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Political Cults: Western Service Workers Association Wants You to Stop the Senseless Slaughter of the Uninsured

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Political Cults: Western Service Workers Association Wants You to Stop the Senseless Slaughter of the Uninsured

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National Labor Federation - From Wikipedia

National Labor Federation

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The National Labor Federation (NATLFED) is an umbrella term for a network of American political cults. NATLFED and NATLFED front-groups are overtly political, and claim to organize the working poor and concerned professionals. Claims of past success by NATLFED front groups are often apocraphyl and current activities are regularly exaggerated, apparently to increase the groups attractiveness to new recruits. NATLFED functions nation-wide as several dozen front-groups, none of which are actual labor unions, and none of which are incorporated non-profit organizations. As such, it is impossible to know the level of coordination between and among NATLFED front groups.

NATLFED front groups are currently enjoying a small resurgence, especially the Eastern Service Workers Association, Western Service Workers Association, and the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, among others.[1]

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History

Origins

Gino Perente, founder of NATLFED, got his start by organizing his small group of followers to briefly occupy the New York office of César Chávez's United Farm Workers Organizing Committee when the UFW office coordinator unexpectedly left the office for personal reasons. [2]

Perente, by all accounts a charismatic and manipulative personality, inspired recruits with revolutionary rhetoric and established rigid, military-like discipline among his followers. Later accounts identified him as Gerald William Doeden, contradicting Perente's claims to Hispanic heritage. Doeden, prior to coming east, had established a record in California as a small-time con man. [3]

After being quickly expelled from the United Farm Worker's Office in New York City, Perente and his followers headed out to Long Island in 1972 and established the Eastern Farm Workers Association(EFWA) in Suffolk County, NY. The Eastern Farm Workers Association received a fair amount of press attention in their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to organize farm workers at the I.M. Young company. While the EFWA claimed to have organized 800 farm workers, journalists report that the active campaign at I.M. Young involved 30 full-time EFWA staff, 70 volunteers, but only 38 actual farm workers. (NYT, "L.I. Migrant Farmworkers, Backed by Union, Fighting Eviction," December 19, 1972)

A Plethora of Front Groups

In the mid-1970s, Perente continued to direct his followers to establish new front groups for the organization Perente dubbed the National Labor Federation (NATLFED). He established an office in Brooklyn to direct the growing network and refined an elaborate system to train and ensure the loyalty of volunteers, and founded the Provisional Communist Party, a secret society of Perente's cohorts.

The Provisional Communist Party formed the secretive ruling council of NATLFED, and gave Perente a forum for his lengthy lectures in which he communicated his idiosyncratic interpretations of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. These lectures, often starting late at night and continuing until dawn, were delivered to the captive audience of full-time volunteers in the NATLFED office.[4]

Perente's directed his core of volunteers to expand, sending recruiters to other cities and towns, starting about twenty "mutual benefit associations," and perhaps as many related support organizations by the late 1970s. The entities, many of which still exist, are managed by full-time volunteers, called "cadre," many of whom no longer maintain personal or professional ties outside of NATLFED.[5]

Public scrutiny and controversy

In the early 1980s several journalists wrote highly critical articles about several groups in the federation. One such article, written for the Christian Century magazine, described changes in the leadership of the Commission for Voluntary Service and Action (CVSA). Originally a church-affiliated nonprofit organization, the CVSA had annually printed a catalog of volunteer opportunities called Invest Yourself: a Catalog of Volunteer Opportunities since 1946. In the early 1980s, when CVSA was struggling financially, NATLFED surreptitiously took control of its operations. As many as 50 NATLFED entities were listed among about 200 service organizations in the catalog during the 1980s and 1990s. This number has slowly dropped since, in keeping with the gradual disappearance of all but the most persistent of NATLFED front-groups.[6]

The political investigative magazine The Public Eye published two articles about NATLFED, by Harvey Kahn in 1977 [7] and a longer exposé by former volunteer Jeff Whitnack in 1984 [8].

The FBI raided NATLFED headquarters at 1107 Carroll Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on February 17, 1984. [9] Several of the organization's members were convicted of felony larceny and forging documents to defraud a former member, the heiress Mia Prior, who fled the organization.[10]

The NYPD raided the same location again on November 11, 1996. The police seized numerous firearms and arrested 35 people. Newspapers around the country briefly ran columns about the group, and two of the cult-leaders were convicted of weapons charges.[11]

Shortly after the 1996 raid in New York, David Bergen announced on usenet the creation of a website by "an informal network of people" who were "frightened" by the effect NATLFED entities on their loved ones. This website archived many news articles and other stories about them. The site, "users.rcn.com/xnatlfed", disappeared from its original host in 2004 and is mirrored on the Wayback machine.[12]

Recent activities

Since Perente's death in 1995, and the raid on their headquarters in 1996, there has been little information about how NATLFED is run, although Margaret Ribar is reported to have assumed leadership.[13]

The Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) operate on numerous college and university campuses in the Northeast, quietly recruiting student volunteers through the service-learning offices available to all students. The ESWA is thriving in Boston, Massachusetts[14] and Rochester, New York,[15] with assistance from local universities, churches and businesses who may or may not be aware of the group's cult practices or connection to NATLFED.

It is difficult to get information about NATLFED and its entities because the organization is institutionally secretive. Entity operations managers are directed not to give interviews to reporters.[16] NATLFED entities are not labor unions, so they have none of the internal democracy or reporting requirements required by federal law for unions. And NATLFED entities are not non-profit organizations, so their internal structure and finances are not transparent.

NATLFED entities also conspicuously lack a presence on the World Wide Web.

"They use poor people as fly-paper to attract members."

The various entities identify themselves with the labor movement for the purpose of attracting volunteers and supporters, but when describing their organization make it clear that they do not advocate the formation of trade unions per se, calling themselves "labor organizations of a new type." As such, they do not represent workers in negotiations or disputes with employers. And, unlike unions, they do not hold internal elections of officers, or hold votes on policy.

Furthermore, NATLFED and it's front groups are not non-profit organization. They eschew 501(c)3 status and the limited financial openness it requires.[17]

Most NATLFED entities produce seasonal or annual newspapers to members, supporters, and volunteers. Volunteers for the entities canvass poor residential areas to recruit low income members, knocking on doors and delivering a door-to-door "pitch". This pitch includes a brief explanation of the organization, promises benefits, and asks for participation. People are asked to contribute a symbolic 62 US cents a month as membership dues, an amount said to be the average hourly pay for potato workers at the I. M. Young and Company, where the NATLFED precursor Eastern Farm Workers Association ran a small and unsuccessful organizing campaign in 1972. New members also sign an "authorization" form, giving the association a vague authority to bargain on behalf of the member.[18]

Critics deride NATLFED's focus on the indigent, claiming that it is merely cover for more sinister activity. A former NATLFED member told the Boston Globe that "they use poor people as flypaper to attract members."[19]

Mutual benefits offices - "part cult, part con-game"

New entities are started by recruiters from the cadre armed with lists of contacts. These entities have names like the Eastern Service Workers Association, the Western Service Workers Association, the Alaska Workers Association, the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, etc. These recruiters set-up shop in new locales by approaching community and business leaders with their mission statement and asking for support to help with the funding of the entity. A steering committee is created including community leaders willing to lend their names to the organization, and the recruiters solicit donated office space until they can purchase an office.

The entities establish a benefits program which may in fact provide limited services to the indigent and soon start door-to-door campaigns using volunteers to recruit low-income workers. Available benefits and the scope of the programs vary from entity to entity, but usually include food, clothing, and holiday events for children.

Critics and supporters of the organizations contend that much of the food, clothing, cash and other goods collected for the poor are consumed by members of the cadre. It is unknown how much of the resources collected for the poor actually make their way to the intended recipients. [20] This practice led one NATLFED-watcher to dub the NATLFED-fronts "part cult, part con-game."[21]

Aggressive recruitment and elaborate paperwork

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the NATLFED entities is their aggressive recruitment. The NATLFED entities send representatives to churches, residential neighborhoods, shopping centers, university campuses, music festivals and other venues soliciting volunteers and resources.[22]

At these events, organizers will read a brief and selective introduction about the organization to possible new volunteers and try to schedule visits to their office.

For recruitment purposes, NATLFED entities keep extensive records of all their contacts on index cards that are filled out by hand, and make a practice of repeatedly calling potential volunteers who leave their numbers with organizers. Drawers of these cards contain detailed information about any sort of contact the group has with volunteers, members, donors, and other supporters.

Former members claim that the elaborate paperwork required of volunteers is unnecessary, inefficient, and intended to exhaust the volunteers, in order to keep them in a suggestible state.[23]

NATLFED also has an elaborate system for persuading volunteers to further the organization's goals, and the social pressure they apply convinces some volunteers to de-emphasize goals of their own. Organizers use interviews and conversations to elicit volunteers' attitudes about the labor movement and activism and tailor "political education classes" to argue against points of disagreement. Regular volunteers are periodically interviewed and asked to increase their commitment to the organization. Volunteers are asked to defend their activities outside the organization, and the points raised as objections to further involvement become items on the organizers' agenda of issues to neutralize with the goal of developing casual volunteers into committed, full-time cadre. [24]

Former members claim that deception and psychological manipulation mix with the sensation some new recruits experience of an of intellectual awakening as stories of past labor struggles explain the underside of U.S. history, and classes in Dialectical Materialism provide a coherent, if stilted, world view. The commitment of NATLFED converts is solidified by the emotional impact of working to exhaustion surrounded by others who constantly reinforce the groups message and beliefs.

Organizers often encourage students to drop out of school, to quit their jobs, or to stop other obligations in order volunteer full-time with the group.[25]

The "full-time volunteers" or "cadre" - work seven days a week and have little time to spend apart from the organization. Their level and manner of compensation, as with all other financial aspects of NATLFED entities, is unknown.

The question of semantics: Is NATLFED a "cult?"

On the one side, NATLFED supporters and organizers contest the label "cult" as loaded and misleading. In debates posted on electronic bulletin-boards concerning NATLFED, this position also finds support among those who are ideologically predisposed to dismiss the very existence of "cults."[26]

On the other side, NATLFED entities and front-groups are often labeled as "cults" by former members,[27] are listed on cult watch websites, and have been described as "cults" by journalists and editors from the New York Times [28], Village Voice [29] and a host of smaller local newspapers.[30]

List of NATLFED entities

Natlfed operates about thirty offices, called "entities" around the US, with concentrations in California and the Northeast. The Eastern Farm Workers Association (now in Bellport, NY and Syracuse, NY) and California Homemakers Association (in Sacramento, California) were founded in the early seventies, and were followed by Eastern Service Workers Association, Western Service Workers Association, Western Massachusetts Labor Action in Pittsfield, MA, Western Farm Workers Association in Stockton, CA and Hillsboro, OR, Friends of Seasonal and Service Workers in Portland, OR and Northwest Seasonal Workers Association in Medford, OR. Other voluntary associations organized under natlfed include the National Equal Justice Association, the Womens Press Collective of Brooklyn, NY, and the Physicians Organizing Committee of San Francisco, CA.

Since Perente's death, several new entities have opened, including Midwest Workers Association in Chicago , Alaska Workers Association in Anchorage, AK,[31] and Mid-Ohio Workers Association in Columbus, OH.

More details can be found in the List of NATLFED entities.

References

Andelman, David A. "L. I. Farm Workers, Backed by Union, Fighting Eviction" New York Times December 19, 1972.
Bazar, Emily. "Migrant workers get refunds on rent charges" Sacramento Bee August 26, 2004
Berliner, Uri. "Opinion Sharply Split on Farm Organization". East Hampton Star August 28, 1986.
Berliner, Uri. "Labor Group: Saga of a Cult". East Hampton Star September 18, 1986.
Bryson, George. "Working It; Volunteers try to build an independent organization supporting low-paid employees." Anchorage Daily News (Anchorage, AK) April 18, 2003.
Fager, Chuck. "The Edge of Right" City Paper (Philadelphia, PA) October 22, 1983 – November 7, 1983.
Hamblett, Mark. "Emergency Exception Held No Basis for Search". New York Law Journal. January 5, 1999.
Jones, Charisse. "Grand jury seeks reason behind a group's arsenal". The New York Times. November 14, 1996.
Kahn, Harvey, NCLC and its extended political community Public Eye, 1977, Vol. 1, No. 1
Kifner, John. "Its leader dead, fringe group lives on for its own sake". The New York Times. November 18, 1996.
Lyles, Jean Caffey. "How the Revolutionaries Conned the Bureaucrats". The Christian Century. July 20 – 27, 1983.
Moran, Kevin and Carrie Saldo. "Past cult link dogs aid-for-poor group". North Adams Transcript January 10, 2003.
Resnick, Joshua. "Service Group Linked to "Cultic" Organization" Williams Record (Williamston, MA). October 3, 1995.
Rosenfeld, Neil S. et al. "Group Raided By FBI Called Harmless Cult". Newsday. February 19, 1984.
Russakoff, Joe. "Doorway to a Cult?" City Paper (Philadelphia, PA) June 26 – July 3, 1987.
Tourish, Dennis and Wohlforth, Tim. On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (M. E. Sharpe) 2000, ISBN 0-7656-0639-9, Chapter 12, "The Many Faces of Gino Perente"
Whitnack, Jeff, Gino Perente, NATLFED & the Provisional Party Public Eye, 1984, Vol. 4, Nos. 3-4.

External links

Archive of 1996 anti-NATLFED site: Cached xnatlfed (broken as of May 2006)
Boston IMC: Watch out--Stalinist cult in Roxbury!
Portland IMC: Authoritarian 'cult' organizing at portland universities
Portland IMC: Continuing the Discussion of Gino Perente and NATLFED
SF Bay Area IMC: Black Panther Memorial
discussion group open to all: [32]

Political Cults