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Normally, Tripp, who is 52, would have been running with them. But he had a cold, so he reverted to his race-day role of sideline encouragement, which he delivers in an emotional register that will stay imprinted in their amygdalae into adulthood.
The next group of runners stepped up to the starting line. "This is the 600. Violence, all right?" he cajoled. "This is not some middle-distance 'I'll save myself,' OK? Let's bite their head off, Ozzy Osbourne! You guys know Ozzy Osbourne, right?"
And yet the runners hustled and focused. Amid the herdlike thumping of feet, a young assistant coach from rival Harwood Union Middle & High School, Jake Pitman, marveled at the display of discipline: "They're all bought in. They want to be here. It's indoor track! It's not even regular track!"
Tripp's knack for motivating people has helped endurance athletes at U-32, a public school of 700 or so students from towns outside Montpelier, excel with head-turning consistency. They've won more than 30 state championships in Nordic skiing, track and field, and cross-country running, including seven consecutive titles for the boys' cross-country runners. In 2021, their streak earned Tripp an award as the top boys' coach in the country from the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association.
Establishing unions has gotten harder in the United States, where the proportion of unionized workers has been declining for 50 years. That's never deterred Tripp, who has honed the trade of high-stakes team building. He's worked on landmark campaigns in Vermont and more than 20 other states, organizing more than 100,000 people over the years. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, he helped health care workers at a rural Pennsylvania nursing home take on the boss while many of them were infected with COVID-19.
Tripp played an important behind-the-scenes role last fall in the effort to organize nearly 5,600 minor-league pro baseball players, who for decades endured exploitative working conditions during their quests to make the big leagues. Their nationwide campaign defied long-held assumptions that minor leaguers were too itinerant and individualistic to band together and bite the head off Major League Baseball.
"I don't believe there's a better organizer in the country," said Larry Cohen, former president of the 700,000-plus-member Communications Workers of America, who chairs the board of Our Revolution, a political action group spun from Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) presidential campaigns. "He works through other people, as the best organizers do. It's not charismatic organizing: 'If you want to be a hero, just follow me.' He's the opposite of that."
Like most draftees, Merchant would never play in a major-league game. During his three years pitching in the Houston Astros' farm system, Merchant earned less than $10,000 per season, with which he was expected to pay rent and maintain his body at an elite caliber. He spent countless uncompensated hours on buses and worked a second job as a stonemason's assistant in the off-season. He accrued calories by eating leftover hot dogs from the stadium snack bar.
"You were treated horrendously," said Merchant, now 41, who runs a local carpet-cleaning business. "You felt at the time like that was the way it was. That was the price you had to pay if you wanted to play in the big leagues."
In the ensuing years, as MLB tightened its grip, players began to challenge that assumption. They started speaking out, and their working conditions attracted wider attention. A pitcher-turned-attorney from New Jersey, Harry Marino, took charge of a small organization called Advocates for Minor Leaguers. Marino, whose career 2.13 earned run average hadn't been enough to secure a big-league promotion, recruited players into activism through Instagram. Within months, MLB announced it would provide housing to minor-league players.
Energized, and backed with some MLBPA funding, Marino's group decided to explore a minor-league union. One problem: "None of us had any union organizing experience," Marino said. One of the group's founders, labor and racial justice activist Bill Fletcher Jr., recommended he contact Tripp for help, Marino said.
Beginning in fall 2021, Tripp served as adviser to Marino, as a strategist and a sort of organizers' organizer, training the handful of former players who joined as field organizers. Advocates for Minor Leaguers formed a player steering committee, and Tripp and Marino went on a spring-training tour to Arizona and Florida to meet with more athletes. Tripp, who is fluent in Spanish, helped make inroads with players from Central America. Mostly, he showed the player-organizers how to approach the delicate, methodical work of building trust among players across more than 100 clubhouses.
Even with an effective organizing network, the players were uniquely vulnerable. An aggressive opposition campaign by the deep-pocketed league could crush their shoestring effort. "So we had to back the league off," Tripp said.
Public awareness was one prong of the strategy that Advocates for Minor Leaguers devised. Congress was another. The league, in 2021, had cut ties with 40 of its affiliate teams, including the Vermont Lake Monsters, eliminating hundreds of jobs, many of them in communities that had helped pay for the stadiums. (The Lake Monsters were reconstituted as a collegiate summer team; its players today are unpaid.)
Congress had historically done MLB's bidding, but now the players saw lawmakers as an important ally. Sen. Sanders announced a push to end a long-standing antitrust carve-out that had allowed Major League Baseball to suppress wages and control teams in ways that most businesses could not. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) planned hearings on the question. Key Democratic and Republican senators started talking publicly about the treatment of minor leaguers.
Time, however, was not on the players' side. The minor-league workforce would disperse during the off-season and rosters would change, weakening the player relationships needed to win majority support for a union. Players could hold elections club by club, but a patchwork process could allow team owners to more easily push back. Pursuing a league-wide vote, meanwhile, was an all-or-nothing gamble.
Confident in the breadth of their support, Advocates for Minor Leaguers went for the league-wide approach. When the campaign went public last August, it took barely two weeks for a majority of players to sign cards saying they wanted a union. The once-skeptical MLBPA had agreed to represent the players, leaving the league with two options: force a contested election, administered by the National Labor Relations Board, or agree to recognize the new union and negotiate with players. The league acquiesced.
The challenges the players overcame weren't unlike those faced by other workers who seek to unionize, Tripp said. But the minor-league drive differed in one respect. "It went almost exactly according to plan," he said.
Tripp was on board. Then a graduate student studying economic history at the University of Chicago, he had come to believe that a strong labor movement was the foundation for all progressive social change. "It's fundamentally about small- 'd' democracy. Do you get to vote on what you get paid? Or does someone get to just tell you?" he said.
Tripp had learned at a young age the ethic of never crossing a picket line. His father, a Harvard University-educated physician, was a New Deal Democrat who had served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon and Nigeria. Tripp grew up in Washington, D.C., then attended Harvard himself.
At a time of rapid globalization and free-trade Clintonomics, Tripp was studying the policies of the late Mexican president Lzaro Crdenas, who seized the assets of foreign oil companies during a labor dispute. He came to loathe the culture at the exclusive institutions he'd attended, seeing them as training grounds for the "world's elite."
Tripp started an organizing drive among University of Chicago graduate students in 1995 and later traveled to California to work on an ambitious but unsuccessful campaign by the United Farm Workers to unionize strawberry pickers, most of whom were immigrants. He never returned to graduate school.
Some of Tripp's earliest campaigns as a field organizer were waged at nursing homes, including in central Vermont, where he and his partner, Rebecca Plummer, moved in 1999 after she got a job as an attorney at Vermont Legal Aid. He took a position with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, or UE, helping nursing assistants and service workers form a union at Berlin Health and Rehabilitation in Barre. They won a fiercely contested union election in 2000, making them the only unionized nursing home workers in Vermont.
A nurse sympathetic to the plight of the home's nursing assistants persuaded licensed nursing assistant Laurie Gomo to join the cause, Gomo recently recalled. "I trusted her; therefore, with her backing up Andrew, I felt he was OK," Gomo said. She handed out union flyers during the drive.
Being a white man who wears Carhartts comes with certain advantages in Tripp's line of work, where he's seen employers use photos of a gay organizer to divide workers. These days, Tripp, pale and sinewy, wears beat-up running shoes, U-32 jackets and Bernie beanies, from which curls of dark hair peek out. He converses with a disarming openness that makes it easy to envision even a stranger sharing confidences with him. Tripp might also be genetically predisposed to forthrightness, as when, during one interview for this story, he suggested that Seven Days publish an article about bass fishing, one of his hobbies, figuring that the paper's middle-class readers would enjoy reading about something they saw as "authentically redneck."
Tripp's zealousness for the work aids in the organizer's fundamental task: getting workers to take personal risks for the benefit of their group. Those consequences can be particularly severe in the United States, where most employers can terminate workers without cause. Though it's illegal to fire someone because they're involved in organizing, enforcement is "exceedingly weak," Tripp tells workers. "You don't hide that."
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