Frank and Kathy Kadi (MSEA-SEIU 1989) & Over Five decades of Activism

PHOTO: Frank Kadi, top center, with fellow MSEA-SEIU members demanding an end to the 1991 Maine State Government Shutdown

The story below comes from the Maine Service Employees Association (MSEA-SEIU 1989) newsletter The Maine Stater.

Barely a teenager in the summer of 1991, Lauren Kadi spent much of that July tenting with her parents and providing childcare for scores of nearby children, but this wasn’t your typical adventure in Maine’s great outdoors. And it wasn’t your typical babysitting gig, either.

Lauren and her parents, MSEA-SEIU Members Frank and Kathy Kadi, set up in Augusta’s Capital Park in a village of tents that became known as Union City. State workers created the encampment as they protested the infamous 1991 Maine State Government Shutdown.

For 16 days in 1991, most state workers were locked out of their jobs without pay. State parks, courthouses, the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles and other state offices were closed, all as state legislators and then-governor John McKernan held the state workforce hostage in their fight over passing the next two-year state budget.

Back then, MSEA-SEIU members like Frank and Kathy Kadi packed the State House every day to protest the shutdown and the hundreds of state worker layoffs along with health care and retirement cuts being pushed onto them by McKernan and his allies as part of the budget fight. State workers jam-packed the State House Hall of Flags with thunderous chants of “We Want to Work! We Want to Work!” When McKernan and his allies emerged from meetings in the governor’s cabinet room, the chants grew even louder as grim-faced legislators ran the gauntlet.

During the shutdown, many state workers, including Kathy Kadi, were deemed “essential,” which meant the McKernan administration forced them to work without pay for the duration of the lockout. That didn’t stop Kathy from driving most nights after work from her job at the Maine Department of Human Services in Portland to the State House and Union City, and to a couple emergency meetings of MSEA’s board of directors during the shutdown, as Kathy served on the board at the time. Kathy said she persuaded the board to arrange for short-term loans for locked-out workers via the international union the Service Employees International Union. “And they did,” Kathy said.

Kathy and other MSEA members even chained themselves to the State House steps one night in protest of the shutdown and cuts both imposed on and proposed for state workers. “There were maybe five or six of us.” No one got arrested, “but they did have the troopers ready to go anytime. It was a threat, basically.”

Every day of the shutdown, Frank protested at the State House opposing any cuts to the state workforce. Meantime, at Frank and Kathy’s request, their daughter, Lauren, led a childcare effort in Union City for the children of fellow locked-out-state-worker parents who joined in the State House protests.

“I babysat my neighbors growing up. I turned 13 that summer – I was in middle school. I liked kids and I knew a lot of the union community’s kids, so it was natural,” Lauren recalled.

“I’ve been going to rallies since I was in utero,” Lauren added, calling Union City just one of countless union actions she joined in with her parents throughout her childhood. With her parents highly engaged as progressive activists and MSEA leaders – both served as chief stewards, and both served on our bargaining committees and our Board of Directors at times – Lauren also saw, and did, it all at MSEA with her parents. “I’m the end of Generation X and when I was younger, I often felt more politically engaged than most of my peers.”

Throughout Lauren’s childhood, she routinely took to a corner in the board room of our former union hall at 65 State St., Augusta, reading while her parents participated in bargaining, board or political action committee meetings. On their trips up from Portland, her parents would stop by the Mr. Paperback in the nearby Shaw’s Plaza for books, so she was all in.

Lauren also joined her parents regularly at the State House, at annual breakfasts honoring The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and at Labor Day celebrations. As a teen, she wrote phone-bank scripts for Frank, who served as chair of MSEA’s political action committee, now known as PASER, Political Action by Service Employees and Retirees. She knocked on doors with Frank in support of the union’s endorsed candidates. She joined him in election-night watch parties. After heading off to college, she quickly realized that few of her peers shared her working-class upbringing or her family’s deep participation in union and progressive advocacy.

FRANK KADI: A SEASONED LABOR AND PROGRESSIVE ACTIVIST

By the time the 1991 shutdown had started, Frank Kadi, now age 78, already had engaged in over two decades of labor and progressive activism. Born in New York, he’s lived in Maine since he was a year-and-a-half old: Hebron, Bangor, Orono, Portland, Gorham and currently in South Portland at Pinnacle Health & Rehab, where he has lived since 2023.

In 1966, Frank enrolled at the University of Maine at Orono (UMO), where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history four years later. He initially thought he’d join the Reserve Officers’ Training Core (ROTC) and head off to fight in the Vietnam War. “When I started college, I was for the war in Vietnam.” But his education and experiences at UMO changed that.

“Within a couple years, I turned against it and it was a radical action,” he said. “It wasn’t just me.

The activist movement in Orono was very committed at that time: supporting strikes, ending the war, (and supporting) civil rights.” In 1969, Frank and fellow students joined in a boycott of General Electric (GE) products as part of a nationwide strike by unionized GE workers.

After graduating UMO in 1970, Frank took a job with the Pineland Center in New Gloucester, then a state institution providing care for people with developmental disabilities. He joined the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represented the workers at Pineland, and became a union chief steward.

In the early 1970s, he and Kathy met at a fundraising dance for the Portland group Youth in Action. “We fell for each other,” Frank said. They married in 1975 and Lauren was born three years later.

Building on the relationships he had formed with Maine unionists at UMO, Frank helped establish a group they called FORMULA – For Maine Union Labor Action. At the Maine AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) Convention, Frank and other FORMULA members took on what then was the national AFL-CIO’s neutrality position on the Vietnam War. Frank said neutrality had “outraged many people in the labor movement,” so he put forth a motion at the 1972 convention to oppose its neutrality position. The resolution passed after fierce debate.

Frank joined MSEA around 1985 when he took a computer-programming job with the Maine Department of Human Services. He soon became a chief steward, chair of our political action committee, board member, finance committee member and bargaining team member.

In a column in the March 1990 edition of our union’s newspaper, Maine Stater, Frank wrote about why the union must strengthen its political program. His words ring true today: “Politics underlie everything we do as public employee union members. We sometimes labor under the illusion that this is not so, thinking that collective bargaining exists separate from the political process. Much of the time the true relationship between collective bargaining and politics remains hidden – even though all of our contracts have to pass muster with elected officials, and every dollar that funds our jobs is publicly appropriated.”

Frank Kadi, at far right, joins in a MSEA-SEIU delegation to our nation’s capital in 1993 in support of national healthcare legislation.

In another column by Frank, this one in the February 1992 edition of the Stater, he said there’s no letting up in the fight for respect for state workers: “Maine’s continuing budget crisis has put MSEA to the test like never before. In large measure, we’ve met that test. But we need to be ready to fight for much more.”

He kept working for Maine DHS until his retirement in 2003. He has continued his advocacy as a retiree member-leader of our union. In 2004, he testified in the Maine Legislature in support of protecting retiree health insurance. In 2011, he testified against anti-worker legislation during the LePage years. Also in retirement, he served as president of MSEA's Southern Maine Retirees Chapter, retiree director on the union's Board of Directors, union delegate to annual meetings, PASER Committee member and Retirees Steering Committee member, and as a member of the Southern Maine Labor Council.

Reflecting on all of his advocacy, Frank said, “The labor movement has to be involved in issues that are not just bread and butter” like contracts, workers’ rights, and health and retirement security. He said labor unions must cast a wider net and advocate for “issues that are life and death for the country and for the labor movement. The Vietnam War was a progressive issue like that. Same with the Native Americans. That was an issue of racism.”

In 2004, a year into his retirement, Frank Kadi testified at the Maine State House in support of protecting retiree health insurance.

For Frank, the opportunities and responsibilities of unions are many. He urges anyone who works in a union shop to join and get involved. “A union fights for its members on all different levels,” from contracts to worksites to lobbying elected leaders, he said. “It’s there for anything that the coworkers need. It gets people elected who are pro-union, lobbies for workers’ rights. It does everything you can think of.”

MSEA-SEIU Retiree Member-Leader Peggy Rice presents Frank Kadi with our inaugural MSEA-SEIU Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Frank’s room at Pinnacle in South Portland doesn’t provide much space for personal effects, but a picture of Kathy with newborn Lauren hangs on his wall, along with his MSEA 1988 Chief Steward of the Year plaque and his 1990 Member of the Year Award. The perpetual plaque listing Frank as the inaugural recipient in 2013 of the MSEA-SEIU Lifetime Achievement Award hangs on the wall at the union’s headquarters in Augusta.

Frank and Kathy continue making their voices heard. They will tell anyone who asks why they are voting NO on Question 1, the voter-suppression question on November’s statewide ballot. Living in a care facility means the only way he can vote is by absentee ballot, Frank said. Health problems also mean Kathy has no choice but to vote by absentee ballot – something she’s also determined to keep doing. That’s why both said they will vote NO on 1.

“I’m not able to get around very well,” Frank said about why he will vote NO on 1. “I have to use a walker. If I could still drive, I probably wouldn’t be here” at Pinnacle. There’s no way he could stand for hours in a long line to vote. “Definitely not. I’d fall over. If they didn’t bring the balloting here, there’s no way I could vote.”

KATHY KADI: ENFORCER OF CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS

Kathy, now age 78, has her own record of advocacy for workers. She moved from Boston to Portland in 1971 or 1972 after being raised in a union family. Her father belonged to the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), and when she was in fifth grade, her family lived in an affordable union housing cooperative known as Electchester, put together by IBEW Local 3 in Queens, New York. “I started accompanying my Dad to picket lines when I was three,” Kathy said. Kathy’s Mom belonged to a union for a short time while working a city job. Kathy’s grandfather was a boilermaker, and her grandmother belonged to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union.

Kathy’s positive experiences with Electchester, which remains a union housing cooperative to this day, contributed to her current-day activism of pushing for state legislation that would allow residents of mobile home parks in Maine the right of first refusal to buy the parks themselves when they go on the market. Such legislation stalled in the 2025 session of the 132nd Maine Legislature; Kathy will keep fighting for it. She lives in a mobile home park and hopes she and her neighbors could use such a law to buy the park in which they live.

At one point before moving to Portland, Kathy was denied an apprenticeship in a trades program because of her gender. This infuriated her and her family, and furthered her resolve to always fight for what’s right. Her family would’ve fought her denial of the apprenticeship but couldn’t afford a lawyer to do so at the time.

Also before joining MSEA and state service in 1983, Kathy and some of her female friends, whom she met through Frank’s advocacy, started a women’s caucus at the Maine AFL-CIO. “It was not well-liked” by leadership at the time, she recalled. “One of the things we organized was a massive bean supper in support of the J.P. Stevens workers.” Union workers in 1977 nationwide had begun a boycott of J.P Stevens, which operated textile mills in the South. Kathy also recalled serving as keynote speaker, talking about women’s history and the labor movement, at a Labor Day picnic and rally in Deering Oaks Park.

The challenges facing women in the labor movement go way back. At the March 23, 1991, Maine AFL-CIO’s Trade Union Women’s Conference at the University of Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn campus, then-University of Southern Maine (USM) Professor of New England Studies Ardis Cameron “spoke of the difficulties women historically have faced, and the continuing need for solidarity,” according to a story in the March 1991 Stater.

“They are still writing labor history as if women were not there,” Ardis told the conference. Such distorted perspectives “confirmed for women their marginal position in the labor force.” Ardis referenced a 1912 strike she studied: “The women’s memory of strikes was very different than the men’s. Women were central, but the image of the strike was masculinized.” Now a distinguished professor emeritus at USM, Ardis is the author of the 1994 book, “Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1888-1912.”

Kathy didn’t start out with a union job in Maine. “When I moved here, I had to take whatever job I could get to pay rent.” She worked as a nurse’s aide for a while and filed several complaints with the state over poor nursing home conditions, “which led me to being appointed to be a volunteer with the state ombudsman program to interview clients who had called up to complain.”

As a volunteer, Kathy assisted in removing some people in nursing care from unsafe conditions, sometimes with help from police, but stopped doing that while pregnant. This volunteer work led to Kathy’s hiring in April of 1983 by the state, first as an eligibility specialist for Maine DHHS in Portland. She was later promoted to an ASPIRE (Additional Support for People in Retraining and Employment) specialist position in Augusta.

Kathy talked with Maine Stater July 23rd from her home in Gorham, where she lives independently with a strong support network. Kathy and Frank remain married; they’re living separately because Frank’s healthcare needs exceeded what she could provide for him.

Kathy explained how she jumped into advocating for her coworkers at MSEA. In her first year, she and some of her coworkers formed a new union chapter focusing on their worksite. They named it the Portland DHS Chapter and started taking on worksite problems, including bad bosses.

Kathy immediately took on a health and safety issue for her coworkers, helping to set up meeting spaces so that she and her coworkers could easily and quickly exit a meeting room if they became uncomfortable while meeting one-on-one with a client.

“I had a very-involved sexual harassment case against two supervisors at Portland Human Services and that manager who supervises the supervisors, and her supervisors in Augusta,” recalled Kathy, who served as a chief steward in our union. The resolution?

“The main complainant was able to transfer out. As far as I know, there were oral reprimands, which wasn’t enough, and people who wanted to transfer out of their supervisors’ offices were able to. I worked on that sexual-harassment grievance a long time.”

In another case, Kathy helped a coworker secure a determination by the Maine Human Rights Commission in September of 1989 against Maine DHS in Portland after management denied the coworker’s request for a parking space close enough to her office to avoid aggravating a chronic health problem. A story in the December 1989 Stater notes how one of the commissioners described management’s handling of the matter as “appalling.” The worker ended up getting the requested parking space.

In 1988, Kathy began serving on MSEA’s statewide bargaining committee as part of negotiations with Governor John McKernan’s administration for new state employee contracts; those negotiations resulted in a three-year contract reached in July 1989 providing for, in total with compounding, base wage increases totaling 20.5 percent by July 1, 1991. However, an ensuing state budget crisis led to multiple and sustained attacks on state workers’ wages and health and retirement security. The administration laid off 53 state workers and pushed for $15 million in cost savings from state workers. On behalf of her union, Kathy served on a labor-management task force that landed on a voluntary cost savings program for state workers up through July 1, 1991. It allowed for voluntary workweek reductions, flexible staffing and sporadic days off without pay.

Yet the McKernan administration demanded more and more cuts, handing out 505 layoff notices in late 1990 and demanding a 15% cut in state spending. In March of 1991, the Legislature passed a compromise supplemental state budget that restored 200 of those jobs, but they still hadn’t passed a budget for the two fiscal years starting July 1, 1991 – the day the state government shutdown began.

In the end, after 16 days of state workers being locked out of their jobs in July of 1991, the Legislature and McKernan finally passed a two-year state budget. From the July 1991 edition of the Stater: “What was accomplished? We got our members back to work, a budget passed, and much more. We saved hundreds of state jobs. We beat back major administration initiatives to privatize state services….We prevented the elimination or rollback of employee retirement benefits for those with more than seven years. We prevented the state from shifting more health insurance costs onto employees, and we provided innovative ways to save the State money in administration of health insurance benefits.”

Kathy retired from state service in 2007 but has remained engaged in her union, serving several terms as president of its Southern Maine Retirees Chapter, as a union delegate to annual meetings, a committee member of the Southern Maine Labor Council, and as a member of MSEA’s Retirees Steering Committee.

‘THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESSIVE CHANGE…WILL CONTINUE’

A few years ago, Frank Kadi had the opportunity to revisit his UMO years and his college friendship with Steve King, known by most of us as Stephen, by contributing an essay for Stephen’s 2016 collection of writings, “Hearts in Suspension.” Both Frank and Kathy joined Stephen at the book-release party, where Frank and Stephen shared a hug onstage.

In Frank’s essay, titled “In the Shadow of Mordor,” Frank quoted the first verse of “Solidarity Forever” before summarizing his and Stephen’s shared experiences as emerging activists:

“Students felt this strength in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and when this particular surge ended and the war in Vietnam was over, (but not the civil rights struggle), it was not the end of revolt in America, only the beginning. The struggle for progressive change began long before the student movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it will continue long after.”