Protecting the Rights of the Members
Joe Ames left a legacy to AFSCME: a Judicial Panel to protect the rights of individual members and the integrity of the union.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Joe Ames may be the union’s James Madison and John Marshall rolled into one: the primary author of its constitution adopted in 1965 and the judge who established guidelines and precedents for AFSCME’s Judicial Panel.
It was just a twist of fate, however, that brought Ames from St. Louis — where he was secretary-treasurer of Local 410 and president of the Missouri state council — to the International’s Washington office.
Ames had strongly supported the candidacy of Jerry Wurf when he ran for AFSCME president. “I was his floor leader in two Conventions,” says Ames, “one unsuccessful and one successful.”
Never one to run away from responsibility, he rose through the ranks — chairing the commission to rewrite AFSCME’s constitution and winning a seat on the International Executive Board. But when Wurf tried to make him move from St. Louis to D.C., Ames balked.
“I was very happy in St. Louis. I had a job that I loved. I had become a major mover and shaker in the Democratic Party there,” Ames recalls. “And my wife [Lillian, a physician] had a job that she loved and her own laboratory.”
But timing was on AFSCME’s side. The day before Ames was to fly to AFSCME headquarters to officially decline Wurf’s request, his wife learned she had been passed over for promotion to professor.
Ames took the job. And Lillian got a full professorship — at Georgetown University’s medical school.
Over the next few years, Ames became involved in AFSCME’s day-to-day workings as assistant to the president and then as secretary-treasurer.
In 1972, he proposed changes to AFSCME’s constitution that would strengthen the Judicial Panel — “to make it a full-time operation and give it much broader jurisdiction.
“I thought it was important because there was no structural way to protect the rights of the members internally,” says Ames. “I had seen problems at the local union level, at the council level and at the International level.”
He felt this was so important that he was willing to step down as International secretary-treasurer to chair the Judicial Panel — making decisions that set AFSCME’s standard for justice.
He ruled on election disputes, often conducting new elections personally. When charges were filed, he decided that the Judicial Panel should hear the case “de novo” (from the beginning). He feared that personal biases at the local level and the lack of professional note taking could create problems. “I thought the only way to avoid that kind of thing is to have the Judicial Panel hear it from scratch — go to the scene and hear the witnesses on the spot and make a record.”
Sometimes the councils in a state would decide to merge. “They would come to me,” says Ames. “I would wind up writing these constitutions.” One of the most lively examples of this occurred in Pennsylvania.
“I once chaired eight conventions simultaneously in one hall,” he says. “The first day we had a convention of Council 13, which was the overall council, and got the constitution adopted. The next day we divided the room into eight parts, and we had eight constitutions. They were virtually the same,” but each was adopted individually.
Ames feels some of his most important decisions concerned eligibility for AFSCME office.
Frequently, the decision turned on whether the officer in question was eligible for AFSCME membership. Sometimes a promotion on the job put a local union officer out of the bargaining unit and — the Judicial Panel would rule — out of office. These were often difficult personal decisions, but Ames was dedicated to making AFSCME live by its own laws.
For more than a decade, Ames was at the heart of AFSCME’s development.
There was a time when every internal document of any consequence was something Ames was involved in: the International Constitution, the first financial practices code, the first full set of Judicial Panel rules, the Elections Manual. Ames wrote the council constitutions for more than half of the councils and the local union constitutions for more than 80 percent of the locals. And he tried to make sure the members understood what these documents said — and how to interpret them.
“I always viewed my role as one of protecting the rights of the members. And one of the ways you protect their rights is that you have decent rules and you make sure that they know what their rights are,” says Ames.
Those rules and those rights are Joe Ames’ legacy to AFSCME’s current 1.3 million members and all the members to come.
By Susan Ellen Holleran
