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Hello C-SPAM. First post in this subforum, long time lurker. Love you all, but you're kind of scary. I work in a small town library. Half a year ago I was elected Steward for the municipal employees in my town. No idea what I was doing, hadn't really been involved before, but no one else stepped up. We're a small Union, not associated with any larger organization. I wanted to do what I could. Immediately I was wrapped up in a consequential grievance- one town department was being asked to do the work of two departments. They tried to reclassify the positions and the Town Administrator sad "lol, no". This issue has been bouncing back and forth between the Town Administrator and the Select Board and the Union as long as I've been Steward here, so I ended up with a pretty solid grasp of the situation. This last week the town Select Board asked for a meeting. Our Union president said the time for discussion was past, and we should just push through to arbitration. I didn't want to overstep my bounds, but I pressed to attend the meeting anyway. Even if they weren't going to give us anything, we might as well attend the meeting. It would look better during arbitration if we had been consistently open to talking, right? So thanks to my advocacy, and my advocacy alone, the meeting happened. In the meeting I was able to outline our position cogently, and explain how all the previous offers from Town Administration were bullshit for various reasons. And the Select Board listened. Just tonight we received a counter-offer that gave us everything we were asking for! An entire town department will get paid for their out-of-grade work, thanks to me! I'm just thrilled, and I want to shout it out into the ether so here I am. This was the only overtly union focused thread I could find when searching the forums, so I hope this is the appropriate place. Unions are awesome!
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Dec 1, 2023 04:56
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I've had a very Union day, and I'm tired and confused. Not sure if this is the place for it, but you lovely folks were very supportive when I posted a celebration of a union accomplishment a while back, so I'll give venting a bit a go. For context, I'm the steward for a small municipal union. Just the clerical workers in the town and the town library. I work in the library. The library director here wants to reclassify some specialist librarians here (youth services librarian, reference librarian) to pay them more in recognition of their supervisory duties which kind of accrued over time but aren't in their job description. So far so good, both positions are in our union, and it's just a request to pay them more basically. The library director submits this reclassification request to the town, which triggers an automatic meeting between the town and the union, so now the union board is informed of this situation. There are five people on the board, including myself. Two of them are as new as me and don't have much to say on this subject, so we have the union president and union secretary and me providing input on this situation. The union secretary's position is that the library workers are lazy and don't deserve anything and people who work at town hall handle things with real consequences, etc. She has said this to me (a library worker) privately and didn't even seem to think anything was wrong with saying it. When she presents elements of this view to the union president, the president rightfully says anyone's job can look like that from the outside and we shouldn't be going around judging. However, when I say "It's great that the library director is going to pay union employees more, we should support the library director," the union president says to me, "oh, we can't just agree to anything, it needs to be fair." She wants updated job descriptions (which is kind of fair), and comparative looks at how these positions are paid in other towns. When I ask, "Why, what difference would that make, what would we do if the library director wants to overpay these people? Would we, the union, ever oppose a pay increase for our members?" she says that we have to be fair to all our members. Why would it be fair for a union, any union, to oppose a pay increase for its members for any reason? I'm legitimately looking for any insight anyone might have as to what kind of obligations towards fairness a union has in principle. I can already see what's wrong with the Union president's position, but I want to understand how it could possibly be right so I can communicate more effectively with her. Nothing she's articulated has made any sense to me. ... Because I'm beginning to think this municipal clerical union isn't good at representing the library! I was given material by another library employee who's retiring who has looked into breaking away from our municipal union and joining a national union. If our municipal union is just following the lead of the one old-timer on the board who I know just does not respect the library, and they'll just oppose anything that "shows favoritism" to the library or anything like that, then I think it's might be worth revisiting those plans. If, however, I'm missing something about a union's obligations towards fairness among its members, then maybe I am really just seeing a small part of a bigger picture. I've been in meetings all day, talking to the Town Administrator, Union President, Library Director, and lastly one of the affected employees who aren't being paid for their work. I told my fellow worker that we were working on upgrading his position, but if it doesn't go through I'm pretty sure he has grounds for a grievance (I left out all the drama within the union). He looked pleasantly surprised and he really appreciated that I had his back. It made me glad I'm a union steward, though I'll be even more glad if I can make sure he's paid appropriately. I just wish the obstacles to better working conditions were obviously outside our union... Beyond my particular case, does anyone have experience with small unions, or unions that cover different categories of employees where the smaller groups interests aren't being represented?
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Feb 29, 2024 00:21
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