Card-check recognition is just the ticket for a new union at Rutgers University

It is March 14th. A small group of mid-level professionals is gathered around a table in a basement conference room on College Avenue in New Brunswick, N. J. They have brought bag lunches, blue cards and a determination to make things better where they work—at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. They’re talking union.

It’s a continuing conversation that began in the spring of 2006. That’s when the Union of Rutgers Administrators organizing committee formed and, with the help of the AFT, began exploring the possibility of becoming a union. Now, the workers have gotten involved in the organizing committee and become activists, framing the facts and arguments they’ll pose to colleagues as they ask them to consider the benefits of joining the union.

Two years ago, New Jersey passed a new law that gave public employees (and some private ones) “card check,” the opportunity to win union recognition based on the filing of a supermajority—50 percent plus one—of cards with the Public Employment Relations Commission. This means that once PERC certifies the unit makeup and the cards’ validity, recognition for the union is automatic.

Card check is at the heart of the Employee Free Choice Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1 and is now being taken up in the Senate. The purpose of the act is to reform the national labor law in order to expedite the election process in a fair and unbiased way. Currently, studies show that the time period between when a group files cards to petition their state labor board for an election and the election date can be notoriously bitter and divisive, with management having undue powers of interference.

In New Jersey, having a card-check law is a testimony to the significant involvement and power of labor in the political process. Still, it provides no guarantees. Workers must still organize and educate. They must build relationships and have conversations about working conditions, aspirations and collective empowerment. It’s old-fashioned one-on-one organizing to get at the heart of workers’ hopes and fears.

And, as the Union of Rutgers Administrators-AFT was to find out, having card check did not inoculate the unit against management tactics of intimidation and an anti-union campaign.

It was only with the intervention of numerous political players—including the governor, U.S. senators and representatives, and a host of state legislators—that the university was made to stand down. On Jan. 23, Rutgers University president Richard McCormick signed one of the only neutrality agreements in memory that has been negotiated in higher education. Three days later, he e-mailed over 3,000 employees to “clarify the University’s position on employees’ freedom to choose union representation.”

Priming the activists

AFT organizer Lauren Samet has written some issues on the blackboard. To get the conversation started, she will ask the group to talk about who works in their unit of administrative, professional and supervisory staff (A/P/S), and how their fellow workers would weight the bargaining priorities of salary, benefits, job security and workload.

But first she shares some news: The Communications Workers of America has reached a settlement with the state of New Jersey. They’ve agreed to a 0.5 percent increase to their pension, a 1.5 percent increase to their healthcare costs and a 13 percent wage increase over four years.

Given the lust in the state Legislature for pension and healthcare givebacks from public employees, the contract is a victory for the union and the Democratic governor, Jon Corzine.

Last summer, after campaign promises to do something about property taxes that are among the highest in the nation, state legislators—Republican and Democratic—went berserk, threatening to impose massive changes to the public employee benefit structure. The governor said “hold everything,” and insisted that the state use the collective bargaining process to come up with a solution. The Communications Workers of America contract was the fruit of that process.

The implications of the news are clear to the activists in the room. New Jersey is a union state. Rutgers is a heavily unionized campus, with two-thirds of its employees represented by unions: Full- and part-time faculty and graduate employees are represented by a joint chapter of the AAUP/AFT. Clerical, secretarial, office, laboratory and technical staff are represented by AFSCME. Campus police are represented by the Fraternal Order of Police, doctors by SEIU and the engineers by IOUE.

Further, administrative and supervisory employees at all the other state universities do belong to unions. They are represented by the Council of New Jersey State College Locals/AFT. Where does that leave the 3,000-plus mid-level managers at Rutgers?

Finding a voice

“A lot of our work is invisible,” says Lucye Millerand, an administrative assistant in the University Libraries. Spread out geographically on three main campuses and other locations, the A/P/S unit hosts a broad gamut of job titles too: over 300 different ones, such as administrative assistant, program coordinator, library administrator, chef, communications specialist, director of development, foreperson of custodial services and so on.

“They give me the title of administrative assistant, but I also do the things on the upper end,” she says, “involving communication skills, editing for my boss, diplomacy, event management, linguistic skills [she speaks four languages]. In pinch situations, there’s a temptation to say, ‘all we need is a secretary in this job. Let’s get someone who will work for $25,000 or hourly.’ If my job disappeared, who would notice?”

Last summer, A/P/S unit members did disappear when the state forced budget cuts of $66 million on the university. Rutgers cut 800 class sections, 374 lecturer positions and 189 employees. This year, with the state’s budget $2 billion in the red, and revelations about its massively underfunded public employee pension system making weekly headlines, the future is anything but certain.

So it’s established: Job security is a major concern.

Next, wages. Most unit members are not happy with the pay-for-performance approach to salary increases. For many, P4P is “about how well you get along with your boss,” says Michelle Pinheiro, an administrative assistant in the Department of Human Resource Management. “Or about how well your boss gets along with his boss,” Millerand adds.

Workload: Last summer’s layoffs have increased the workload of remaining staff. What is more, another cost-saving maneuver, reducing some employees to 10-month contracts from 12-month ones, has created a work speedup for those who now are expected to compress 12 months of work into 10.

They talk about the university’s increasing use of part-time or hourly employees. 

And they talk about trends with medical benefits. “Healthcare is very important,” says Lynn Shanko, departmental administrator for the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. “It seems to be under threat due to the budget crisis in the state. There is constant discussion—you read it in the newspaper, editorials. There’s a campaign against workers. They always blame state workers for the budget not getting balanced.”

Shanko is a soft-spoken but forceful advocate for the union. When she takes a moment to visit some undecideds and do some low-key labor education, one person seems dismissive. “I just got an excellent raise in January,” she says. “And what did you think about the timing of that raise?” Shanko prods. It was at the height of the university’s anti-union campaign. The woman concedes that she hadn’t thought about it, but, yes, it was “weird.”

“Unions aren’t magic,” Shanko adds, “but they do give you a chance to negotiate things.”

A week later, many in the room are enthused to take what the URA calls “A Day On,” to do face-to-face organizing. They take a day or an afternoon off from work, organize their lists, and go out to talk to the unconvinced.

AFT national representative Mark Bostic points out the advantages of card-check campaigns. They are more democratic because the cards represent the will of the majority of the unit, not merely the majority of voters. They unfold “in our time,” he says, “making it less likely that the employer will run an anti-union campaign. The employer is not involved at all.”

The road to neutrality

Yet, an open and democractic process was something the administration seemed dead-set against, says Bob Angelo, a professor in the Labor Studies and Employment Relations Department. He is also chair of the AAUP/AFT chapter legislative committee and a member of the chapter’s executive board. The faculty and graduate employees have been supportive and involved in every step of the campaign, he notes. “In public statements, letters, newspaper ads and, more importantly, in one-on-one organizing in our departments, we’ve been involved.”

Angelo has teamed up with URA activists to talk to workers in other buildings. That was how he was able to see firsthand “the extremes [the university] was willing to go to to keep people from talking about the union.”

His URA partner was Debra McNeill, program coordinator in the Union Leadership Academy. On Nov. 20, they decided to go into an administration building on campus, ASB3. Angelo was talking to workers when “a department director came pounding down the aisle, asking me to leave, telling me I couldn’t talk about the union and not in the workplace,” reports Angelo. “He threatened to call the police. I invited him to do so. They came.”

“The police were very, very nice,” says McNeill. “They’re union, after all.” But still, the episode made quite a statement. “We hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Angelo was appalled. “New Jersey is a union state,” he says. “That was something you’d expect from Mississippi in the ’60s and ’70s, not from New Jersey.

It was one of many hostile incidents that would happen that fall, culminating with a series of e-mails the university human resources department sent in October, November and December. The first one characterized union supporters as similar to “outside vendors or solicitors” who have “disrupted and interfered with your job duties and your work site, and have not respected your privacy at home.” Later ones promise employees they’ll get a better deal from the university without a union.

The e-mails had a chilling effect, says Nat Bender, a URA organizing committee member who is the communications director for the New Jersey Small Business Development Center at Rutgers. “I can cite instances where people who were interested in talking to me were scared off by the e-mails. I had colleagues who are single mothers who said, ‘I can’t afford to lose my job.’ People who weren’t naturalized citizens who said, ‘I am with you but I can’t sign a card. I don’t know where it will go.’”

Adrienne Eaton is a professor and colleague of Angelo’s in the Labor Studies and Employment Relations Department. Coincidentally, one of her fields of expertise is card-check elections and neutrality agreements in industry.

“Card check did not stop the university from conducting a campaign of intimidation,” she observes. “The university’s response was typical of what you see employers do. It was disturbing to see it at an academic institution where the emphasis is on free discourse.

“I actually spent a couple of hours going around with an organizing committee member. It was sickening to see people afraid to talk to us and shooing us out of the building. We went into a nonacademic building. The supervisor asked us to leave. 

“One person we tried to talk to was visibly shaking. We’re not accustomed to seeing that in our university. It’s an environment where upper-level admistration must have sent a message to people that they didn’t want this to happen and they should discourage people.”

Friends in high places

As the university moved to squelch discussion, URA’s friends were moving to provide protection. With the help of New Jersey AFL-CIO president Charles Wowkanech and with key assistance from Gov. Jon Corzine, the URA and AFT were negotiating for a neutrality agreement.

“Republicans and Democrats, leaders of the legislative committees, all the legislators that represent the districts where we have campuses provide solid support for URA unionizing,” says Angelo.

Before the agreement was signed, Gov. Corzine and legislators agreed to come on campus and tell people about their right to discuss whether they wanted to be represented by a union. Even after the neutrality agreement, the officials came on Jan. 31 to reassure employees that their rights would be protected all the way up to the governor’s mansion, if need be. “People ought to have the ability to make a decision based on the free flow of information, especially on a college campus,” Corzine said. “That’s what neutrality agreements are all about.”

On Feb. 12, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez chaired another public forum sponsored by URA, the AFT and the N.J. AFL-CIO to talk about workers’ rights, the meaning of the neutrality agreement and the Employee Free Choice Act, of which Menendez is a co-sponsor.

“I’ll be watching to see that the agreement is lived up to on all sides,” Menendez promised. “I don’t think that one can underestimate the power of the many coming together as one.”

Menendez was joined by two U.S. representatives, two state legislators, a member of the clergy, Rutgers faculty and students. “The fact is, organized labor has a considerable amount of influence here,” says Bender. “We need to do voter education and work with our elected officials and work on the political front to create a good environment to organize.”

Angelo notes that his union has gotten very serious in recent years. “Certainly, since we affiliated with the AFT (in March 2005), we have spent more time and energy building political relationships in the state. First, for bargaining purposes and to lobby for legislation we support, and secondly, to get the rest of the Rutgers employees to join the AFT.”

“Any public sector union has to do this,” observes Eaton. “Unions have different ways of doing things for their members. There are things we achieve at the bargaining table, other things we achieve through political action. The pension issue is largely a political one, and to some extent so are medical benefits.”

“People generally like working at Rutgers,” says Angelo, echoing a widely expressed sentiment. “This is not a traditional union campaign where you can be successful by saying ‘the boss stinks’. You don’t have to be anti-Rutgers to be pro-union. Rutgers is a wonderful institution, but it’s important that people get the recognition they deserve for the work they do.”  As AFT On Campus went to press, organizers were preparing to turn over the supermajority of signed cards for URA-AFT to the N.J. Public Employee Relations Committee.

Once the cards are verifed, notes Pinheiro, “the union will give us a collective voice. It means we can stand up and be counted.” The URA-AFT’s visibility will be unassailable.