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Two Hearts That Help Make up the Union Movement |
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What makes the union movement go and grow? It’s the rank-and-file men and women who not only go to work every day, where they use their first-rate skills to perform top-flight, quality work, but who also go that extra mile.
It may be spending hours after work or in the early mornings helping other workers win justice and a voice at work in an organizing drive. Maybe it’s giving up Saturday mornings to mobilize union families to get out the vote in labor walks or leading efforts to improve neighborhoods and communities.
These union members make up the Heart of the Movement. Debby Zabarenko and Sheila Perez are among them—and the two latest additions to union members we feature in the Heart of the Movement section on our website.
Zabarenko first joined The Newspaper Guild-CWA 27 years ago when she began her journalism career at the Associated Press. Today, she is the environment correspondent for the Reuters news service and covers a host of stories ranging from climate change to environmental political activists.
She also is chairwoman of the 400-member Reuters unit of the Guild and a regional vice president who has fought hard to protect the job security and rights of the Reuters journalists. During negotiations for the current contract, she says, “Job security was key, salary was key, benefits were key, and we had to stop the erosion of our unit.”
Reuters had consistently tried to cut little pockets of our members out of the union by reorganizing them or saying they were working for a different company. We tried to hold the line, and we did pretty well.
Earlier this year, the Canadian media conglomerate Thomson Corp. bought Reuters, and the Reuters workers, along with new co-workers from Thomson who never enjoyed a union contract, are stressed out about what may lie ahead. Zabarenko takes a role in this situation as well.
My main duty is to communicate with our members, so they’re not in the dark. I’m talking to folks at Thomson in the United States who have never been in a union. I tell them that the advantages include job security, getting paid for all the hours you work, benefits that can’t be taken away, plus the simple fact that you’re stronger when you join with other people. There’s every reason to join a union and no reason not to.
Perez, our other featured Heart of the Movement member, says that because of the support and training of the union movement, she’s been able to break through the glass ceiling in a traditionally male-dominated field—engineering and technology—and in a male-dominated culture (the Navy). Now, she’s extending that same type of help and support to other workers, men and women alike.
Today, she is executive vice president of Local 12 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) and a mechanical engineering technician at the Navy’s Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state.
She joined the union 32 years ago when a shop steward told her the union was making a special effort to support women the workforce. Feeling empowered after returning home from an AFL-CIO Working Women’s Conference in the mid-1990s, she was elected as financial secretary of her local and has continued as a leader ever since.
In those decades, Perez has helped evolve the male-dominated culture of Local 32 she encountered when she joined the union. Today, several women are on the Executive Board and women play a big role in negotiations. She says:
Women have a reputation here for being good negotiators. We’re ready to discuss things. We stand hard, but we stand hard in a smart way.
Perez stays involved with Local 12 because she’s “always been a person who likes to help people”—and the union has given her an avenue to do that.
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