Exclusive consultation policy gives teachers, PSRPs a voice
Persistence pays off for El Paso federation

For school employees in El Paso, Texas, the road to union representation has been a rocky one.

In 2000, the El Paso Federation of Teachers and Support Personnel set out to win consultation rights for the district’s teachers and PSRPs when it embarked on a successful grass-roots campaign to elect a school board majority that later would vote to create an “exclusive consultation” policy in El Paso. The policy gave school employees the right to elect a union to represent them in talks with the district over such issues as salaries, benefits and working conditions.

The federation’s efforts were slowed, however, when the local NEA affiliate formed a coalition with two independent organizations to oppose the exclusive consultation policy, urging teachers and PSRPs to vote no during elections that were held in spring 2001.

Although the teachers did vote no by a narrow margin, El Paso’s PSRPs voted for the federation. After the election, the coalition filed suit, challenging the school board’s authority to grant exclusive consultation rights to a single organization, even if employees had voted for it. Because the suit had the potential to undo the exclusive consultation arrangements of AFT affiliates in other parts of Texas, the AFT settled the claim with an agreement that the PSRP recognition would stand and that there would be no effort to seek exclusive recognition for El Paso’s teachers until 2003.

This year, the time was right to call for another exclusive consultation election. The seven-member school board the federation had helped get elected was still in place, and the federation was becoming a well-known entity to school employees. And the district’s NEA affiliate had broken away from the coalition and formed an alliance with the AFT local.

“We knew we had to push [the election] because we had a friendly board and the attention of the school workers,” El Paso federation president Frances Wever says. “We were the only ones talking about issues that people wanted to hear about.” These issues included Social Security and proposed cuts to employees’ healthcare benefits.

High school teachers Chris and Rosa Gad signed on to assist the union in its efforts to become the sole representative of El Paso school employees in talks with the school district. The married couple helped organize informational meetings, hand out fliers and do whatever else they could to encourage their colleagues to elect the federation as their union.

Without exclusive consultation rights, the union could not be an effective representative of teachers and school-related personnel, says Chris Gad, a social studies teacher. “The things we were able to accomplish as individuals were almost all cosmetic; there was nothing of substance.”

The Gads knew that in a state like Texas, where there is no collective bargaining, school employees had to stick together if they were to gain a stronger voice on workplace issues. “Teachers and support personnel had virtually no input” on issues affecting their working lives, explains Rosa Gad, an English teacher.

Gloria G. Mirabal, a special education paraprofessional at Houston Elementary School, also was eager to help mobilize her colleagues. She too became a volunteer member-organizer for the federation. “I knew that our concerns would be heard if we had one union and one voice,” Mirabal says.

The collaborative efforts of the AFT and NEA locals, and the active involvement of rank-and-file members like the Gads and Mirabal paid off in April when school employees in El Paso elected the federation to be their exclusive representative in talks with the school district.

Now that it has organized teachers and support personnel—and won exclusive consultation rights—the federation can turn its attention to strengthening the union and preparing for the challenges ahead, says Wever. “Although we will never be able to fully correct all of our problems, at least we will have a voice in decisions that concern our members.”

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