A unionizing effort by the workers at Denver-based Telfund, Inc, a company that raises money over the phone for liberal nonprofits and charities, had been ongoing for almost a year. According to the company website and former employees, Telefund's clients have included the ACLU, PETA, Planned Parenthood, the Democratic National Committee, the ASPCA, Amnesty International, the Human Rights Campaign, and Mother Jones Magazine. The organizers, who were volunteers for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, have since all been fired or pressured to quit. Other pro-union employees have been harassed for talking to co-workers about a union.

The IWW, known as the "wobblies," was founded in 1905 by revolutionaries who wanted to form a one big union of workers, organized by industry rather than trade, to stand up to the "employing class." The union stood on the brink of irrelevance after the 1920 Palmer Raids, but it has slowing crept back in to the labor limelight with successful union organizing of Starbucks in New York City, and the Stockton Truckers on the West coast.

"There were short term and long term goals," twenty-year-old IWW organizer Eva Enns explained. "Short-term goals were obtaining job and wage stability. The long-term goals were things like maybe health benefits and vacation time. . . things most working professionals are entitled to." Enns was a Telefund employee, and was part of the organizing committee that oversaw the union campaign. While three Telefund employees were on the committee, two other IWW organizers worked from the outside. The outsiders were Hungarian immigrant Sandra Bukowski and Eric A. Blake, a middle-class carpenter.

"The [Telefund] workers were getting fucked over. We were going in there to organize the workers, and to help the workers organize themselves, so they could protect themselves and get some of the dignity they deserve," Bukowski said bluntly.

As at thousands of other cold-call centers across the US and South Asia, an employee's duty at Telfund is to serve as the human voice of an automatic dialer, reading a script designed to open the flood of money from the call recipient's credit card to another company's bank account—in this case, liberal non-profits. Because employee's pay was based on performance, which in turn was based on a variety of factors from method of payment to how many people have been contacted, salaries often varied widely.

"You'd like to know you have some kind of steady pay," said an employee and union sympathizer who wished to remain anonymous, "A lot of people feel their pay is just made up. That was one common goal that everyone had, to make sure we were being paid properly. The types of people who are working [at Telefund] are people who live check to check and can't afford to spend the time to make sure their check is right. Even if it's wrong, they don't have time to wait for the company to give them back the check. Most people just accept it."

The difficulty of knowing one's final take-home pay was compounded by Telefund's irregular employment habits. Workers have arrived to the company at the times they were told they would work—and were sent home because no call station was available. Occasionally, the office would close early and the employee's would lose their breaks. An anonymous worker described the environment:

"We wanted to make sure we were not being gypped for certain [situations], like when the office has to close a half and hour early and we lose our breaks. That's not fair to us."

Matt John, an employee who quit the company, talked about the schedule. "I'd say there was an overall pattern of unfair treatment. Most specifically in discouraging workers by sending people home if the seats were full but they were on time. That's something I think they did deliberately."

The union campaign began strongly in October of 2004. Workers were interested and management knew little about union efforts. Betrayal came from within: one union member, who called himself David Krug, sent a vehement letter to the president of the company and other directors falsely claiming that the union was going to declare a strike in seventy-two hours. Telefund then posted the letter to the company bulletin board with a response letter.

"We suspect his name is David Cunningham," said Enns. "He'd been involved pretty much since the inception. He essentially sabotaged the campaign. After he sent that letter in, they posted it on the wall and wrote a response with basic union-busting retorts. He really made us look foolish. It was hard for us to safely go around and tell people it wasn't from the union. He swore up and down it wasn't him." A couple of days after this incident, Cunningham allegedly stole thousand of dollars in rent money from his roommates (one of which was Enns) and left the city. Cunningham was unavailable for comment.

After the letter, firings and harassment began. Haynes remembered one instance where she was talking to four co-workers about the union during lunch break. "After lunch break was done, [the four co-workers] stopped, logged on, and within fifteen minutes all four of them were fired. They had been on the top of the list for donations, just in the last week's time. It was just earth-shaking. For the rest of the shift, I just sat there with no one else around me. [Management] said all of them had problems with their performance. The previous week they had been at the top of the list, they had had honorable mentions."

"The company did blatant union-busting, word for word out of union-busting manuals. They were just very anti-union, corporate managers are trained to be that way. I don't think they even knew what they were against, they were just doing what they were told to do," Enns said. "It's either apathy or fear. Those [emotions] are the two biggest problems. As far as a solution goes, I don't know, you'd have to have a total paradigm shift. People would really have to believe that what they're working for is important."

Other local organizational problems plagued the campaign. Bukowski explained. "[The workers] didn't get much support from the IWW Denver General Membership Branch. The branch was struggling with organizational issues themselves, and I think that was probably the biggest set back. The support that we needed to give to campaign as a branch, we were not able to give. Telefund continues to screw the workers, but I think the union itself would have been strong enough to handle that, had they had the backing from the branch."

Blake, the other organizer agreed. "The organizers were left to reinvent the wheel, we needed a greater support system, where people share the workload."

In the end, the experience of organizing a workplace has changed some of the organizers' perspectives.

"What I have learned through the failures in this campaign, is that in a lot of ways we need to be functioning like a business," claimed Bukowski. "What I mean by that is that we don't lose momentum. It means constant communication, being accountable and professional in what we do. I think at times we fight the corporate world to the point where we go out of our way to not be anything like them, but a lot a times what we do by that is screw ourselves. They are busting ass and that's why they are succeeding. And if we bust ass we can succeed, too."

"I guess [this experience] made me do a one-eighty," said Enns. "The way the economy is and the way the business world is in America, it kind of goes against everything that is innate. I've always felt that. Maybe that's why Americans are so full of anxiety. I've realized now that this system is just another form of slavery we're trapped in, in present day America. We basically work for an unlivable wage in most cases, lots of times we don't get the things we need to sustain our lives, like health care, or say, vacation time so we don't lose our minds. It seems that all we do is work all day and then go home to sleep so we can get up and go to work the next day. It's a vicious cycle."

According to available Colorado State records on paid solicitors, Telfund gives an average of 35% percent of fundraised profits to the organizations. Douglas H. Phelps, the president of Telefund, is also executive director of the Fund for Public Interest Research, on the board of directors at Green Corps (where union busting has been reported), and the president of Green Century Capital Management, a "socially responsible" investment firm that holds stock in accountable companies like the McDonalds Corporation, and Microsoft.

The question that needs to be asked is this: Why are these "progressive" organizations financially supporting a company that harasses and exploits workers? It is a supreme irony that a magazine named after a radical union organizer-Mother Jones-could be contributing to such mistreatment at Telefund, Inc. But, in these days of global economy and gung-ho efficacy, it's just business as usual, no matter what politics you have. IWW organizer Blake made an interesting statement when he said "A company is a company. A capitalist is still a capitalist. Workers and the boss will never meet. You can bleed your liberal heart all over the carpet, it's still business."