UFCW Local 1529
Standing strong for working families
Powering · Labor Education
One-Page Position Brief — Yes, Yes, No
Prints on a single sheet. Send the link to CWA and the affiliates, or print it for the Executive Board.
Why We Are Sticking With Yes, Yes, No
Two of these referendums are a straight gain for working people and one is a blank check. Good people on our own side read the lobbyist question differently than we do, and that objection is in our record. Here is why our position has not moved.
The amendment cannot do the thing we are worried about. Its only operative command is that the Council shall, by ordinance, create a registration and disclosure process. It defines no one and registers no one. Nothing in it is self-executing. Who has to register gets decided in the implementing ordinance — three readings, public comment, thirteen members in an election cycle. That is a room we can fill.
A no vote does not take the tool away from them. If the Council wants a registry aimed at our phone calls, defeating this referendum does not stop them. It obligates them to act; it does not hand them a power they lack. Voting no surrenders the leverage of a public mandate and buys us no protection.
The text points at paid professionals, not at our members. It contemplates lobbyists filing their state-mandated disclosure statements with the City. A person who has state-mandated disclosure statements is already a registered lobbyist. A member who takes off work to testify, a retiree who calls his councilman, an attorney who phones on behalf of a client — none of them have one to file. Every comparable regime in Tennessee, including Shelby County's, is built on compensation.
If they write it broadly, they have funded their own lawsuit. Petitioning the government is protected activity. The Council knows it: one whereas clause recites that First Amendment rights must be safeguarded, and Section 7 pre-authorizes public money to seek a declaratory judgment on enforceability. They conceded the exposure and budgeted for the court fight. An ordinance reaching a union member on the telephone is the easiest case we would ever have to bring.
Registration has never silenced labor where it exists. Our movement has had registered lobbyists in Nashville for decades. It is a filing, not a permit. We know how to comply, and complying has never cost us a vote. The outfits that fear disclosure are the ones whose influence depends on nobody knowing they were in the room.
In Memphis the asymmetry runs entirely one way right now. There is no lobbyist disclosure at City Hall — none. PILOT and abatement applicants, developers, stadium and arena interests, utility and data-center interests all operate with zero public record. Our power is members and votes, and disclosure does not threaten a hall full of members. Theirs is money and access, and disclosure is the only thing that does.
And there is the headline. “Labor voted against lobbyist disclosure” is a line we would eat for years, quoted back at us every time we demand to know who wrote an ordinance or who asked for an abatement.
The drafting defects are real: eleven sections with no definition of a lobbyist, no threshold, no penalty, no enforcing office and no deadline. That is why we are putting this in writing now. Any implementing ordinance must:
- 1.Applies only to persons compensated to influence City action.
- 2.Expressly exempts members, retirees, volunteers and officers of a labor organization acting without separate lobbying compensation.
- 3.Expressly exempts attorneys communicating on behalf of clients in representational matters.
- 4.No registration fee that operates as a toll on petitioning government.
- 5.Labor at the table while it is drafted — in writing, not by invitation after the fact.
If the Council brings forward an ordinance that fails these tests, this Labor Council will oppose it with everything we have — and we will have the receipt showing we said so first.
The amendment takes the word “employees” out of the Article 34, § 250(i) exemption, which is the win. It leaves “officers of the library” still exempt, and neither the ordinance nor the Charter defines who an officer is. Nobody has published which library positions would be classified that way. Our YES rests on the judgment of the library workers and their counsel, and it would be worth having that read in writing before November 3.
