[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] Came in. We got to stay another
week during some of the initial meetings.
But then we had to come back
home after he was like, "Okay,
that's it come back."
Because they were paying for
a mediator to hear it anyway.
But I'll tell you that probably
some of the weirdest thing that ever
happened to me happened there.
I went to eat lunch. The whole group,
the whole negotiating team went
eat lunch with the Secretary of State,
secretary of the navy or the war or something like that.
The Secretary General of Panama went to lunch.
Now that already freaked me out,
but I found out that they'd all been
president of the (inaudible) local in the past.
I thought, "Oh my God,
this is CIA stuff."
We're training the President to
become elected or national.
I was freaking out, we went to
this restaurant that could sit 300 people,
it was empty. For three hours it was empty.
I finally said, "Is this
just like the worst restaurant in town?"
They said, "No, it's closed because we can't just let
anybody in here right now because
of the elected officials that are here."
At that time, do you remember a guy named (inaudible)?
He was a radical in
South America that was throwing bombs,
and killing people, and stuff like that.
He was a revolutionary
(inaudible) something like that was his name.
Well, he had apparently
threatened some of the Panamanian officials.
Normally, he worked in Chile and Brazil.
That's where I knew about him for those countries.
There was security. Outside the restaurant,
there was (inaudible) all the way around.
While we sat there having lunch,
they talked about nuclear energy,
nuclear subs,
warships, all kinds of
weird stuff as far as I was concerned.
Because I thought, well, this has nothing to
do with contract negotiations.
Why am I sitting here?
I was really weirded out by the whole thing,
then (inaudible) would come and blast or blow
up the place, while I was having lunch with these guys.
But it was the best meal I've ever had in my life.
It was the best restaurant I'd ever been to.
That was one experience there.
The other thing was I was invited to speak before
a women's group because I was a member
of the women's labor group.
They wanted me to talk about starting when there.
Well, eight women showed up.
While we were there, five of those were
dragged off by their husbands.
The men came and said,
"My wife is not supposed to be
in here, she's got children,
and just take care of my home," off with that one.
Another one the man just went
like this, and the woman left.
At the end, there was three left.
I was like,
okay, something is going on here.
I talked with the women, I said,
"Do you not have independence or freedom here?
Do you work for a living?" They all
worked, they were actually members.
You pay union dues you work.
But if your husband walks in
here, are you going to leave?
The three women that were left they said, "Well,
I'm not married," one of them,
and other one says, (FOREIGN).
That she was divorced, and the other one said,
"Well, since he doesn't work,
I told him if he showed up here,
he'd have to get a job,
so I don't think he's going to
come," and she lived in the United States,
so she was more independent
than the other women I had met.
I was shocked at the condition of women
in Panama, that was 1983.
I came out of the newspaper the next day.
You would think that I had done something horrific,
that I had come to train
women to be independent
of their husbands, and all this stuff.
I would like, was there a mouse in
the wall or a cockroach
somewhere that how do they know what we talked about?
That I had come to rabble-rouse women,
and I was from the American AFL-CIO,
actually I AFL-CIO member, but an employee.
But even though I made
the front page in Panama on that next day.
All eight women that came,
apparently rabble-rouse three of them. I don't know,
but that was my big claim to fame in Panama.
Other than that, I really didn't do anything
substantial in any other foreign country.
In Puerto Rico we partied.
I love Puerto Rico,
and I never got to go
to Mexico as many times as I wanted it to
but I did work in 39 states in the United States,
and a lot in the South;
in Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, Georgia, Florida.
I worked in all those states.
[Vinicio Satin] Did you maintain your links
to the activist organizations you are working with?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] From the days when I was in college?
When I was working for a living?
[Vinicio Satin] Okay.
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I didn't maintain links to anybody
who lived in Austin.
I was gone anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the time.
When you get a job with an International Union,
that's exactly what it is.
It could be a 30-day assignment,
it could be a 90-day assignment,
it could be a two-year assignment.
When I first went to work for them,
they had just organized the staff union.
Just about two years before I went to work for them.
I was an activist in the staff union.
How we sued the union?
I sued the union for an unfair pay.
I thought I would be fired soon after that.
But I made it the whole 25 years without being fired.
It was a little hot sometimes.
I could tell that the actions
towards me at this particular time or
that particular time had to do with a little bit
of resentment over my union activism.
But you know, you cannot or you should
not take a job
where you're telling somebody
file a grievance against your employer,
if you can't do that.
If you can't do that,
then you don't belong in that work.
You certainly have no right to
tell somebody to put their life on the line,
because that's what it was.
You file a grievance against
an employee in the State of Texas,
this is a right-to-work state.
But go to a state where they have
a collectively bargain contract,
and they have a state law that supports them,
there's a lot more power.
But I've found over the years that I was
working that a lot of states
had let their contracts go lax,
and they weren't really enforcing them.
There was a lot of girl-boy arrangements.
Since I had grown up in
a state where there was a lot of girl or
boy already arrangements, I hated it.
Part of my work when I went into
those areas was to tell them, "Oh no,
you're not going to live like we
live in Texas, bullshit,
you have contracts,
you have a right to so much."
Part of my job was to learn
every single word in those contracts,
and I negotiated contracts also,
I mediated, and I arbitrated.
One of the things in my job was also to
participate in political campaigns.
I'd have to take, and I still have all my work records,
so I've saved every planner
I ever had since 1981, I think.
They're all downstairs in my filing cabinet.
I bet I was participatory,
active, worked in lead,
led or raise money forward 300 campaigns,
not just in Texas,
I mean, all over.
I was also involved in which,
you call, issue campaigns,
like every time Arnold Schwarzenegger
wanted to do something horrible,
oppressive, whatever, to California,
we were pulled out there to go
work against whatever he was doing
or a state that had contractual laws,
wanting to go to right-to-work state level,
I was in those states also.
As the part of the education department,
it all fit in.
But it seemed like the Political Action Department was
pulling me out more and more often,
and I loved it, I wanted to work
in Political Action Department.
But I stayed in the Education Department for 15 years.
Then change of leadership in the Education Department,
I had to move to the Field Organizing Department,
which was the biggest department in the organization.
That's when I started doing things
like negotiating contracts
and mediations and arbitrations
and things like that, and organizing.
[Vinicio Satin] Backtracking a little to that time you
mentioned there was a suit overpay.
Were there notable difference
in how women were treated in the union?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] It wasn't women.
I think it was six months to eight months
after I got hired, or maybe it was a year.
They hired a beautiful white woman, she was beautiful,
she'd been an attorney in California,
John Dalton had hired her also.
He gave her what she wanted.
One day we were at staff training session,
and we made friends right away.
She says, "What do people make?"
She was trying to figure out where she could go
from how the salary she had already negotiated.
I said, "I don't know."
I said, "I've never asked anybody what they make."
It's not like, I said, "You know what,
it might be in the contract salary thing",
I didn't have a copy of it,
so I'd call somebody and they send me one.
I was looking through it, and I said, "Oh,
you didn't get anywhere from that particular year."
I still have those contracts,
if you can get paid from 16-25, something like that.
No, 16-20.
That was it,16-20.
She looked at me. She goes,
I started a year ago,
so yeah, I started at 25,000, what did you start at?
I said, "18,000."
I said, "They said they couldn't give me anything more.
I wanted 20,000 minimum."
She said, "Teresa, you're the only one on
the whole staff that speak Spanish?"
I said, "Yeah."
She said that, "Something wrong here."
She said, "Let's ask everybody what they make."
There was 11 of us or 13 of us,
I think, so we had a meeting of staff half union,
and everybody put what they made on a piece of paper,
and it ranged anywhere from 13,000 to her 25,000.
Some people have been there,
five and six years, and
were not making what she was making.
The staff union said,
"We have a grievance."
They'd been trying to fight for some stabilization,
equalization, some foremost way
to say how salaries would range.
In other words, from the start to this point,
step increases versus favoritism stuff
where you just went from here to here.
They've not been successful at it.
Because I was a woman and a Latina,
they use me as the lead part
of the lawsuit or the grievance,
because it was unfair pay.
They showed the white woman and they showed me,
and of course it was drastic.
But she was an attorney.
But then they say, we're able to prove
that being an attorney had nothing to do with education,
because none of the classes
we were teaching had to do with law.
I wouldn't hurt to have an attorney on staff,
and they hadn't had to do with law.
Well, we filed our grievance,
of course, John Dalton turned it down,
and he said, "No,
you're not going to win your grievance with me."
He heard our grievances, and he said, "No."
We had certain steps,
and we got up to him and he's said,
"I'm denying the grievance."
Then we went up to the next level,
and they denied the grievance.
Then he went to arbitration.
The thing about arbitration is,
in our contract, arbitration was final and binding.
We went and we'd be able to create
a salary scales and blah, blah, blah, blah.
It wasn't going to be just for our department,
it was going to go contract-wise,
It was a huge huge thing.
We won the arbitration.
We had a hell of an attorney.
He was 83 years old,
but he was one of the few attorneys in
the country that would represent a staff union,
Saul, that was his name.
He represented us, we won.
They refused to honor the arbitration.
They said, "We don't care, take us to court."
We took them to court. They didn't expect that.
We took them to court. Everybody held.
I remember, John, coming to me and saying,
"Teresa, you were my first hire."
I said, "Yeah, I was
your first person that you denied and you lied to.
You told me that there was
no way I could get another dollar."
He said, "But you didn't have a law degree. "
"I didn't need a law degree.
You needed someone who spoke Spanish?
I spoke Spanish.
I still speak Spanish.
I've helped in changing a lot of your stuff
into Spanish because our members wanted it in Spanish.
I think that,
as we fought in the City of Austin
for 25 cents an hour extra,
I think you should have paid me
$5,000 more a year extra.
You should have given me
the same money you gave her,
in fact, and maybe another 1000 more."
He would get so upset with me.
The judge read the arbitration and on
the day that we went in for
the hearing because we all flew in.
He called the thing to order,
and then he said, " (inaudible) attorney,
come here." The attorney went up there,
high-priced guys, real high-priced guys,
$500 an hour probably.
He said, "Weren't you here last week with."