike.

* The Teamsters merely threatened to walk out at UPS and won a new contract that made up for years of concessions.

* The United Auto Workers stood up to the Big 3 in an innovative 46-day strike and reached an historic settlement.

 

The big strikes were against powerful corporations, too – impressive successes built in part on ambitious internal organizing and an increased transparency for the rank and file. It was no coincidence that the major work stoppages were by unions benefiting from new leadership – and new, more militant attitudes – by Fran Drescher (Screen Actors Guild), Sean O’Brien (Teamsters) and Shawn Fain (UAW).

 

“This year alone, 900,000 unionized workers won double-digit wage increases through new contracts. In an era of so much financial uncertainty, union-negotiated contracts are putting money in workers’ wallets that will allow them to pay bills in full, put food on their tables and fuel local economies,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Across the country, we’re seeing the highest level of popular support for unions – especially from young workers – in decades.”

 

Indeed, 67% of Americans approved of union, according to Gallup.

 

Further, President Biden became the first U.S. president to be at a strike’s picket line when he stood with Fain at a UAW rally in Belleville, Mich., and other improvements ranged from African American workers in the South starting to revive organizing in the region, and labor helping to open up the historically anti-union tech sector, and robust unionizing campaigns at many college campuses.

 

Unfortunately, with gains were losses – of key labor leaders and allies, including Illinois leader Ed Smith from Laborers Local 773, Steelworkers President Tom Conway, domestic-workers advocate Myrtle Witbooi, past AFL-CIO President Thomas Donahue, longtime arbitrator Donald Wasserman, AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust CEO Stephen Coyle, Florida AFL-CIO leader Mike Williams, and union activist and writer Jane LaTour.

 

For 2024, the UAW – busy with a continental campaign to organize non-union auto workers and already collecting signature cards at VW in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Rivian in Normal, Ill. – is going to be at or near labor’s vanguard, and it seems promising to see regular working people increasingly engage and energize.

 

Ahead: The Teamsters already have authorized a strike at Anheuser-Busch (their current pact expires next month); the UFCW will take on the Meijer grocery chain (expiration also in February); the UAW at Daimler Trucks (April), CWA at AT&T (also in April on the West Coast, and in the Southeast in August); the Post Office’s Rural Carriers (May) and the APWU (September); 170,000 Theatrical Employees bargaining two national contracts (in May and July); teachers preparing for tough negotiations (June in Chicago and August in Philadelphia); International Longshoremen on the East Coast (September); Machinists at Boeing (September); and Flight Attendants’ unions at different airlines (already working without a contract).

 

“As we know, the power of a membership card goes beyond just a higher paycheck,” Shuler added. “Whether it was watching the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA establish critical contract language around artificial intelligence; United Auto Workers of America’s fight to ensure the future of electric vehicles is union strong; UNITE HERE’s precedent-setting victories in the hospitality industry as we bounce back from the COVID tourism slump; National Nurses United’s (NNU’s) unrelenting advocacy for safe staffing ratios or countless other groundbreaking campaigns, we saw workers join together to demand a fairer, more-democratic economy and future for us all.”

 

It could be another great year.