NY's AFSCME Local 375 members choose insurgent slate
By Mary Owen
New York
Frustrated with a two-year pay freeze and a
leadership that refused to stand up to anti-union Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, members of AFSCME Local 375 have elected an insurgent
slate to head their 6,600-member local of city engineers,
architects and technical employees.
The insurgents opposed the mayor's "zero-zero" contract,
that is, a wage freeze for the first two years of a five-year
contract. They also criticized the leadership of the
120,000-member AFSCME District Council 37 for going along with
it, and vowed to be more responsive to the rank and file.
In addition, the opposition team includes many immigrants
from India, Haiti and other areas, bringing them into the local
union leadership for the first time.
In the hotly contested rerun election, insurgents won 12 of
15 seats on the local's executive board. The opposition's
victory is seen by progressive DC 37 affiliates as a bellwether
of dissatisfaction with a citywide leadership viewed as too
cozy with the mayor.
Opposition team leader Roy Commer defeated incumbent Lou
Albano by more than 500 votes. Albano was president of the
local for 17 years and a steadfast supporter of DC 37
policy.
The union scheduled the rerun election after an initial vote
last fall was invalidated when some 1,200 ballots mysteriously
disappeared. The vote originally gave Commer an 80-vote victory
over Albano.
Some members of his team opposed Commer's decision to file a
lawsuit in federal court demanding that he be instated. They
objected because recent experience-with the Teamsters, for
example-has shown that the government takes its own anti-union
agenda into the conflict. However, the court dismissed Commer's
case, saying that internal union avenues for resolving the
dispute had not been exhausted.
Albano also challenged last fall's election results. Both
sides finally agreed to a rerun election supervised by the
American Arbitration Association rather than the
Albano-appointed Local 375 Election Committee.
A leadership transition is in progress at the local. The new
leadership team is set to take office once ballot results are
ratified in early April by a special meeting of Local 375
delegates.
Meanwhile, in one of their first public appearances, the
newly elected insurgent team rallied with members of AFSCME
Local 420 outside Harlem Hospital on April 1 to oppose the
layoff of some 900 hospital workers.
President-elect Commer joined other union and community
leaders. His talk supported the besieged workers, who could
lose their jobs as part of Mayor Giuliani's program to downsize
city hospitals.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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