UE Service Center Workers

From the St. Albans Messenger

By Michelle Monroe

ST. ALBANS CITY – At 4:15 Thursday afternoon roughly two dozen contract workers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) center cheered their victory in the second of four union elections.

Workers for Choctaw Archiving Enterprise voted 51- 31 to join United Electrical Workers (UE). In an election that ended a half-hour earlier, workers for the Federal Working Group voted 12-8 against joining the union.

"For the first time in a long, long, time I'm actually looking forward to going to work tomorrow," Choctaw employee Kelly Levick said.

Levick, who has worked at the center for eight years, said, "I think we're taking a huge step in the right direction." She supported the union because she believes the workers need to "have outlined in a contract our wages and our benefits."

UE is alleging the Federal Working Group violated the law by holding one-on-one meetings with workers in the hours before the vote. Companies cannot legally discuss the union with workers for 24 hours prior to the election. The union will be filing unfair labor practices charges against the Federal Working Group, according to Kim Lawson, a UE organizer. "We have ample evidence that the employer used strong-arm tactics," Lawson said.

Today Northrop-Grumman workers were to vote whether to join UE. Sandra Behan, a Northrop employee who has worked at the center for five and a half years, said that the result of the Choctaw vote "makes me feel pretty positive."

"All of us from Choctaw are definitely behind them," Levick said when asked about the Northrop vote.

Following the counting of the Choctaw ballots, one worker proclaimed into her cell phone, "Choctaw has a union," while Jeremy Murray, a Stanley Associates, Inc. employee, said, "I don't know about justice at Stanley, but we have justice at Choctaw." Stanley Associates is the primary contractor at the center; the other firms are subcontractors.

"For the first time in the history of the Vermont Service Center, there is a union," Lawson told workers assembled at UE headquarters following the vote. "We'll pull off Northrop-Grumman. We'll pull off Stanley, and we'll pick up Federal Workers Group, because we aren't leaving them behind," Lawson said, drawing cheers of agreement from the workers.

James Haslam, of the Vermont Workers' Center, called the victory "long overdue." According to Haslan the USCIS service center has been the largest source of calls to the workers' rights hotline run by the Vermont Workers' Center since the first contractor, Labatt-Anderson, took over file set-up and maintenance at the center in the 1990s.

"It's great to see people being able to withstand an unfortunate anti-union campaign and stick together," Haslam said.

Haslam also observed that raising the wages of workers benefits the whole community, and cutting them hurts the whole community. By cutting wages at the center, Stanley is "taking that money out of the community and putting it in a few pockets in Arlington, Virginia," Haslam said.

That money is significant. Approximately 100 workers at the center have had their wages cut $1.70 per hour, resulting a total loss of more than $350,000 per year for the St. Albans workers.

Northrop-Grumman has told workers in recent days that if they vote for the union they'll lose the benefit of Northrop's own grievance procedures, an argument that has not impressed Behan who asked a Northrop executive, "What protection is there for clerks with that system?"

Behan also has been unimpressed by Stanley's claims to have provided new benefits for center workers. "They're not giving us anything," she said. The 10 holidays Stanley claims to have given workers are federal holidays during which the center closes, and government contractors are required to spend $3.16 per hour per person on benefits, Behan said. Even with that requirement, Northrop-Grumman is not making any contributions to a 401(k) for its workers.

Stanley Associates, Inc. Vice President Bill Karlson attended the Choctaw vote count, but declined to comment on the outcome.