Background on Peter Olney
A writer, scholar and leader in organized labor for over 50 years, Peter B. Olney began his career in the early 1970s with a successful effort to organize the machine shop where he worked in Roxbury, Massachusetts into the UE (United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America), fully committed to helping the workforce take control of their own lives and destiny. Today, he remains fully as engaged with organized labor and committed to workers’ rights as he ever was.
Olney was born in Boston, Massachusetts in November, 1950. His early life was spent in Andover, Massachusetts – a town Olney has described as “a middle to upper middle-class suburb of Boston…a town of mill owners and supervisors from Lawrence, Massachusetts,” the great textile manufacturing center of the Northeast. As he had family around him who held different perspectives on the issues of the day – though always inhabiting what Olney has called the “liberal Democrat” end of the spectrum – there were always opportunities for the young Peter B. Olney to participate in vigorous discussion of differing opinions. Olney was steeped in debate over issues of class, race, civil rights, workers’ rights and unions. He was encouraged by the example of his grandmother – who was herself very active in the Civil Rights Movement and other significant cultural shifts in the post-war America of the 1950s and 1960s – to think critically about the United States, its foreign policy, the Vietnam War, and other issues related to civic engagement. Through the alchemy of the many contrasts and influences of these very early life experiences, Olney’s effervescent intellect and steadfast commitment to workers’ interests crystallized into his lengthy career in organized labor, which continues to the present day.
Olney graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1969, and then went on to 2 years at Harvard University, where he nurtured a budding awareness that protest was powerful, engaging in marches and rallies – principally against the Vietnam War – and on-campus politics. After spending his junior year studying political science at the University of Florence in Florence, Italy, Olney returned to the U.S. energized through his exposure to the ideas and principles of the Italian labor movement, and rejected continuing his own formal education in favor of working a job and deepening his understanding of the Labor Movement on his own time. So it was that in 1972 he began working as an elevator operator at NECCO (the New England Confectionery Company). From 1973 to 1975, Olney worked at the Massachusetts Machine Shop, Inc. It was during these early years that he became a union shop chairman and “industrial salt,” bringing unions into non-union facilities or strengthening the union position in unionized facilities. From 1976 to 1983, Olney worked at Advent Corporation, Sintered Metals Inc. and Boston City Hospital, also engaging in union activity at each of these places of employment. At the same time, he obtained certification in Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) work in 1981, and completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish at UMass-Boston in 1982. He also gained substantial experience in organizing and supporting union activity as a labor negotiator, boycott organizer, strategist, advisor, writer, conference planner, and delegate to the Boston Labor Council of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations), the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Convention, and the United Electrical Workers International Convention.
In 1983, Olney moved to Southern California and quickly became immersed in the Labor Movement in Los Angeles. He brought with him his dedication to workers’ interests, and his sense that it was with workers and their communities working together that the most progress could be achieved. Once there, he was further inspired by the perspectives and energy of the immigrant communities in Los Angeles. He immediately became actively involved with the LA Coalition Against Plant Shutdowns; a coalition to save General Motors Van Nuys; fighting the closure of a community hospital in Long Beach and an ongoing strike for the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) membership.
By 1984, Olney decided to increase his knowledge base, and therefore his ability to support all these worthy causes, by getting a Masters of Business Administration, which he did, graduating from the UCLA Graduate School of Management (now called the Anderson School) in 1987. From 1984 to 1989, in part while pursuing his graduate work at UCLA, Olney was an organizer for the ILGWU; consultant to the UAW (United Auto Workers), local 645 on corporate campaigns; chief organizer and negotiator for the ICEA (Irvine City Employees Association) and an organizer/coordinator for the United Furniture Workers Local 1010 based in Huntington Park, CA.
All these professional experiences combined to prepare Olney in 1991 to be the Director of Building Services at Local 399 of the SEIU, the home of Los Angeles Justice for Janitors, an ongoing campaign to support the labor group of primarily underpaid immigrants as they sought to improve their pay/conditions using the tactics of civil disobedience, public action, sophisticated corporate research and community solidarity. Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles was part of a national campaign that had national attention and national impact in what it accomplished for the workers through a strategy that combined the efforts and enthusiasm of the workers themselves with those of the primarily Latino communities in which they lived and worked, which has come to be termed the “community/labor nexus strategy.” Olney continued working on Justice for Janitors until 1994.
In 1994, building off of his work at Justice for Janitors and his own ongoing analysis into how to reverse the decline of membership and influence unions were then experiencing, Olney, together with its other founding directors, created the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project (LAMAP), a project that sought to reinvigorate unions and unionization by applying the ideas of the “community/labor nexus strategy” to manufacturing in Los Angeles, particularly along the Alameda Corridor. The founders’ hope was to create a resonance – “subjective social dynamite” as Olney called it – among the untapped power of immigrant workers, the immigrant communities, ten of the largest and most powerful unions in the U.S. that represented manufacturing workers, and the vast and diverse manufacturing sector in Los Angeles, all to redound to the benefit of the workers, especially the economically burdened immigrant workers of the region. It was an idea, fleshed out by Olney in a 1993 article he published in Crossroads entitled “The Rising of the Million,” that, due to its innovativeness and reliance on one-to-one connection, required the investment of a great deal of time in creating the links between the structural elements of the organization, and building faith among the workers in the promise of unions to improve their lives. Olney and the staff and volunteers of LAMAP did all the research, met with all the community and union leaders, and gave all the effort necessary to make the venture a success. While LAMAP ceased operations after 5 years, it was an unquestionable success in permanently shifting the national conversation about where the power to represent the interests of working people truly resides, and also changing the answer: the power resides with the workers themselves.
After the shuttering of LAMAP in 1997, Olney became the director of organizing at the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union), where he remained until 2013, pursuing many of the same projects and ideas he had in every other job or undertaking, working tirelessly for the benefit of the longshore, warehouse and supporting service workers as they kept the ports and warehouses that underpin an enormous portion of the U.S. economy running smoothly and efficiently. Olney and his staff pursued a wide variety of union activities/actions in order to provide the workers with job security, pay security and safe working conditions in an age when the computerization of such transportation hubs threatens such foundational needs both in the U.S. and around the globe. During this time, Olney also served for 3 years as an Associate Director of the ILE (Institute for Labor and Employment) at the University of California, and as the Academic Coordinator responsible for overseeing courses and research projects offered as part of a Labor curriculum, and conferences given in support, in addition to fulfilling the duties of his advisory/consultative role as an Associate Director.
Since his departure from the ILWU, just as throughout his entire life, Olney has been prodigiously active in many organizations focused on organized labor and the Labor Movement, and invested in sharing his comprehensive understanding of unions and unionization with future generations. He is a member of the faculty at the NABTU-Building Trades Academy in partnership with Rowan University in New Jersey, where he teaches union organizing. He regularly contributes to ongoing discussions, publications and scholarship, online and in print, about the changing face of the Labor Movement with particular focus on organizing strategies, class struggles, immigration and the political climate.
In retirement Olney has partnered with longtime friend and labor comrade, Rand Wilson of Massachusetts to write a frequent column for “Sinistra Sindacale”, a regular publication of Lavoro e Societa a formation within the largest Italian labor confederation, the CGIL. Olney has also traveled to Japan twice in recent years and under the auspices of Zenroren, the second largest Japanese labor federation, held workshops and training sessions in Tokyo for the Federation’s affiliates.
