Profiles in Dignity: Tower of Power
Columbus, Ohio
At 6’5,” William Endsley stands tall among union leaders. He has the easy grace and the natural instincts of a professional athlete, but he’s just as skillful as a negotiator, organizer, and mover and shaker on behalf of 43,000 members of AFSCME Ohio Council 8.
“The labor movement is and has been my life and my family’s life for a long time,” he says.
He recalls as a youngster waking up on Saturday mornings to the smell of coffee brewing and the sight of his dad and his co-workers around the kitchen table. The talk always centered on the boss, the worksite and the workers.
“I guess all that talk about organizing and collective power just really stuck with me,” says Endsley, whose late father, Bud, was president of AFSCME Local 7 in Toledo, and helped found AFSCME Local 2058, the union for Toledo city supervisors.
His father was an honest man who cared deeply about social issues. “Bud believed that the mission of the union back then was the same as it is today: to protect the middle class from a barrage of attacks by the rich and powerful,” says Endsley, AFSCME Ohio Council 8 president and an International vice president.
Like father, like son, Endsley has stepped up to the plate and delivered well in providing services to his members.
“He has the most amazing ability to size up anything — an issue or situation — and resolve it in a split second — anytime, anyplace and anywhere,” says Patricia Moss, Council 8 first vice president, who has worked with Endsley for nearly two decades.
Moss says Endsley is respected as a “pragmatic and passionate leader” by the men and women he serves.
And his record of union service reads like a Hall of Famer’s. In the late 1970s, he founded and was first president of the United Coalition of Municipal Employees (UCOME), which included AFSCME, the International Association of Firefighters, the Toledo Police and Patrolmen’s Association and the Teamsters. He was secretary of the Toledo Port Council, a delegate to the Toledo AFL-CIO Federation of Labor and regional vice president of AFSCME Ohio Council 8.
In 1991, he was elected president of Council 8. He has served as a trustee of the AFSCME Ohio Care Plan since 1988 and was named chair in 1991.
Endsley’s passion for organizing has long been at the center of his vision for increasing the quality of life for Ohio’s public employees.
He credits AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee and AFL-CIO Pres. John Sweeney with moving organizing front and center as a focus of the labor movement. “There are some good signs that the movement is on the way back toward rebuilding itself, thanks to consolidated efforts by labor leaders.”
Endsley has helped organize thousands of Ohio public and private non-profit workers. He can take particular pride in the events of 1984, when Council 8 members finally won the right to bargain collectively.
“It took 20 years of action, 20 years of talks, 20 years of efforts in the political arena to elect public officials who would support collective bargaining,” Endsley explains.
Collective bargaining was the union’s goal as far back as 1964, when he joined the union as a laborer. For the next 17 years, he worked as a fire and police serviceman, lineman and cable splicer for the City of Toledo, while serving as steward, chief steward and finally president of Local 7.
Those who know Endsley best know him as a man of gentle humor, a connoisseur of jazz, and a real softie when it comes to doting on his 2-year-old granddaughter, Jordan Elizabeth — “the light of my life.”
But he’s very direct in his approach at the bargaining table.
“It’s all about guts,” he believes. He has no patience with what he calls the “theatrics” of negotiating. “It’s a waste of time. ... I simply crystallize what we want with the support of my committee, and give justification for what we believe is fair and reasonable.”
The collective power of union members is especially important in the political process, Endsley believes. Ohio employees learned it first-hand in the November 1998 elections when voters defeated Issue 2, a ballot referendum that called for drastically cutting workers’ compensation benefits, limiting the time period for filing a claim, and excluding injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome from the list of workplace injuries.
“A lot of legislators were on our side with this issue, but what really turned it around was the support we got from the community,” he points out.
During the past five years, Council 8 has turned the process of candidate endorsement over to the members in their home districts. “Years ago, we would demonstrate at the state house just prior to a bill being passed. By that time, it was often too late. ... Now the real action is back home, where people talk directly to the people they elected and hold them accountable for what is happening in the legislature.”
Endsley is proud that workers now meet with their legislators about the work that is being done, what bills are in the hopper, and make elected officials justify their position. “We’ve got to teach our members that legislators are no better than they are, that they don’t have to be afraid of public officials and they don’t have to have ‘spit and polish’ to visit them.”
In short, Bill Endsley encourages them to trust their instincts, the same ones that have made him a “tower of power” among his union peers.
By Venida RaMar Marshall
