Focus on organizing is unionwide

Organizing cuts across all sectors of the AFT. With members employed in healthcare, state and local government, and higher education, as well as in the nation’s public schools, the union’s diversity is one of its strengths.

AFT’s organizing in public higher education reflects the increasing pressures on institutions to do more with less. In the past year, the AFT has organized 13 new locals representing nearly 10,000 people.

Of the new locals, nine represent part-time, temporary full-time, or graduate employees. Institutions increasingly are relying on these professionals to serve as a contingent workforce; and the employees in turn are looking to unions to help them secure basic working conditions, such as adequate pay, health benefits and job security.

The reliance of higher education on nontenured teaching staff is an ominous trend that exploits the workers, hurts the profession and robs students of the quality education services their parents had access to.

The AFT’s largest new locals are the Lecturers’ Employee Organization at the University of Michigan; the full-time faculty at the University of Cincinnati, through an affiliation with an American Association of University Professors local; and the Graduate Employees Organization at the University of Illinois. Other new AFT locals were elected at community colleges in California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York.

The AFT also has had a number of successful organizing campaigns in the healthcare sector this year. In May, registered nurses at Christ Hospital in Jersey City, N.J., fought off a fierce anti-union campaign and cast a strong vote for representation by the Health Professionals and Allied Employees, AFT Healthcare’s state federation in New Jersey. The vote within the unit, which represents approximately 400 nurses, was 186 to 115.

The nurses, seeking a voice to improve working conditions and the quality of care at the hospital, began organizing more than a year ago. They garnered strong support from civic, religious, business, labor and political leaders, including Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) who publicly endorsed the nurses’ right to unionize and criticized the hospital for using patient-care funds to run an anti-union campaign.

HPAE scored another organizing win in July, when nurses at Southern Ocean County Hospital in Manahawkin, N.J., voted for union representation. There are 252 nurses in the bargaining unit.

Mobilizing members against budget cuts has been the number one organizing priority among the AFT’s public employee division. It is so important for members to be involved in the union’s response to budget issues that AFT Public Employees held a mobilization conference in Bismarck, N.D., this past spring. Organizers from nine states attended the meeting, which had one primary assignment: mobilize the geographically dispersed members of the union’s North Dakota Public Employees Association for a “Stand up for Public Services” rally at the state Capitol. More than 400 people stood up—the largest rally in NDPEA’s history.

From Montana to Connecticut, AFT Public Employees affiliates have been mobilizing members (and others) to fight budget cuts—by holding rallies, building coalitions and launching media campaigns.

“Mobilization gets members involved in their union,” says Terry Reed, field service director of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, who attended the North Dakota conference.

“More importantly, it is members speaking for their issues, [which] goes much further with legislators and elected officials than having other people speak for them.”

Back to feature: Talkin' Union

Copyright by the American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO. All rights reserved. Photographs
and illustrations, as well as text, cannot be used without permission from the AFT.