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 politicsGrowing 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.
"From the minute I got there," Chafe said, "I knew I would learn more doing that work than in my four years in college."
A career was born.
In the early days, Chafe worked for little more than food money.
"It was $26 a day, and, frighteningly, I saved money," he says now.
The young organizer spent a lot of time in Eden, branched out to Kannapolis and towns in Western North Carolina, and he eventually went to Mississippi.
The work could be exhilarating and dangerous.
One night in September 1991, returning to his motel after a meeting with Mississippi shirt workers, Chafe found out how risky his business was. Traveling alone down a dark, rural highway, he was halted by a traffic accident caused by two cows in the road.
He pulled over to help and quickly found out the car behind had been following him for a reason. A large man from that car -- he later saw it parked in the plant manager's space -- assailed Chafe.
"I had to literally outrun this guy, and he was humongous -- he probably clocked in at 270 pounds," Chafe recalls.
Advising EdwardsThe incident did not dissuade Chafe from his fight for low-wage workers. He eventually became chief of staff for UNITE-HERE, a major textile union, before joining John Edwards' presidential campaign as a senior adviser.
Chafe said he was surprised and dismayed by Edwards' extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter. He has spoken with the former senator many times since then and expressed those feelings.
"But at the end of the day," Chafe adds, "I'm immensely proud of having been a part of a campaign that I think helped drive the agenda of the Democrats to give working families a chance. "
With that in mind, Chafe jumped at the offer six months ago to head Change To Win, even though it means spending more time away from his family than he prefers. He worries that he misses too many spontaneous moments with his daughter Lila, 6 1/2, and son Jordan, almost 5.
"There are some moments I will never get back," Chafe says regretfully. "But I know some day my kids will be proud of what I do."
A typical weeks starts Monday morning on an airplane from Raleigh-Durham to Washington. If his schedule permits, Chafe flies back Wednesday night. Sometimes there are meetings at the end of the week that require more flights.
"I can always count on Chris being helpful to me in making the argument about investing in the South and organizing in the South," said James Andrews, president of the N.C. State A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Others count on him, too, to remember his roots -- both Southern and in the movement.
"Chris is a unique individual, and I worked very hard to promote his ascending to the position he's in," said Chip Roth, a Teamsters lobbyist in North Carolina. "I believe it is essential that the leadership of the labor movement, both nationally and locally, must reflect the tradition of organizing."
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