Dispute Muddies Signature Drive Initiative 200 Workers Complain About Meals, Goals; 3 Say They Were Misled
Four unemployed Midwesterners headed home in a funk after less than a week of work here gathering signatures to get Initiative 200 - an anti-affirmative action measure - considered by the Legislature.
The visitors arrived last weekend on a bus from Chicago for the work, drawn by ads in the Midwest that promised $500 to $600 - plus hotel rooms and transportation - for those collecting 1,000 signatures a week from registered voters in the Seattle area.
By Thursday morning, all four - a minister, a homeless man and two other people - had headed back home because of disputes over meal money, the number of signatures being collected and the purpose of the initiative.
The Rev. Eric Ellis, a Chicago youth minister, said he was told he would be working to get a pro-affirmative-action measure on the ballot, and was promised two meals a day plus payment.
There were no meals, he said. “And after we read the petition, we realized it was to demolish affirmative action,” he said.
Dee Jones, a Toledo, Ohio, contractor who hired Ellis and the others, dismissed the complaints as nothing more than “a case of disgruntled employees.”
She said the workers were fired for failing to meet their quotas of 150-200 signatures a day.
“All they wanted to do was sleep and treat this like a vacation,” Jones said.
She said she’s out hundreds of dollars in transportation and hotel money and ended up with about 600 signatures - far fewer than the 4,000 she expected from the crew by the end of this week.
The initiative would ban hiring preferences for minorities and women in state and local government, public education and in public contracting.
The campaign faces a Jan. 2 deadline for submitting 180,000 signatures. Lawmakers can adopt the measure outright or refer it to the November 1998 ballot, with or without a proposed legislative alternative.
Opponents of Initiative 200 - titled the Washington Civil Rights Initiative - accuse the campaign of “playing the race card” by hiring black, out-of-state signature gatherers.
The idea may be to persuade white voters “to think, ‘It’s OK to sign this if it’s a person of color asking me to sign,”’ said Kathleen Russell, the No! 200 campaign manager.
The initiative’s campaign chairman, conservative talk-show host John Carlson, said there was no effort to recruit blacks and that those helping collect signatures believe in the cause.
“Clearly, it irritates our opponents that so many black people are willing to work for and volunteer for an initiative that does away with set-asides. That should tell them just how wrong these set-asides are,” he said.
“I think we could be turning in even more signatures than we anticipated,” Carlson said. The campaign has 130,000 signatures so far, he said.
Jones, the campaign-petition contractor, who is black, said she recruited people through relatives in Chicago and Milwaukee. She said contract terms were clear and the workers understood the initiative.
The four workers who gave up say many voters were hostile and that they had trouble meeting their signature quotas.
“We were getting cussed out and everything,” said one of them, Tyrone Wells, 18, of Toledo. “By white people, black people, every people.”
Wells, Ellis and Beverly Mosley, 48, a disabled veteran from Milwaukee, also said they had thought the proposal sought to restore affirmative action to a state where it had been banned.
The fourth worker, self-described homeless man Arthur Tillis, 45, said he did understand the initiative’s aim before he left Chicago.
It’s not uncommon for initiative campaigns to hire out-of-state workers. This one has had to look farther for them due to the holiday season and Washington’s low unemployment rate, said Sherry Bockwinkel, who is directing the signature drive.