Health insurance change fuels organizing drive

The New Hampshire Federation of Teachers/AFT (NHFT) is celebrating yet another organizing victory among government workers—the employees of Keene.

When city officials announced they were changing the health insurance carrier and doubling nonunionized city workers’ health insurance contributions, little did they realize they were fueling an employee-initiated unionization campaign.

“I started here five years ago and people have always been talking ‘we need to unionize,’” says Sherri Beckta, a secretary for the Keene Police Department’s investigation division who was instrumental in the organizing campaign. “Once the insurance rates changed, we became serious. We were only given two weeks’ notice that our insurance carrier was going to change. We had no say in it. We were made to feel that because we were not unionized, we were funding everyone else.”

Beckta didn’t need to go far for information on unions—she works with John Stewart, president of the Keene Police Officers’ Association, which affiliated with the NHFT last year. “He was a resource,” says Beckta. “He pointed us in the right direction.”

The arbitrary increase in nonunionized employees’ health insurance contributions for family coverage to $70 a week, Beckta says, underscored an ongoing issue that she hopes will be improved by unionization—lack of communications between city management and employees.

On Aug. 16, eligible employees voted 26-19 to join the AFT, despite the city’s efforts to discourage unionization, including retracting a pay raise proposal for the new fiscal year, which began July 1, says Laura Hainey, NHFT president. “We had a pre-election meeting, and the city said it was putting the raise on hold because of the organizing campaign,” Hainey notes.

In the city’s quest to thwart unionization, it also questioned NHFT’s ability to represent nonteaching public employees. But Hainey, who says the state federation’s diversity “strengthens us,” notes that “a lot of the issues are the same—healthcare, benefits, retirement, keeping the job and advocating for adequate budgets so our members can provide quality services.”

The new bargaining unit of 57 employees who work in several departments “is a fairly large group of city workers” for the New Hampshire city of nearly 23,000, notes Terri Donovan, director of field services and collective bargaining for the NHFT. Donovan says the union is ready to bargain and has taken the steps to get the process moving.

On Aug. 31, at the first official membership meeting of the new local, Keene City Employees, Beckta was elected president.