AFSCME Michigan Members Stand Up to Local Dictators

by Cynthia McCabe  |  October 10, 2012

Campaign volunteer Yvonne Ross, AFSCME Local 62 (Council 25). (Photo by Cynthia McCabe)

DETROIT – It’s not an exaggeration to say Yvonne Ross is fighting against a dictator in this election.

The AFSCME Local 62 (Council 25) member is taking her vacation and spending it in a windowless room downtown here, calling across the city to urge opposition to the emergency manager law, also known as the local dictator law. Its official name is Public Act 4 and it will allow the governor to appoint emergency managers who have sweeping authority to control city, school and county operations.

In the name of supposed fiscal reform, emergency managers can wipe out collective bargaining agreements, lay off employees, outsource and privatize public services, fire elected officials, and dissolve or merge cities, counties and school districts. They have unchecked, unprecedented power. And that’s all without being elected.

No surprise, the law is promoted by right-wing groups including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the anti-worker Koch brothers.

“It disintegrates the role of elected government,” says Ross, a legal secretary. “The citizens will have no voice. It’s a dictatorship.”

She is one of about 30 volunteers gathered on this particular afternoon. From 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. they will make as many as 5,000 phone calls from 30 phones. Joining Ross at the phonebank is fellow AFSCME member Eula Murray, a retired clerk. She, too, is disturbed by the anti-democratic nature of the local dictator law.

“We vote for the people we want to take office,” Murray says. “The emergency manager law will take away our rights.”

Detroit almost fell to an emergency manager earlier this year when Gov. Rick Snyder proposed that the city sign a union-busting contract if they wanted to avoid the takeover. Emergency managers are already in place in Benton Harbor, Flint, Pontiac and Ecorse, as well as three school districts across the state, including Detroit’s.

Ross has been a Detroit resident since the 1980s, a time when the auto industry was still booming and the city’s politics were “very progressive,” she recalls. What followed were decades of decline as the bottom fell out of the auto industry, the housing market and the American economy. The rise of anti-worker right-wingers and their business-first policies targeting her city and the state are disheartening to Ross.

“We do have some problems,” she says. “Yes we do. But this law won’t solve those problems. We need help in Detroit but the workers need to be part of the solution.”

So even though she’s been at it for six hours, Ross heads back to work the phone for another couple hours.

“The voters in Detroit need to know what’s at stake,” Ross says. “We’re just trying to make them aware.”