By Laureen Lazarovici Two-year-old Jackson Stafford is a little boy overcoming big hurdles. Only one of his kidneys functions properly, which requires him to get tests and treatments at a hospital that’s a four-hour drive from his family’s home in Sylva, N.C. Huey Stafford, Jackson’s dad, is able to take care of his son because he is a member of Communications Workers of America Local 3673.
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| |  | Health first: Huey Stafford can help care for his ill son thanks to his union contract. |
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“This summer, Stafford and his 150 co-workers at Verizon South went on strike to preserve several contract provisions that help employees balance work and family time—including the time needed to care for Jackson’s illness. In August, the union members went back to work after negotiating a contract that preserves the union’s family leave benefit and improves wages, health insurance and pension funding. “It was always reassuring to know” he could get time off to take care of his son, says Stafford, a cable splicer. “You can’t really put a price tag on it.”
As corporations wring more hours out of U.S. workers—Americans worked nearly five weeks more a year in 2000 than they did in 1973, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute—union members are fighting back, helping workers balance home and job responsibilities.
They are channeling bargaining and political clout to expand the definition of sick time to include time to care for ill family members, draw the line on mandatory overtime, educate union members about the federal Family and Medical Leave Act and increase access to quality child care. “Union members have been able to find innovative answers to the demands of work and family,” says AFT President Sandra Feldman. “We need to…build our strength so that we can make family-friendly solutions the rule and not a rarity,” she says.
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| | | Tough but necessary: Fighting to improve work and family benefits is not optional, says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. |
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As many workers suffer through the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, they may be eager to accept any job, regardless of the hours of work involved. But the problems of overwork and high unemployment are interrelated, economists say. “Many companies have resorted to layoffs during periods of drooping sales revenue, leaving larger workloads on the ‘survivors,’ ” says Lonnie Golden, an associate professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University who researches work and time issues. Productivity continues to increase—it went up 8.1 percent between the second and third quarters of this year—at the same time the economy is losing jobs, which means people who have jobs are working harder to make up for having fewer co-workers. In addition, the rising cost of health insurance encourages employers to delay hiring new employees and instead assign existing employees to work overtime when business picks up, Golden says. Workers sense they are more vulnerable during periods of high unemployment, feeling “not particularly secure about their job prospects, so they accept the ‘overemployment,’” Golden adds.
Amid these economic pressures, union leaders say they are stepping up efforts to help workers gain control of work time. “Under these conditions, maintaining and improving work and family benefits is tough going,” says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. “Fighting for work and family benefits…remains important to our members and our unions—and we’re winning,” she says.
Sick leave
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| | | No more: Nurses fight back against mandatory overtime—and win. |
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Fully 60 percent of U.S. workers believe it is against the law for an employer to refuse to provide sick leave, according to a February 2003 Peter D. Hart Research Associates poll for the AFL-CIO. In fact, no laws in the United States require employers to provide sick time. Some 47 percent of private-sector workers don’t have sick leave for themselves, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With union representation, millions of union members such as Stafford can negotiate paid sick leave for themselves and their families at the bargaining table. Increasingly, unions also are winning state legislation requiring employers that provide sick leave for workers also to provide time off to take care of seriously ill family members. After a campaign by the Hawaii State AFL-CIO, the state legislature this spring passed a bill requiring employers with 100 or more workers that provide sick leave to allow employees to use up to 10 days of their sick time to care for a child, parent or spouse with a serious health condition. Union activists in California, Minnesota and Washington helped pass similar laws.
Before the new law took effect, workers with ill family members were “put in a bad situation,” says Harold Dias, Hawaii state federation president. “If they had a sick child, they’d ask for a vacation day and get denied. They could stay home without pay and get docked for an unexcused absence and end up getting disciplined,” he says. Working to prevent the governor from vetoing the bill, state federation leaders joined with a key Republican lawmaker who had experienced firsthand the need for more flexible sick leave to help take care of an ill relative. Time off to care for family members is “not a Democratic issue or a union issue,” says Dias. “It’s an issue for all workers and families.”
Overtime
As a registered nurse at St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center in Long Island, N.Y., Barbara Crane has seen how families struggle when hospital administrators demand nurses work excessive overtime hours. One nurse worked a different shift than her husband, enabling the couple to share child care duties. Each time she was forced to work overtime, he would have to stay with their children, which meant he was late for work. The two would have shouting matches because he was at risk of losing his job. The nurse ended up quitting—as did dozens more who faced similar dilemmas. “How do you keep this up?” wondered Crane, unit chair of the New York State Nurses Association, a United American Nurses affiliate. The nurses’ response was to fight back. The 450 nurses went on strike in winter 2002 and won a fair contract that banned forced overtime except in emergencies. “They can no longer use [forced overtime] as a staffing tool,” says Crane. Nurses who want to work overtime can request it in advance and get fair overtime pay. Now the hospital touts its nonmandatory overtime policy when it recruits workers amid a serious nationwide nurse shortage.
Leaders of nurses’ unions say most current organizing and contract campaigns center on mandatory overtime. Many nurses would be among the 8 million workers who could be denied the right to overtime pay under a March 2003 proposal by the Bush administration to change federal rules governing the Fair Labor Standards Act and allow employers to require longer days without paying extra for overtime hours.
Working families mobilized against the proposal, distributing leaflets at their worksites, sending 1 million faxes and e-mails to Bush, the Department of Labor and members of Congress and rallying in Washington, D.C. Despite bipartisan opposition to his plan in Congress, Bush is poised to gut workers’ overtime pay rights as early as this month.
Continuing their campaign to win better control of work hours, union members joined community activists to mark “Take Back Your Time Day.” Activists held community discussions and teach-ins Oct. 24, nine weeks before the end of the year. The nine weeks symbolize the number of additional weeks U.S. employees worked (on average), compared with their western European counterparts.
Family and Medical Leave
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| | | Work and play: Union leaders such as Teamster Donny Brown shadow child care workers to win worthy wages for underpaid caregivers. |
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For years, Transport Workers Local 260 President Sandra Burleson spent hours ironing out sick-time disputes between bus drivers and managers at Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. Then several years ago, she attended a TWU local union leadership workshop on the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). FMLA has been law since 1993, after unions and women’s rights groups fought for the bill giving workers the right to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the birth or adoption of a child, to care for an ill family member or to recuperate from serious illness. As a result of the workshop, Burleson realized most of her members didn’t know about the FMLA. Workers were using up their sick leave and vacation time to deal with their own chronic health conditions or care for ill family members—and running into managers’ resistance. Burleson began a member-education campaign, distributing fliers about workers’ rights under the FMLA and holding informal information sessions in bus depot break rooms. “Members see it’s going to help them and their families, so they are interested,” she says. At the meetings, workers were wide-eyed and incredulous, Burleson says. The husbands of pregnant women would say, “You mean I can stay home and help my wife when the baby comes?” One man said, “I heard I could take time off to take care of my dad without getting in trouble.” When union members began using FMLA, the number of sick-time grievances plummeted—as did turnover. “I’m proud that we have dedicated officers like Sandra who understand that there are many ways we can serve members beyond negotiating a contract, in this case, by helping them balance work and family responsibilities,” says TWU International President Sonny Hall.
Union members also are working to expand family and medical leave and to enable more workers to take it by creating paid leave. Activists in California last year won the nation’s first paid family and medical leave state law. Beginning in January, workers paying into the state’s disability insurance system can take six weeks of partially paid leave to care for a new child or seriously ill family member. Citing the new law, Child magazine in November named California the best state in which to have and raise a newborn.
Child care
On a typical workday, Donny Brown is a business agent at Teamsters Local 391 in Greensboro, N.C. But on May 1, he spent a few hours shadowing a child care teacher as part of Worthy Wages Day, an annual national effort by the Center for the Child Care Workforce/AFT Educational Foundation to highlight low salaries paid these workers. At the end of his two hours of “work” as a child care teacher, Brown received a mock paycheck—for $13.18. “That’s less than the hourly wage I made in 1982 working as a part-time package handler for UPS,” says Brown. Earning such low wages “would make life very challenging to provide for myself and my family,” he says.
Union activists don’t limit to one day a year their efforts to improve working families’ access to quality child care—which includes fair wages for child care workers. Child care workers also are organizing for better pay, benefits and a voice on the job with AFT, AFSCME, CWA, SEIU and UAW. IBT Local 391 members work year-round with the Economic Justice Working Group, a local coalition of child care providers, community groups and unions, to persuade local and state government officials to provide more funding for child care and consider health and pension benefits for the teachers, who don’t have a union voice on the job. IBT members “see that child care workers don’t have half what they have as union members,” says Brown. “As we begin to educate and engage the community, it’s the beginning of a campaign to raise the pay and benefits for the people we entrust with our future,” he says. @
