Dare to Struggle! Dare to Win!
Milestones in WSWA History
Western Service Workers Association (WSWA) began in an area with a rich history. Even before World War II, the Bay Area was a manufacturing hub. By 1935, little Emeryville – no more than one square mile – was home to over one hundred manufacturing plants. Oakland became a land of opportunity. With the expansion of the Port of Oakland during the Second World War, Black share croppers from the South came West by the trainload, fleeing poverty conditions and Jim Crow racism for good paying union jobs in the shipyards and munitions plants. After the war, returning Black soldiers chose not to return to the plantations of the South and settled in the Bay Area, adding manpower to the growing industries.
The prosperity only lasted a generation or two before the hollowing out of the Bay Area's once buzzing manufacturing industry brought an end to union jobs for those workers. Today, temp work and gig work abound, replacing stable living wage jobs that included adequate health benefits.
A Living, Not a Dying Wage
Western Service Workers Association (WSWA), and its subcommittee California Homemakers Association (CHA), began in Oakland in 1975 as an organizing drive by and for domestic and attendant care workers. Many WSWA members worked as domestic workers providing in-home attendant care for aged, blind and disabled recipients through the County-run, state-funded program called In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS).
In 1976, WSWA-CHA organizers turned their efforts for fighting for Alameda County care workers who at the time received a paltry $2 an hour, and through the “time-task formulas” some employers could force them to work without any compensation.
Fight for Immunizations
In 1979, WSWA members brought to the Bay Area Workers Benefit Council (WBC) their concern that over 2,700 children had been suspended from school that Fall due to lack of immunizations or lack of record of immunizations because the parents did not have the money to have their children vaccinated. County officials had begun to dismantle public heath services in response to a dwindling tax base. WSWA worked with Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals (CCMP) to organize an Immunization Hot Line, to assist families in obtaining immunizations for their children. WSWA canvasses in low-income areas of East and West Oakland began taking and filling requests for well-child check-ups as well as immunizations. CCMP’s Well Child Sessions found that nearly 60% of the children needing immunizations were suffering from malnutrition.
On September 27, 1982 after a three year fight Alameda County Community Health Services announced that immunizations would be provided by the County, regardless of a family’s ability to pay.
WSWA battles the Enterprise Zone schemes
In 1988, the government introduced Enterprise Zones (EZ) to Oakland with the promise of creating more jobs in distressed areas. Businesses were granted tax breaks for purchasing equipment and received credits for workers employed. However, only large corporations qualified for tax breaks and they would only get the tax breaks for up to 150% of minimum wage. The companies had no incentive to provide living wage jobs and strong incentive to lay workers off and bring in new employees in order to generate the tax credit for each new employee. WSWA-CHA continued to participate in an ongoing fight to abolish EZs through the summer of 1993.
The Day the Earth Moved and the Government Stood Still!
On October 17, 1989 the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta Earthquake struck, and WSWA became the largest “unofficial” disaster effort in the Bay Area. WSWA organizers launched into action immediately setting up all-volunteer, independent Disaster Relief Units (DRU). Organizers procured the donated use of a circus-sized tent which was installed by the donors on the large lot next to Office Central then located on the corner of 7th Street. Using WSWA’s method of Systemic Organizing, WSWA was able to incorporate large numbers of volunteers rapidly into the relief efforts.
New Permanent Office: Here to Win! Here to Stay!
On December 21, 2009, WSWA relocates office central to a newly renovated building at 1141 Peralta Street.
Remembering Renowned WSWA Leaders Who Built Bridges for Our Collective Future
Winfield Baggett
Illustration by Sam Frankel
Active from 1983 until his death on September 25, 2001 at 91 years of age.
Mr. Baggett, or “Mr. B.” as he was affectionately called, used his riveting stories and beautifully resonating bass voice to sing songs and recite poems, teaching hard-knock lessons from his life and prior labor and political movements that tried to overcome entrenched poverty, racialism and exploitation of the working class, in general, and African Americans, in specific. He was the first to break the color-barrier blocking Black membership in the Bay Area’s carpenters union.
Mr. B. reveled in telling volunteers the story of his meeting the award-winning Black scientist and inventor George Washington Carver as a boy. He had won a milking contest award of a trip to the Tuskegee Institute where Carver had developed over 300 uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans and the byproducts of these crops; his research is said to have contributed to the quadrupling of peanut production in the South.
Often the first organizer to greet members and volunteers at WSWA’s front counter, Mr. B. led the Bay Area Workers Benefits Council (WBC) Speakers Bureau and rose to serve as WBC President. He knew all too well from bitter experiences the pitfalls of government-promoted “urban renewal” programs, aptly calling them “urban removal” schemes to push out poor and working people from their homes to create an open season on the real estate market in historically Black and working class West Oakland.
A lifelong labor and civil rights leader, Mr. B. headed up WSWA’s Community Labor College presentations on Black History and presided over other commemorations during Black History Month, always working to cultivate new WBC delegates and cadre from WSWA’s membership ranks.
Mr. Baggett was known for reciting the poem, “The Bridge Builder,” which he said was Dr. Carver’s favorite (see below). He maintained his commitment as a full-time volunteer organizer well into his 80s, and then did as much as he could as age took its toll.
The Bridge Builder
By Will Allen Dromgoole
An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”
Barbara Bentley
Active from 1976 until her death on January 12, 1995.
Photo courtesy of the Brown Family
Longtime West Oakland resident Barbara Bentley was attracted to WSWA’s independence from government funding and its all-volunteer staff policy. She readily embraced WSWA’s strategic approach and methods, having seen her community suffer bitterly from a string of broken government promises.
She had been active in West Cypress Action Line and other community groups fighting insurance redlining of West Oakland homeowners. She was especially disgusted with the federal Model Cities program of the late 1960s and 1970s and would detail how many millions had been allocated but resulted in only one house being built. Model Cities had broken every promise of improved housing, education and health services and also for local residents to be given a say in planning and administering the program. Taxpayer dollars instead went to a handful of “poverty pimps” that used government funding to feather their own nests. This contributed to her seeing them as traitors to their people and revolutionary change a necessity.
An impressive orator, Barbara was vocal in every WSWA staff meeting and WBC meeting. She always carefully prepared her remarks, and spoke passionately about the need to act to change conditions in the low-income community, now. Barbara encouraged other members to get actively involved, kept in contact with her membership constituents through her phone tree, and ran an ongoing baked goods table to raise donations to help with costs of running the Benefit Program. Barbara served faithfully as WBC Secretary and then WBC President.
When Barbara collapsed from a brain tumor in 1986, the organization she had helped to build advocated strenuously for her to get the best care possible. Volunteer organizers arranged for her to be moved from Highland Hospital to University of California, San Francisco, and to be accepted as a patient by the top brain surgeon in the nation at the time for her type of tumor, Dr. Charles Wilson, who performed her surgery and extended her life for another nine years.
Bertha Mae Teague
and Simon Teague
Became leadership and active delegates to the WBC representing members from the East Oakland area.
Illustration by Mary E. Libby
Well known in the community, Bertha and Simon Teague were exemplary delegates of the Bay Area Workers Benefit Council (WBC). Bertha was an active WSWA membership canvasser, worked to ensure the association’s food distributions ran in an orderly fashion and insisted that meals were prepared for volunteers on time. Simon worked alongside Bertha at the food distributions, and when he became too crippled to walk or stand for extended periods, he would sit at the front counter of WSWA’s office central on a high stool with his crutches at his side, welcoming people in and reminding members to help build their organization with their volunteer time and voluntary membership dues.
Gracie Lewis Grandison
A WSWA member and volunteer for over 25 years, from the Loma Prieta Earthquake of October 17, 1989 until her death January 16, 2016, less than one month before her 98th birthday.
Illustration by Jesse Reisch
“Miss Gracie” was a fighter who never backed down. In 2001, at the age of 83, she participated in a WSWA delegation at an Alameda County Board of Supervisors hearing and was one of the first to speak out during the public input section against the supposed “welfare reform” that was going to reduce the number of urgently needed jobs and significantly cut critically needed benefits for low-come residents in Alameda County. Miss Gracie was proud of her role in participating in 2013 in WSWA's winning of over $500 million in overtime pay for caregivers of low-income elderly and disabled, and WSWA's successful fight in 2014 to stop PG&E from raising rates by over $2 billion. Miss Gracie participated in weekly WBC meetings and inspired and challenged others younger than herself. She was a regular feature in the office staffing the front desk. Her voice was the first contact thousands of people had with WSWA.