Graduate employees at the University of Illinois in Chicago, like their counterparts at colleges around the nation, teach classes, grade tests and guide undergraduates. For years, administrators piled on more work but kept salaries low and health insurance benefits paltry. The workers, fighting to win a voice on the job with AFT, were so outraged they held a rally one Halloween, inviting activists to wear their best "untreated injury costume" to demand better benefits. Workers wrapped their feet in fake casts made out of toilet paper, hobbled along on crutches and donned bandages splattered with fake blood.
Today, the 1,000 graduate employees have a voice on the job. In April 2004, the workers won their union through a majority sign-up or card-check process, in which an employer agrees to honor the workers' choice after a majority indicates the desire to form a union by signing authorization cards. The Illinois Education Labor Relations Board granted the workers recognition in September.
The graduate employees' victory in Chicago culminates the successful efforts of union activists in Illinois to meld political, legislative and organizing strategies that together build strength for working families. In 2002, Illinois union members mobilized to help elect Rod Blagojevich (D) governor as well as a pro-working family majority in the legislature. The following year, Blagojevich signed a bill allowing public employees to form unions by card-check.
In New Mexico, union activists also are winning a voice on the job through similar strategies. Bill Richardson (D) won the race for governor in 2002 and signed a bill restoring public employees' right to bargain collectively. Thousands of workers now can exercise their freedom to form unions and bargain collectively for decent pay, benefits and respect on the job because of the new laws in both states. Both governors have signed a raft of pro-worker legislation that furthers social and economic justice for working families. Union leaders say such a multipronged approach is critical to successfully building strength for working families.
The victories in Illinois and New Mexico are just two examples of union activists using innovative strategies to move the working families' agenda forward at the state level. State and local initiatives are increasingly important as lawmakers at the federal level are attacking workers’ rights, say union leaders. Activists in several states, including Connecticut, also are exploring legislation that would prohibit employers from forcing workers to listen to political or religious messages—including messages about unions—during the workday.
State and local activists must be vigilant as governors mimic some of the Bush administration’s attacks on workers’ rights. In January, newly elected Republican governors in Indiana and Missouri signed executive orders unilaterally rescinding state workers’ bargaining rights and contracts, eliminating some 50,000 state workers’ right to negotiate wages, health care and working conditions. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels cancelled existing contracts—meaning state workers no longer have any voice in their workplaces. These attacks on workers’ rights are “not a coincidence,” says AFSCME President Gerald McEntee. “They are a coordinated assault by right-wing forces on a part of the union movement that is growing.” Workers in both states are determined to mobilize and fight back, McEntee says.
Enabling workers to win a voice at work in Illinois
Four years ago, Illinois governor George Ryan (R) announced he would not seek reelection—and Prairie State union activists knew they had an opportunity to transform their state government from one that
blocked pro-worker legislation to one that listens to working families. Union leaders at the Illinois AFL-CIO geared up to educate and mobilize union member voters.
Bill Looby, the state federation’s political director, says the federation’s legislative agenda focused on majority sign up legislation. “A big segment of our legislative agenda can only move if we elect the right
people,” says Looby. “We would say to union members, ‘These are the things we need to help people live and work, and here’s who stopped them. We need to change our government completely.’ ”
By implementing the AFL-CIO’s 10 Point Program, a comprehensive strategy in which unions recruit key contacts at locals and worksites and distribute political information at the workplace, over the phone and through the mail, Illinois union members helped elect a pro-worker governor and state legislature. Local union coordinators mobilized union members to call their co-workers, distribute worksite fliers and walk precincts, helping Blagojevich win with 52 percent of the vote.
One of the new governor’s first acts in office was signing a bill allowing public workers to form unions by majority sign-up, a fairer alternative to the often drawn-out, contentious election process many public-and private-sector employers demand in order to harass and intimidate workers seeking a voice on the job.
Two Illinois campaigns involving graduate students highlight the difference majority sign-up makes in enabling workers to exercise their freedom to join a union. While challenging, the effort by graduate employees to win a union at University of Illinois at Chicago represents a sharp contrast to graduate employees’ struggle to form a union at another University of Illinois campus, Urbana–Champaign, before the majority sign-up law passed. Administrators at Urbana–Champaign embroiled workers in long legal battles and delays, arguing they were not workers but students earning financial aid, and sent a “white paper” to all students asking them not to support the union. Faculty members intimidated the campus workers, who were forced to hold a brief strike and sit-in to win a voice with the AFT-affiliated Graduate Employees Organization in fall 2002 and a tentative first contract in July.
“Gov. Blagojevich’s law supporting majority verification made the University of Illinois–Chicago campaign very different from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign campaign,” says Kat McLellan, a graduate employee who teaches in the English Department at the Chicago campus. “The UIC campaign shows that legislative support for majority verification makes it easier for people to form the unions they so clearly want to have.” (Depending on state laws, graduate employees at public universities have the right to organize, but this summer the National Labor Relations Board stripped graduate employees at private universities of collective bargaining rights.)
In addition to graduate employees in Illinois forming a union with AFT, more than 2,000 state workers are using the public employee card-check law to gain a voice on the job with AFSCME Council 31. “Any state that wants to pass a card-check law should make that a priority,” says Council Executive Director Henry Bayer. Workers’ enthusiastic response to the new law shows “when we have the right of choice, then people do indeed choose unions,” says Margaret Blackshere, Illinois AFL-CIO president. “When you take away the intimidation and delays, people join unions.”
Since taking office, Blagojevich has signed numerous pro-worker bills. He expanded bargaining rights for Chicago teachers and for 20,000 home health care workers, who spent more than a decade seeking a voice with SEIU Local 880. In July 2003, Blagojevich signed legislation giving home health care workers bargaining rights.
“These kinds of changes allow us to grow in a way we couldn’t before,” says Local 880 lead organizer Keith Kelleher. Three months later, Blagojevich signed the state’s first contract with the home health care workers—which includes a 34 percent wage increase over four years.
He raised the minimum wage to $5.50 an hour, expanded access to prescription drugs for seniors and exempted Illinois from President George W. Bush’s overtime pay take-away. Blagojevich also launched an equal pay initiative, strengthened corporate accountability rules for businesses that receive tax incentives and took steps to ensure fair wages on state public works construction projects.
It was, says Blackshere, “the most productive legislative session labor has experienced in over 20 years.”
Winning back bargaining rights in New Mexico
As in Illinois, working families in New Mexico won significant gains when they helped elect a new governor after suffering under prior administrations. In 1999, then-Gov. Gary Johnson (R) allowed a law giving public employees the right to bargain collectively to expire. Almost overnight, workers’ voices were silenced and their quality of life declined. “When we lost collective bargaining, it was dramatic,” says Kevin Mulligan, organizing coordinator for Communications Workers of America Region 7, which along with AFSCME represents thousands of state workers.
“People got virtually no raises between 1999 and 2003, and out-of-pocket health care costs went up significantly,” says Mulligan. Workers also faced unfair treatment, heavy-handed management and abuse of the performance evaluation and pay systems, he says. Schoolteachers “were being chewed up by districts that had stopped bargaining,” says Christine Trujillo, president of the New Mexico Federation of Educational Employees, an AFT affiliate. “Management was creating onerous conditions.”
With Johnson barred from seeking reelection by New Mexico’s term-limit law, union activists worked to elect a pro-worker governor and majority in the state legislature. “It was the chance of a lifetime,” says Trujillo, who is also president of the New Mexico Federation of Labor. The margin for error was slim.
“Labor people can be fragmented and territorial” when it comes to politics, Trujillo says. “We brought all of the players to the table and constructed a labor agenda. We didn’t trip over each other, and we stuck to our plan,” which included phone calls, worksite contacts, precinct walks and one-to-one conversations. AFSCME members proclaimed Wednesday nights AFSCME night at the Richardson campaign phone banks and wore their trademark Kelly green shirts. On Nov. 4, 2002, Richardson won with 55.5 percent of the vote.
To help pass the collective bargaining bill, AFSCME leaders recruited and trained 15 workers who took time off from their jobs to lobby state legislators and testify at hearings. After Richardson signed the law in March 2003, union activists stepped up their organizing and bargaining efforts. More than 3,000 workers in several state departments joined CWA and by October won a strong new contract. Thousands of education workers flocked to sign union authorization cards with AFT. At AFSCME, workers elected 45 fellow union members from 13 agencies to lead contract negotiations. Bolstered by coworkers taking action at their worksites—such as handing out peanuts (because workers won’t work for peanuts)—and circulating petitions about the need to lower health care premiums, the negotiating team won a strong contract that cut workers’ share of health care premiums in half, boosted wages by 3 percent and added a grievance procedure.
McEntee says the workers’ victory was the fruition of a clear strategy. “They helped elect Gov. Bill Richardson, who promised to reinstate collective bargaining rights,” says McEntee. “Then they took their fight to the state legislature and won. At the same time, they organized and won a union for 7,000 state employees. They have their first contract in nearly five years.”
With pro-worker politicians in office, New Mexico’s working families won more big victories, including a project labor agreement establishing fair common work rules on large, multicontractor construction projects for the expansion of the state’s university hospital; state procurement rules that take a company’s safety and training record into account; and a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation in hiring and housing. Emboldened by their wins at the state level, union activists in Santa Fe used their new skills to help city council members who had voted for the city’s landmark living-wage law fend off aggressive challengers recruited by the business community. And some 15,000 public workers have the potential of becoming union members with AFSCME, CWA and AFT.
When working families win at the state level, they are building momentum for ever bigger changes, union leaders say. “We have to identify local and state opportunities to make political change,” says CWA’s Mulligan. “We have to expand bargaining rights and have that lead to more power, because more workers means more power, and that changes the culture,” he says. “If we can get public worker organizing up, it will give us the culture change that will lead to labor law reform in the private sector nationwide.”
