Organizing principal

“They’re coming out of medical school, carrying huge amounts of debt,” he said. “They have a hard time, many of them, making ends meet.”
Phelan grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in a neighborhood that was getting by, the heavily Irish Inwood in Upper Manhattan. His father was a carpenter from Mooncoin, Co. Kilkenny, his mother a nurse from near Charlestown, Co. Mayo. Both were union members.
When he went to the Jesuit high school Regis on the affluent East Side he became aware there were two New Yorks — one that was fighting with the city over services and another, he said, that was quite different.
An avid reader, Phelan came across a book that told the story of a less familiar world, of those who weren’t getting by — the urban poor, the rural poor, the minorities, the elderly. Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” first published in 1962, had influenced the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ policies.
“Harrington was Irish Catholic himself, born and raised in St. Louis, grew up in a traditional and somewhat conservative neighborhood,” Phelan said. “Over time he found his way to social democratic ideals — and was an articulate and compassionate advocate of a different type of America.”
Phelan’s own idealism led him eventually to work with the labor movement. Now 42, he’s helped organize health-care workers for 15 years.
The CIR has 12,000 members and is the only union that organizes among the nation’s estimated 100,000 interns and residents. (Its parent body, the SEIU, has 1.8 million members.)
About a third of the membership was recruited in recent years, facilitated by Clinton administration appointees to the National Labor Relations Board who eased restrictions on training professionals organizing. However, Bush-appointed officials have slowed that growth.
On a recent morning, Phelan took a telephone call in his office. On one wall, a framed Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union poster commemorates the 1913 Dublin lockout. On another is the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
The woman on the other end was worried about her son, an intern who was working up to 120 hours a week.
Phelan explained that if other young doctors felt like her son, they could the approach the management with their grievances. The next step, if they were still unhappy, would be to form a union.
“It makes sense in dealing with an organization to have an organization yourself,” he said.
Phelan said in every case the CIR is approached by doctors. The union doesn’t need to hand out leaflets at hospital gates.
“They want to organize because the conditions under which they labor and learn are intolerable,” Phelan said. “It’s really hard to break a longstanding culture. [Administrators say,] ‘When we were residents we did this, and what’s wrong with you guys doing it?’ “
Some interns and residents are quite happy, he said, to view their training as an extended boot camp but want to organize for other reasons.
“Because of the pressures on hospitals and on caregivers, they see patient health care being compromised all the time,” Phelan said. “They spend more time than any other employees there. They see what the problems are.
“They tend to be younger; they’re idealistic. And having an organized voice helps them have an impact on the quality of patient care delivered in the hospital.
Union membership does not mean waving a magic wand, but the benefits are tangible for CIR members. “They have better wages and benefits than their unorganized colleagues,” Phelan said.
Nor will the Democratic Party wave a magic wand, but there’s enough of a difference between the parties for the labor movement to be anxious for a Kerry victory.
The CIR is worried about its own right to organize professionals in training and about the issue of health care generally.
“The parties are very different on the health care crisis,” Phelan said. The Republicans want to leave it entirely to the market, whereas, he said, Democrats advocate a bigger role for government and will pay for it by undoing some of the Bush tax cuts.
“Bush does the bidding of the large corporations; he’s what I would call a low-wage conservative,” the union organizer said.
“It’s a real turning point for America,” he added about Election 2004.
When Phelan was a child on Thayer Street on the border of Inwood and Washington Heights, there wasn’t much doubt about what way most people would vote.
He’s a member of the last Irish-American generation to grow up in Manhattan, the last to have the intense street life closely identified with the working-class New York experience.
“They built New York’s buildings, put out its fires, policed its streets, ran its trains,” he said of the neighborhood’s residents, who were Irish, Jewish, Cuban, Greek, and, as time went on, increasingly Dominican.
“I’m still friends with people I grew up with. I see them all of the time,” Phelan said. “People are really surprised when I tell them that, particularly those who might have grown up in the suburbs and not even known the neighbors next door.”
The neighborhood was a small community, bound by ties of loyalty, in a huge, extraordinary city; while its streets, densely packed with apartment buildings, edged New York City’s last natural forest.
“We were doubly blessed. I’m really lucky to have grown up there,” he said. “The neighborhood was about having a good time.”
He added that he was perhaps triply blessed because he and his siblings, as soon as they were old enough, were packed off annually to Ireland for the summer vacation, usually to Kilkenny. Their parents would join them for the last two weeks.
He remembered long days of unstructured and unsupervised play with his cousins from sunup to sundown, which could be at 10 p.m. “They only wanted to see you at mealtime,” he recalled of uncles and aunts. “Somehow we kept ourselves really occupied. And we were happy, though there weren’t a lot of toys or gizmos.”
On one trip, he discovered that some of his relatives voted Labor. “I was about 15. I always thought there was just Fianna Fail and Fine Gael,” he remembered. This third party’s most solid support was among the rural workers in Eastern counties who did not have their own farms. The party was hardly radical, though it was founded by James Connolly.
“To be an Irish American and to be close to one’s roots, sooner or later you hear about James Connolly, but you hear only part of his story — 1916 and the Rising against English rule,” he said.
“The part you usually don’t hear about is that he was a union organizer in upstate New York and here in New York City, where he wrote a left-wing newspaper called the Harp. You don’t hear he was one of the founders of the largest trade union in Ireland [the ITGWU, now SIPTU] that helped give shape and form to the modern Irish labor movement.
“When you read about Connolly’s life, read his writings, read the letters to his wife, you’re really struck not only by the depth of his commitment to a different kind of world, but also by his real empathy for people who suffer.
“That was derived from his own life: he spoke with a lisp, walked with a limp from childhood. It came from his own life experience growing up in Edinburgh, another child of the Irish diaspora.”
After taking a few years out to work, Phelan went to Fordham to study political science and history. There he joined the youth wing of Harrington’s organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, and threw himself into the issues of the day, particularly apartheid and Central America. It was his experience with DSA, which is linked to the main labor and social democratic parties around the world, that led him to consider union work.
“I was really impressed with the folks I got to meet,” he remembered. “I believed what they were all talking about. And working for a union I felt was a practical day-to-day way to live out what I believed in.”
In 1989, he became the field director in John Daniels’s Democratic primary campaign in New Haven, Conn. Daniels, an African American, successfully overcame the resistance of the remnants of the city’s old Italian machine.
Through that effort, Phelan got to know people who were members of 1199, the health care workers union, and that eventually led to a job.
He worked in Connecticut and Rhode Island before finally returning to his native city, to take up a position with CIR, in 1998.
Today, he lives in Riverdale in the Bronx, not far from his parents. They’re now in Ireland, where they spend part of the year. “They worked hard; they deserve it,” he said.
His sister is also an annual visitor to Ireland. She married a Kerryman, and they have three children. And his brother and his wife, who also have three children, make the transAtlantic trip regularly, too.
Phelan and his wife, Elizabeth, are expecting their first child in early October.
“I’ve had my run. Time to settle down, I guess,” he said. “We’re really excited. We’re looking forward to it. My brother and sister are laughing now. They say, ‘Now you’re going to see.’ “
It should be an interesting few months — a new baby and, he believes and fervently hopes, a new administration.