Trade You a Mohawk for That Peanut Butter

Trade You a Mohawk for That Peanut Butter
Robert Struckman
AFL-CIO NOW

She said she’d get a Mohawk. She got a Mohawk.

“I’m sporting a new ‘do,’” says Alice Phillips, business manager for Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 483 of Tacoma, Wash. “It feels…light. It’s different.”

The shaved head and spiked hair came about because Phillips wanted her union local to double last year’s donation of union-made peanut butter as part of the Letter Carriers’ (NALC's) National Food Drive. The 21st annual drive to combat hunger is the nation’s largest single-day food drive and is held annually on the second Saturday in May in 10,000 cities and towns in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2012, letter carriers collected 70 million pounds of food donations along their postal routes.

Last year, 35 union locals in the Tacoma area decided to donate peanut butter, a nutritious and popular food made by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members at the J.M. Smucker Co. in Ohio. The peanut butter was donated to the Emergency Food Network, which provides food to 67 food banks and feeding programs in Pierce County. This year, those 35 union locals tripled last year’s haul, bringing in 10,000 pounds of the food.

It didn’t start out as two years of aggressive giving. After the drive began last year, the jars barely trickled in and Phillips scrambled for a way to motivate her members to dig deep to fight hunger.

So she made a wager. If her local would donate 200 jars as part of the Pierce County Central Labor Council’s peanut butter drive, she’d eat an entire jar herself, she promised.

The local brought in 483 jars, so she got ready to eat, until members of her executive board raised a concern about the possibility of a peanut butter binge triggering an allergic reaction. So the board voted to waive the pledge.

“I’m a person of my word,” says Phillips, who has been business manager for her local for eight years. “I made a promise, a commitment. So this year, I wanted something to make up for last year, and I wasn’t going to back out of it. That’s when I came up with the Mohawk. They’d get to dog me for a little while for having this hairstyle. It’ll grow out. No harm, no foul.”

But, she says, “I’m not getting a Mohawk for only 500 jars.”

Phillips raised the wager to 1,000 jars of peanut butter.

Three hours before the deadline, the local was 400 jars short. So Phillips sent out a message that said, “You guys aren’t going to make it. I’m going to go out and buy a new hairbrush!”

Suddenly, the jars started coming in: 20 from here, 40 there.

“I think some of them had these jars stockpiled. We had trucks pulling up with cases and cases of peanut butter,” Phillips says. “And the next thing you know, we’re at 1,000.”

A few days later, hairstylist Angela Tyson of Salon on Broadway in Tacoma plugged in her clippers, shaved Phillips over the ears and spiked the top.

“It’s airy,” says Phillips.

A friend of mine did something similar for Movember last year. He is the sort of person who can't really grow facial hair (when he tries, the words "bum fluff" come to mind....), so instead of trying to grow a moustache for November, he grew his hair long for a few months beforehand and then got it done into a proper punk-style Mohican (i.e. tall and spiked). He did it at work (they got a barber in specially) and his company told him that they'd match whatever donations he got for doing it, so I think he raised over a grand in the end.