Union organizer now speaks for 6 million workers

CARRBORO -- Chris Chafe gets a chuckle from the puns.

Yes, his name is Chafe and he's a labor organizer, a workers advocate who can rub management the wrong way.

But mild-mannered, good-humored and politically shrewd are better words for the work style of the executive director of Change To Win, an alliance of seven unions with 6 million members.

"He is nice, low-key," says Anna Burger, the national labor leader who helped form the powerful 3-year-old federation, which includes the Teamsters and Service Employees International Union.

"I actively recruited him because I think he's a great leader," Burger said.

Chafe's attributes -- dedication to his work, flexibility in negotiating -- have taken him a long way in the world of organized labor. He's gone from staging rallies in Southern textile mill towns to helping shape law in the halls of Congress.

For much of his adult life, Chafe, 40, has lived out of suitcases, moving from hotel room to hotel room while trying to persuade textile workers to come together for greater bargaining power.

These days he splits his time between Carrboro, where he lives with his wife and two children, and the nation's capital, where he has a small studio apartment with a fold-down Murphy bed.

"When I'm in Washington, I work till 11 o'clock at night," Chafe says. "It's all about face time. It's pretty exhausting."

But Chafe and others in the labor movement are enthusiastic about the long hours required of them in recent months.

In North Carolina, one of the least unionized states in the country, organized labor scored a major victory late last year. After a bitter 15-year battle, a union was formed at Smithfield Foods, a pork-industry giant.

For the November elections, national labor organizations invested millions of dollars in campaigns for state offices and sent out hundreds of union members to knock on doors, help with phone banks and distribute candidates' literature at plant gates and blue-collar hotbeds.

"For people who aren't from the South, there's sort of an assumption that people here are conservative," Chafe said. "But if you've lived here, you know that's not true, that there's always been a history of progressives going up against mill owners."

Chafe was born in New York City, but he grew up in Chapel Hill when it was known as fertile ground for politically progressive ideas and left-wing politics.

As a self-proclaimed "sports nut" in the heart of ACC basketball country, the young Chafe showed early his propensity to pull for the underdog.

His father, William Chafe, is a noted historian at Duke University. His mother, Lorna Chafe, is a retired social worker who got her graduate degree at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Although the family rooted for both the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels during most of college basketball season, theirs was a house divided when the rivals played each other.

"They're both such great teams, my general rule has always been to cheer whoever is behind," the politically savvy Chafe said.

Steeped in politics

Growing up, Chafe was fascinated with the civil rights heroes his father's research brought to their home. He also walked precincts for the David Price and Jim Hunt campaigns before he was old enough to vote.

"I was blessed I was raised here," Chafe said last week, while sitting in a local food co-op cafe near the Chapel Hill-Carrboro border.

Since his childhood, he has moved away from and returned to the western part of the Triangle several times.

After getting a bachelor's degree in peace studies at Colgate University, Chafe came back from the campus in Hamilton, N.Y., with only the notion that he wanted to get involved in politics. A friend of his father's took him out for a beer at a Darryl's restaurant between Chapel Hill and Durham and asked him to give three days of his life to a labor organizing workshop in Eastern North Carolina.