Ron Patenaude wears his heart not on his sleeve, but just below it.
On his left arm is a tattoo reading “UAW Local 2322,” the labor union to which Patenaude has belonged for the past 12 years, the last six as president. On his right arm is another tattoo, of the “Union Yes” symbol; he got that one, he says, after employees at the since-closed Brightside child welfare program in West Springfield were told by management that they couldn’t wear pro-union T-shirts to work. A third tattoo reads, simply, “Solidarity.” And Patenaude’s planning a new one, a union label to sit, appropriately, on the back of his neck.
“My partner likes to say, ‘If you don’t know where Ron’s coming from, you’re not paying attention,'” Patenaude says.
As a labor organizer, Patenaude is a fierce champion of workers, and a major headache to employers he feels are not treating their employees justly. Now he’s bringing that same energy and commitment to electoral politics, as a Democratic candidate for the Hampden District state Senate seat, which is being vacated by incumbent Stephen Buoniconti.
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Massachusetts legislative races are known, shamefully, for their anemia, with challengers rarely taking on incumbents—and viable challengers even more rarely. Even when races are contested, they typically feature a strong, or strong enough, incumbent versus a rival candidate who cannot drum up enough media attention or popular support to make any significant waves in the race. (Traditionally, those lopsided races have often broken down along party lines, with a dominant Democrat and marginalized Republican—a tradition the Mass. GOP, newly energized by Scott Brown’s victory, is working hard to overturn.)
Often incumbents hold on to their seats with little effort, until they decide to move on. In the case of the Hampden Senate seat—which represents West Springfield and Agawam, as well as parts of Springfield and Chicopee—Buoniconti, the incumbent since 2005, has opted not to run for re-election so he can instead run for Hampden County district attorney. The D.A. seat, in turn, is being left vacant by the retirement of 20-year incumbent Bill Bennett.
News of Buoniconti’s plans to leave the Senate was followed a few days later by state Rep. Jim Welch’s announcement that he would run for the seat. Welch, a Democrat from West Springfield, began his political career as an aide to Buoniconti when the latter held the 6th Hampden state rep seat. When Buoniconti ran for the Senate, Welch ran for, and won, his open House seat.
Also running for the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat is Susan Dawson, the former Agawam mayor who gained an embarrassing degree of notoriety last year after a physical dustup, in a Springfield restaurant, with another woman whose estranged husband Dawson was dating. That confrontation—which saw the other woman plead guilty to assault charges filed by Dawson—haunted Dawson into last fall’s mayor’s race, which she lost in the primary.
Several Republicans are also running for their party’s nomination for the Senate seat, including Kenneth Condon, chief financial officer at American International College; Agawam City Councilor Robert Magovern; and Vinny Tirone, a Republican activist and one-time Agawam City Council candidate.
In that crowded field, conventional wisdom would hold that Welch—with his connections to Buoniconti and his current seat in the House—is the frontrunner, the heir apparent to his former boss. Indeed, Patenaude said, some have suggested to him that he run for Welch’s rep seat, not the Senate seat, because it’s “not his time”—a notion he dismisses.
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s seat,” Patenaude says. “This is the people’s seat, as what’s-his-name—Scott Brown—likes to say.”
Welch’s assumed advantages aside, Patenaude brings his own formidable political connections to the election—namely, his position within the Valley’s organized labor network. In addition to serving as president of Local 2322, which reports 3,600 members, he’s also a vice president of the Pioneer Valley Central Labor Council.
That experience, Patenaude says, would serve him well as a legislator. “I’ve been doing the work,” he says. “I’ve been representing people. I have a constituency I represent now.”
Patenaude is also intimately familiar with working people, the challenges they face—and the things that need to be done to improve their lot. “I know how to organize and put pressure,” he says.
Interestingly, Welch, too, has enjoyed the support of organized labor; his finance reports from earlier campaigns show donations from labor groups, including the Pioneer Valley Central Labor Council, and his campaign website prominently features a “union-made” symbol.
Finance reports for this fall’s Senate race will not be filed until shortly before the September primaries.
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Politically, of course, Patenaude’s work as a labor leader might prove to be a double-edged sword. At UAW, he’s taken on such Valley institutions as the Sisters of Providence Health System, Springfield Partners for Community Action, and the Springfield YWCA—and made enemies as well as fans along the way.
“I don’t back down,” Patenaude says of his willingness to go to the mat for the people he represents. “It’s not my job to kowtow to people who are threatening my members. It’s not going to happen.
“My mother, God bless her, is gone. And there are not many people left who can tell me what to do,” he adds.
The 54-year-old Patenaude grew up in a working class French-Canadian Catholic family of devout Democrats. For about 20 years, he owned a home in Springfield’s Maple High/Six Corners neighborhood; now he and his partner live in West Springfield. The couple also built a second home in Otis, where they run a pottery and stained glass business.
Patenaude’s union work goes back about 12 years, to the time he was working as a mental health counselor at Providence Behavioral Health Hospital. When employees heard that their wages and benefits were to be cut, he and a group of about a half-dozen others began talking about forming a union. They joined UAW, and six years ago, Patenaude was elected the local’s president.
While UAW stands for United Auto Workers, the union, in fact, represents a broad range of workers. Its members come from the education, health care and social service fields, and include daycare workers at SPCA and Square One, graduate students at UMass, mental health workers at ServiceNet, housekeepers at Mount Holyoke College.
Patenaude is running for the Senate, he explains, “because after six years as president of the local, and six years in the rank and file, I have just reached the conclusion that you can’t change the system from without, and you have to change it from within.
“And the best way to be effective is to write and pass legislation that’s good for workers and working families, and not for Wall Street, and the elite and powerful, who don’t seem to need any help,” he adds.
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What would Patenaude’s priorities be in the Senate?
For one, he’d like to see a single-payer health care system; he calls Chapter 58—the state health care reform law passed in 2006—”a big wet kiss to health insurers.” Just because people are guaranteed health insurance, he says, doesn’t mean they truly have access to health care, if they can’t afford their co-payments.
In addition, Patenaude would like to see an improvement in the quality of jobs in the state. “Everybody talks about job creation,” he says. “What about job retention? What about job value?” Like many in organized labor, Patenaude supports casinos in Massachusetts because, he says, he believes they will create well-paying union jobs.
And he calls for stronger supports for young people, from quality jobs for older kids to services to help prepare the youngest kids for school. When children come to school lacking the basics they need at home, “why are we blaming teachers for bad outcomes?” he asks. “We need more services, not less.”
Patenaude would also like to see laws demanding more transparency in how publicly funded organizations spend their money. In the case of taxpayer-supported nonprofits, he argues that the Legislature should set aside money to go straight to direct-care workers’ wages and benefits, rather than let management decide how the money is spent. Too often, he says, those organizations are topheavy, and spend too much on the salaries of top officials—not to mention on anti-union efforts and anti-union attorneys—while claiming they can’t pay their workers better. That’s a particularly sore spot for Patenaude, who, in his union role, has clashed with a number of nonprofit organizations that, he says, mistreat their employees.
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“Anyone’s argument that I’m going to be an automatic vote for the unions might have a point. Because I think what unions are working on is usually the right thing,” Patenaude says with a smile.
But he rejects the idea that organized labor is a special interest, concerned only with advancing the prospects of its own members. Organized labor has long been involved in issues that affect a much wider population than its own members, from raising the minimum wage to social reforms, such as efforts to make the criminal record system more equitable.
“The middle class was built in this country by unions,” Patenaude says.
For all his dedication to the cause of organized labor, Patenaude says, “I’m not a union guy—I’m a working class guy.”
He’s also, he adds, “not ashamed to say I’m progressive”—a label, to him, that means a commitment to good health care and decent wages and benefits for all workers. “Those are the values I was raised on,” he says. “I’m about fairness and equality.”
Patenaude’s criticism of the powerful elite extends to Democrats who have abandoned the party’s core beliefs, by, for instance, scapegoating immigrants or privatizing public jobs. “I’m& very disappointed in the Democratic party. It’s not the party I grew up in,” he says. “I’m a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe in the social values that the party is supposed to stand for.”
And, Patenaude believes, voters will respond to his commitment to working people and working families. After all, he notes, “I think there are more workers in the world than bosses.”
