Workers Across Nation Choose a Voice with AFL-CIO Unions
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County workers, professional employees, bakery workers, airborne pilots and “ghost” pilots and sheriff’s deputies are among the latest workers to choose a voice at work with AFL-CIO unions.
In Utah, more than 400 Salt Lake County workers won a union voice with AFSCME Local 1004. The 408 county employees—skilled trades, maintenance and service workers—could vote for union representation only after AFSCME fought and won passage of a county collective bargaining ordinance last year.
John Farrer, a Highway Department worker, says:
This is definitely a positive thing for workers, and that’s why they voted it in. With all that’s happened, the wage cuts, benefits going down and insurance going up, we need a strong union voice to represent the interests of working families.
Legal Services Workers Vote to Join IFPTE
By an overwhelming 26-1 vote, a group of lawyers and professional staff at the Legal Services Corp. (LSC) voted to join the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees (IFPTE). The LSC, which receives federal funding, provides legal services to the poor.
The Sept. 15 vote to form a union came following the LSC’s refusal to recognize the workers’ choice after 95 percent of the bargaining unit signed union authorization cards and after the LSC hired an anti-union law firm to fight the workers’ choice.
Earlier this month, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, criticized the agency’s anti-union action. In a letter to the LSC President Helaine Barnett, Harkin wrote:
Not to support the employees’ desire to unionize is troubling. The card-check process is a fair and unbiased way for employees to choose a union. I am disappointed that an organization committed to protecting the rights of our most vulnerable citizens did not support the free choice of its workers to organize through this process.
IFPTE Counsel and Former AFL-CIO Staff Nominated to Labor Relations Authority
Julia Clark, general counsel for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), and Ernie DuBester, a former AFL-CIO Legislative Affairs staff member, were nominated by President Obama last week to serve on the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA)—the federal workers’ version of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Clark was nominated to the FLRA’s general counsel post. She is a former Justice Department trial attorney in the Anti-Trust Division and has spent the past 20 years as a labor and employment law attorney representing unions and workers.
