AFSCME is the biggest and baddest public service union in the nation and, every year, we get a little bigger and badder.
Since our last convention in Philadelphia, we have welcomed many new members across the country, and in diverse and growing job sectors. At the 46th AFSCME International Convention in Los Angeles, delegates heard from a few of them.
Those members included Maggie Pecchioli, a midwife for Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, who organized with her co-workers because Kaiser ignored their requests for raises and better retirement benefits.
“So, I sent an email to my fellow midwives saying, ‘Enough is enough. Now is the time,’” Pecchioli said. “The next step was to pick a union to organize with — and that part was easy. We met with a few options. But we looked to our sister midwives here in the south that are already organized with UNAC/UHCP and knew it was the right fit for us as well.”
Francisco Luttecke, a public defender in Franklin County and a member of AFSCME Ohio Council 8, said he and his co-workers were “dramatically underpaid compared to other public defender offices. I saw colleagues leave for higher-paying jobs after they were denied modest raises.”
Like most public service workers, Luttecke didn’t become a public defender to get rich. But he and his co-workers felt undervalued and ignored.
“When we’d bring our concerns to management, they wouldn’t listen,” he said. “It was clear we needed a voice.”
Shirley Hall-Belisle, a member of AFSCME Local 3096 (Council 31), is a special education teacher at UCAN Academy in Chicago, a school that serves troubled youth. Serving special education students is hard work already and bad management made it needlessly harder, she said.
“Our bosses wouldn’t listen to us,” Hall-Belisle recalled. “They’d ask for suggestions and then ignore them. They’d micromanage us. And instead of working with us to improve safety in the school, they’d throw blame around.”
That’s why she and her co-workers began organizing.
“Other parts of our UCAN family already organized with AFSCME, so we knew it was the union for people in public service,” she said. “Now we have the voice we need to fight for the safety we deserve. It won’t be easy. Management has doubled down on their hostile behavior since our election. But we can only win if we stick together.”
Sameer Shah, a pulmonology/critical care physician at MGB-Salem Hospital in Boston and a member of AFSCME Council 93, said most people don’t think of doctors “as likely candidates for organizing unions, but just like working people everywhere, we need a voice on the job.”
Shah said there has been a strong shift in the past decade in the way health care is practiced in the United States. Big corporations and private equity are taking medical decisions out of the hands of physicians. That’s why he and his co-workers joined AFSCME.
“Being a good physician is about more than what happens in the examination room,” Shah said. “I joined with AFSCME so I have the power to advocate for my patients.”
Sharon Sherman, a bilingual patron experiences associate for the Jefferson County Public Library system in Colorado and a member of AFSCME Council 18, said she and her co-workers formed a union because their workplace didn’t feel safe and management ignored them.
“We wrote a petition asking for incident reports to be shared across the whole library system and to have regular security and social workers to be available in every library to deal with incidents as they arise,” she recalled. “It was clear nothing would be done unless we built power for ourselves.”
Sherman spoke for everyone when she asserted their reason for organizing with our union.
“I know that organizing with AFSCME is the best way for us to win respect at work,” she said. “And since we’ve won, we’ve seen county workers across Colorado lining up to join us and organize their unions with AFSCME.”
Photo: Sirlentor Berry of CSEA New York/AFSCME Local 1000 underscored the critical importance of volunteer member organizers. They help strengthen our union and advance workers’ rights. Photo by Sed McCray
