Tag: Vermont

Vermont lawmakers lead the way, passing state PRO Act / by Press Associates

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the leading sponsor of the national version of the PRO Act. AP

Reposted from Peoples World

MONTPELIER, Vt.—By veto-proof margins in the state that longtime worker champion Bernie Sanders represents in the U.S. Senate, Vermont’s legislators passed a state version of the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s top national legislative priority.

The measure, S102, cleared the Vermont Senate by a 23-6 tally on May 9. The state House approved it before that, 115-26 with nine members not voting. It now heads for the desk of Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who hasn’t said what he’ll do, yet.

Besides making Vermont labor law much more pro-worker, the Vermont PRO Act goes beyond current federal law, the National Labor Relations Act. Vermont’s bill extends the right to organize to historically barred Black and brown groups of workers, according to the Teamsters, one of a 26-group coalition of unions, civil rights groups, civic groups, and religious groups pushing it.

When Congress approved the original NLRA during the New Deal, FDR had to exclude household workers, who were mostly African-American women, and farm workers, who were mostly Spanish-speaking, to appease the then-dominant Southern segregationist wing of the Democratic Party.

“Federal labor law denies collective bargaining rights” to those two groups, the Pass the Vermont PRO Act coalition explains. “It is up to states like Vermont to end this historically racist exclusion.”

And the Vermont bill bans mandatory attendance at bosses’ “captive audience” meetings—a ban approved as a stand-alone law by other states. Under federal labor law, bosses can now discipline or even fire workers who refuse to go to those meetings and sit through anti-labor lies and harangues.

Vermont’s captive audience meetings ban, like the others, covers bosses’ demands of mandatory attendance at meetings on political or religious topics, including worker rights and union representation. Workers can still go, but only if they want to, and bosses can still harangue them.

“To protect their freedom of speech and of conscience, workers should have the right to refuse to attend without fear of discipline or termination,” the coalition adds.

The Vermont PRO Act also legalizes card-check recognition for public workers, the Teamsters said. The state AFL-CIO adds the Vermont PRO Act lets bosses fire workers only for good cause. It lists specific causes for termination—barring all others–and forces employers to follow those standards.

“Our goal is to make it easier for workers in both the private and public sectors to form a union by making it easier for workers in the public sector to form unions, expanding collective bargaining rights to agricultural and domestic workers and protecting workers’ freedom of speech by preventing employers from forcing employees to attend captive audience meetings,” the state AFL-CIO said.

“Vermont passed the Vermont State Labor Act in the 1960s with a goal of protecting the rights of the employees and the public. This is a work in progress, which will be strengthened by the Vermont PRO Act,” Curtis Clough, President of Teamsters Local 597 in Barre, told the national union. “This legislation is a game changer for workers and Gov. Scott must sign it into law immediately.”

Sanders, who chairs the U.S. Senate’s Labor Committee, hasn’t commented yet on his home state’s PRO Act, but he’s the lead Senate sponsor of the national version. A Republican filibuster threat, aided by renegade Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has stopped the national measure from a floor vote.

Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.

How Union Reformers Passed the PRO Act in Vermont / by Paul Prescod

Vermont AFL-CIO president Katie Maurice (L) holds a banner, along with the organization’s executive director, Liz Medina (R). (Courtesy of David Van Deusen)

The pro-union PRO Act is stalled at the national level. But in Vermont, union reformers took over the AFL-CIO and used it to win their own version of the bill

Reposted from Jacobin

If you’re a fan of unions, there’s been a lot to get excited about lately. Strikes and militancy are up, public support for labor is peaking, and the prospects for new organizing are better than they’ve been in decades.

Unfortunately, even with all this good news, labor’s legislative fortunes remain dim. If passed, the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would arguably represent the most comprehensive labor law reform since the 1940s. The bill includes a slew of measures to make it easier to form a union and negotiate a first contract. But the PRO Act is stalled in Congress, and it’s hard to see a world where the Democrats can muster a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate anytime soon.

This hasn’t stopped the labor movement in Vermont, bolstered by new reform leadership of the state’s AFL-CIO, from winning their own version of the bill. On May 9, the Vermont Senate passed the PRO Act, and it now heads to the governor’s desk with a veto-proof majority. While not identical to the federal version, the Vermont legislation is a resounding victory for the state’s workers.

The Vermont PRO Act (S. 102) bans captive-audience meetings, a well-worn employer tool for spreading anti-union propaganda and intimidation. Public sector workers will be able to organize with card-check neutrality, allowing them to skip the often unfair and unnecessarily lengthy union election process by getting a simple majority of workers in a bargaining unit to sign union cards. Importantly, the bill will also extend collective bargaining rights to domestic workers who have been historically excluded by US labor law.

This victory was the product of years of work by union reformers, which precipitated a paradigm shift in the way the state’s labor movement engaged with politics. The Vermont labor movement has offered a master class on how activists can turn their state labor councils into hubs for organizing and vehicles for deep legislative reform.

United!

The passage of the Vermont PRO Act cannot be separated from the project of reforming the Vermont AFL-CIO, which activists have pursued over the last five years. In Insurgent Labor, author and Vermont AFL-CIO president from 2019–2023 David Van Deusen describes the moribund state the council existed in for years.

Most union members didn’t know the state council existed, while meetings and conventions were sleepy affairs. After hearing that the 2017 convention contained only twenty delegates, barely enough to fill up one banquet dinner table, Deusen decided to organize a slate for new leadership.

The United! slate was formed around a platform that prioritized new organizing, involvement of rank-and-file union members, more selective support of elected officials, and a Green New Deal. In 2019, fourteen United! candidates were elected, winning all the top officer jobs and a majority on the executive board.

The newly empowered reformers got straight to work in a flurry of activity that helped build relationships for the future. When the International Association of Machinists Local 2704 went on strike right after the election, the council mobilized support in a big way. The local hadn’t participated in the 2019 state council convention, but after this experience of strike support, they sent delegates to the 2020 convention.

The board voted to take money traditionally devoted to hiring outside lobbyists and put it toward a bench of part-time organizers. This new organizing staff helped the council lend meaningful resources to campaigns run by unions like United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459, American Federation of Teachers Local 3203, and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1674. In the wake of COVID-19, the rejuvenated state council took the lead in organizing car caravans to resist municipal-level austerity.

Though the building trades had a reputation for being more conservative, the progressive United! leadership was able to build trust and credibility by championing local campaigns important to them. They successfully partnered with the trades to pass responsible contract ordinances in three cities. These laws require contractors to pay a prevailing wage on all major city construction projects, giving union contractors an advantage in the bid process.

Coalition building outside traditional unions was also central to the state council’s new vision. The Vermont AFL-CIO partnered with Migrant Justice, an organization representing the state’s undocumented dairy farm workers, on their Milk with Dignity campaign targeting the Hannaford supermarket chain. They also skillfully walked a delicate line of supporting local climate groups while making clear their commitment to maintaining good union jobs in the energy sector.

“No More Politics as Usual”

Perhaps the most transformative change that the United! leadership instituted was a rethinking of how the state’s labor movement engaged with electoral politics. In 2019, a political summit was called to evaluate the council’s inability to move the legislature on labor’s key priorities, rallying under the banner “No More Politics as Usual.”

After a frank and generative discussion, the council passed a resolution outlining three legislative priorities: card-check neutrality, a $15 minimum wage, and robust enforcement of worker misclassification laws.

Boldly, the resolution also stated that any political party that did not support these priorities would face a two-year endorsement moratorium of any candidate in the Vermont House and Senate. While progress was made on a living wage and worker misclassification, the Democratic leadership did not move on card check, thus triggering the moratorium.

In the years that followed, the Vermont AFL-CIO allied with the democratic socialist–oriented Progressive Party, endorsing its entire slate for the first time in the 2020 general election. This daring move sent a clear message to Vermont Democrats that they could no longer rely on labor’s support if they didn’t actively push labor’s agenda.

With the establishment of a broad labor-oriented coalition and a political class on its back foot, the state council was ready to fight for card-check neutrality as part of the Vermont PRO Act.

The Pass the Vermont PRO Act coalition was formed with the support of most of the state’s labor movement, along with community organizations like Migrant Justice, Rural Vermont, Central Vermont DSA, and 350 Vermont.

Elected state council leaders attended local union meetings in person to stress the importance of helping nonunion workers through this bill. Workers descended on the capitol for lobby days and press conferences, featuring the testimony of nonunion workers who experienced captive-audience meetings while trying to organize. Teamsters Local 597, though not part of the AFL-CIO, mobilized its members to send letters and make phone calls.

But the council also got creative. Organizers promoted the legislation at contra dances, a type of folk dancing event popular in Vermont. The Vermont Green FC, a local soccer club, hosted a labor night with the state AFL-CIO. A movie night was organized at the statehouse showing Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses.

Predictably, the local business class mobilized in an attempt to defeat the bill, with the Chamber of Commerce testifying three times against it. But they were on the defensive without credible arguments that could resonate with the public. As Vermont AFL-CIO executive director Liz Medina describes in her op-ed, the Chamber advanced the laughable idea that the Vermont PRO Act would prevent employers from being able to hold diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings.

The passage of the Vermont PRO Act has set the stage for the growth of unions in the state. Vermont has already increased its union density in recent years under the United! leadership, something very few other states have managed to do.

Vermont’s labor movement has demonstrated that despite the stagnation of national-level politics, substantial opportunities for change exist at the state level. Just as we’re witnessing the reform of once-dormant unions into militant fighting machines, state labor councils can also be transformed and weaponized to take on the corporate elite and win big for working people.

Paul Prescod is a Jacobin contributing editor.

How Union Reformers Took Over the Vermont AFL-CIO / by Stevel Early

Members of the Vermont State Labor Council. (Courtesy the Vermont State Labor Council website)

In 2019, local union members of the Vermont AFL-CIO elected officers to top positions in an attempt to make the federation more progressive, democratic, and effective. Their record is impressive.

Reposted from Jacobin

Changing the leadership, structure, or functioning of any US labor organization is no easy task. Activists and experts have long argued about whether dysfunctional unions are best reformed from the top down, from the bottom up, or some mix of the two approaches.

For the past sixty-five years, the main locus of union democracy and reform struggles in the United States has been local unions, which hold leadership elections every three years and are closest to the membership. Thousands of rank-and-file workers have campaigned for more militant unionism by running for and winning local office.

Some have had the backing of national networks of like-minded dissidents, including Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a TDU-inspired reform caucus within the United Auto Workers (UAW). And in recent years, TDU and UAWD supporters even ousted national headquarters officials from their respective unions, resulting in a major contract win for UPS Teamsters and a historic autoworker strike of the Big Three last year.

Very few modern-day reformers have mounted similar challenges to the status quo in city or state labor federations chartered by the national American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Representing workers from different AFL-CIO affiliates, these central labor councils (CLCs) may be just as bureaucratic or dysfunctional as the individual unions that belong to them. But structurally, most are too far removed from workplace struggles to generate many electoral challenges to incumbent AFL-CIO officials, at the local, regional, or state level.

As a result, there have been few contested elections, like in the Teamsters and UAW, with opposing slates offering alternative programs for their unions. In AFL-CIO leadership votes, officers and executive board members are chosen by convention or council delegates, the same method used by most national unions. The rank and file has little or no say about who runs AFL-CIO bodies. One notable exception has been the Vermont State Labor Council, which represents twenty thousand public and private sector workers and that in 2019 was taken over by reforming leadership.

A Rare Labor Insurgency

In the Green Mountain State, due to its small scale, most state AFL-CIO convention delegates are working members or retirees, not full-time officials. Since 2019, they have cast ballots in several hotly contested elections, which resulted in a mandate for change.

Most recently, last September, they elected an all-women leadership team to three top officer positions and made thirty-one-year-old Katie Maurice the youngest state AFL-CIO president in the country — and the only one who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Maurice took over last fall from David Van Deusen, a fellow member of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

In his new book, Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO 2017–2023, Van Deusen describes how a group of local union officers and staff members created a reform faction called “Vermont AFL-CIO United!” five years ago (disclosure: I wrote the introduction for the book). These rank-and-file activists were frustrated by their labor council’s lack of militancy and creativity, plus its inability to aid new organizing, contract campaigns, or strikes.

Fourteen United! candidates got elected in 2019 — taking all the top officer jobs, forming a majority on the executive board and then winning a national AFL-CIO-ordered rerun of the original election. The reformers’ goal was to revitalize a moribund organization through membership education, mobilization, and direct action. They favored greater internal democracy and transparency, independent political action, and more labor support for social and environmental justice.

But inside and outside Vermont, that progressive agenda has proved to be surprisingly controversial. Rather than welcoming and applauding the election results, the national AFL-CIO — then headed by the late Richard Trumka — threatened to remove the reformers from office and put their council under the control of appointed staff members from Washington, DC. As Van Deusen recounts in his book, this trusteeship was averted, and union activists in Vermont have continued to make their state labor council a model for the rest of the nation.

Last fall, a second United! slate won a majority of the seats on the labor council executive board. Van Deusen’s successor, Maurice, hailed the results as an “affirmation of our desire to continue to focus on rank-and-file organizing within the state of Vermont over political lobbying.” New organizing, plus a major affiliation with the long-independent Vermont State Employees’ Association (VSEA), has nearly doubled the state federation’s dues-paying membership since 2019 (although the VSEA did not support the United! candidates last fall and instead backed the building trades slate that lost).

A Record of Accomplishment

Van Deusen reports in Insurgent Labor that state labor council meetings were opened up to all union members, not just elected delegates, and they began to attract their largest turnouts ever. The reformers also worked with building trades unions to pass so-called “responsible contractor ordinances” that require prevailing wages on major public construction projects in multiple Vermont cities and towns.

Vermont became the first state labor federation in the region involved in the “Renew New England Alliance.” This six-state “Green New Deal” coalition is campaigning for the creation of thousands of good union jobs — for workers building affordable housing, installing rooftop solar panels, cleaning up pollution, and slashing the carbon emissions responsible for climate change.

The new leadership’s savvy use of social media, radio shows, and local TV appearances allowed organized labor to reach a bigger nonlabor audience and build stronger relationships with community allies. Within the broader Vermont labor movement, Van Deusen aided rank-and-filers in non-AFL-CIO unions during their fight against a public employee pension cut favored by Republican governor Phil Scott and leaders of the Democrat-controlled state legislature. Labor council organizers used Vermont’s annual May Day rally in Montpelier to build support for the state’s immigrant workers (mainly Latino immigrants employed on dairy farms).

The state AFL-CIO has also been endorsing more third-party candidates for state and local office, hopefully giving Vermont Democrats a much-needed dope slap. “Since 2019, we have strengthened our ties with the Vermont Progressive Party [VPP], which has not only focused on workers’ rights but also championed broader social justice causes, in a political landscape often dominated by powerful corporate interests,” Maurice said. She continued:

The VPP’s role as a party for the working class is not just about rhetoric; it’s about tangible actions. It’s about supporting legislation like the VT PRO Act that would protect the right to organize, about standing up against union-busting tactics, and ensuring that union members have a seat at the policy-making table in Montpelier.

Misconduct or Model Behavior?

Before his death in August 2021, Trumka had the opportunity to support an exemplary CLC initiative that called attention to the threat of fascism in the United States. In anticipation of then president Donald Trump’s likely rejection of the 2020 election results, Vermont labor council delegates issued a call for “a general strike of all working people in our state” if there was a right-wing coup aimed at keeping Trump in office.

AFL-CIO headquarters tried to block any discussion of such a contingency plan in response to a possible constitutional crisis (of the sort that might have occurred on January 6, 2021). After Vermont labor leaders debated the subject anyway, Trumka ordered an official probe of their alleged noncompliance with national AFL-CIO rules applying to local affiliates. In response, then state fed president Van Deusen urged AFL-CIO headquarters to investigate

how the example we are setting in the Green Mountain State could serve as a model for what a more engaged, more member-driven, more democratic, more anti-racist, more pro-immigrant and more organizing centered labor movement . . . could actually look like in other parts of the country.

This tug-of-war had a happy ending, temporarily. Vermont labor reformers got a “final warning” from Trumka shortly before his death, but none were removed and replaced by appointees from Washington, DC. Under Trumka’s successor, Liz Shuler, the national organization restarted its organizing subsidy to the Vermont State Labor Council, and relations with the national AFL-CIO took a welcome turn for the better — until last month.

In a January 22 letter, President Shuler informed the council’s new officers and executive board that she was investigating last fall’s “election process” based on a “protest appeal” filed by an affiliated union. She also directed them to “refrain from any discussion of the investigation . . . with the general public or entities and individuals not affiliated with the Labor Council.”

This attempted gag order is directed at United! supporters who have, in past internal disputes, tried to enlist allies on the AFL-CIO national executive board or keep labor media outlets informed about interference from Washington. Their impressive record of internal democracy and worker engagement should be a source of inspiration for trade unionists elsewhere, not an invitation to further harassment and meddling from headquarters.

Yet this new controversy underlines one of Van Deusen’s main messages in Insurgent Labor: the prospects for making real change rest in the hands of grassroots union activists. To meet the challenges facing Vermont workers, Van Deusen and his reform caucus built on the best of organized labor at the local and state level. They didn’t wait for instructions from the national AFL-CIO, which has consistently been a foe of bottom-up change in Vermont.

Steve Early is a member of NewsGuild/CWA and author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. His new book (co-authored with Suzanne Gordon and Jasper Craven) is Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs.