Puerto Rico: A Lesson in Organizing
More than 65,000 Department of Education employees win the right to organize for the first time. SPU/AFSCME reaches out to clerical and professional workers.
To get some idea of what union organizers here were up against, “first appreciate the landscape,” says Edgar deJesús, organizing director of Servidores Públicos Unidos (SPU/AFSCME).
The island of Puerto Rico is only about 2,500 square miles, but its 3.8 million residents are scattered throughout the inland mountains as well as concentrated in the coastal cities.
It’s not the kind of geography that makes organizing easy.
The logistics were not easy, either. The Department of Education election — the first of several mandated by a collective bargaining law passed last year — lasted 10 working days in May. One hundred polling sites were spread throughout the 110-mile-long-by-35-mile-wide island.
AFSCME and SEIU created a merged affiliate called PASO (Personal, Administrativo, Secretarial y de Oficina, or the Administrative, Secretarial and Office Personnel), whose organizers spread out to more than 1,800 schools and related sites throughout the island.
They also visited employees at their homes, drumming up support for the elections.
BIG WIN. Their effort paid off hugely. Eight-five percent (2,500) of the valid ballots cast by clerical and administrative workers targeted by PASO were cast for “Sindicación, Sí!” (Union, Yes!). They needed 50 percent of the whole unit to vote yes.
Altogether, 41,265 employees — including 29,058 teachers, 5,691 cafeteria workers and 3,571 maintenance and security workers — cast valid or unchallenged ballots in the election.
As a result, about 66,000 Department of Education employees won the right to unionize. A second election, in the fall, will determine which unions actually will represent the different employee groups.
PASO was ruled eligible to go on the ballot, but may face opposition.
IT WASN’T EASY. The size of the unions’ victory belies the difficulty of reaching out to those employees. “You have to go into the mountains, [but there are] no roads,” says deJesús. “You have to go to every school on the island.”
PASO workers also visited about 800 workers at their homes in eight days throughout the island, he adds. They also got activists booked on radio stations.
“You know how many workers we had doing house visits?” deJesús asks. “Over 150 workers. These are rapid-fire workers, not paid organizing staff!”
One of those volunteers was Jorge de Jesús (no relation to Edgar). An administrative assistant in the Education Department, de Jesús spoke on radio shows, at press conferences and with national news media representatives. He spent time educating fellow workers who had expressed “the desire of having more voice and power in the department,” de Jesús says.
“When the workers saw our motivation, they began to work with us in order to accomplish a great victory,” he adds.
Gladys Peréz, an Education Department office worker and a member of PASO’s Organizing Committee, also helped get out the union message. Her motivation is uncomplicated and sincere. “I want to have better conditions in my work, and better salaries and benefits,” she says.
The organizing team moved with the polling sites daily to a different region of the island. “We had to house these people, we had to feed these people, we had to fight with the bus companies,” recalls Edgar deJesús. “It was quite an incredible experience.”
NEXT STEP. “This whole scenario is going to be repeated in seven campaigns,” he says. That includes an effort to organize about 8,000 workers in the Department of Family Services, more than 12,000 corrections workers, 2,500 employees of the Department of Natural Resources and about 200 in the Institute of Forensic Sciences.
“We’re hoping that one of the reasons workers will choose PASO,” says José La Luz, executive director of SPU, “is because they want to have their own union.”
The work has just begun.
By Clyde Weiss
