Berger-Marks Grants to individuals:
The people & their work
Kathy AncilBreakthrough in organizing utility call centers  Kathy Ancil was a temporary organizer who was determined to organize more call centers, when she applied for a Berger-Marks grant in 2005. Now she has a permanent position with the Utility Workers Union, partly because the grant gave her a chance to show what she could do, and brought new resources into her work organizing call centers, where workers tend to be women.
When Ancil started work at a Consumers Energy call center years ago, all five of the company’s Michigan call centers were non-union. ”I was not mistreated,” she recalled, “but I saw how other people were treated. And our rights and benefits were being taken away.” When the Utility Workers launched its “Plan Respect” campaign to organize call centers, she enthusiastically volunteered to help. Now all five call centers belong to the Michigan State Utility Workers Union of America, which represents workers at Consumer Energy Company. Ancil was elected chief steward and now works for the national parent union, as their first woman organizer.
More Joanna MillhousePreparing for Baltimore Sun bargaining  “I have an overwhelming sense of joy - I really enjoy being involved in the labor movement,” says Joanna Millhouse. “I like to see changes, and if I can help make the environment better for anyone, I would like to do that.”
That approach has inspired Millhouse’s campaign to organize and mobilize members of Newspaper Guild Local 30325. She's been using a Berger-Marks grant to help 500-plus news writers, advertising workers, computer programmers and editors at the Baltimore Sun gear up for tough bargaining in 2007. "We started early," she says, "because they’ve always had a lot of problems” and needed to be prepared for company scare tactics.
With the local union strapped by job cuts and paying big expenses to represent workers legally and in bargaining, the grant was crucial to hiring her, and helped bring in additional support.
Under the grant, Milhouse also pursued organizing contacts at two non-union workplaces. Although neither has an active union drive yet, she feels she’s made headway in explaining how the union could help them deal with their grievances. “We live in an environment of fear,” she adds. “I try to be a strong person and show where that strength comes from.”
More Lesley PhillipsOrganizing online workers at boston.com  When Lesley Phillips took an early buyout retirement from her job as a page designer/artist at the Boston Herald newspaper, she says she had “no intention of retiring in a traditional sense.” Instead she volunteered to help the union organize online media workers at the Boston Globe, and won a Berger-Marks grant that helped her succeed.
Like many other papers, the Boston Globe launched its online division, boston.com, in the early ‘90’s as a non-union enterprise, even though many employees worked side by side with unionized Globe editorial staff. In 2005 the local Newspaper Guild successfully won the right to organize the boston.com workforce, and the following January Phillips, who had already done some of the ground work, applied for a grant from the Berger-Marks Foundation to support the organizing. The union “was feeling an economic crunch,” she says, and didn’t have staff with experience organizing online workers.
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