AFSCME: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
From October 2011 to October 2012, AFSCME is celebrating its 75th Anniversary. All year long, AFSCME WORKS pays tribute to the union’s history with special features about the key moments in our past. In this issue, we look at the union’s role in fighting for equal pay for women, organizing workers to gain collective bargaining rights and winning a voice at work for child care providers.
Demanding Pay Equity
It was 1981. A study initiated by the City of San Jose, Calif., showed that women were grossly underpaid, as men earned $6 an hour more for the same work. When the city refused to address the obvious disparity, members of Local 101 went on strike to win pay equity. The nine-day strike was the first time workers there had walked off the job to demand equal pay. And they won. As a result, members received a contract that included $1.5 million dedicated to wage increases for jobs held by women.
Two years later, AFSCME’s landmark lawsuit against Washington state resulted in the largest pay equity court settlement to date. It provided more than $480 million in pay equity adjustments to 35,000 employees. This ended AFSCME Council 28’s decade-long struggle to get the state to end pay disparities revealed by the state’s own job evaluation studies.
In 1991, AFSCME won a $7.5 million settlement, bringing wage increases and back pay for predominantly female and minority police communication technicians in the City of New York. And in 2001, AFSCME settled the first class-action lawsuit under the Congressional Accountability Act, winning $1.5 million in back pay for 300 women employed or formerly employed by the Architect of the Capitol.
AFSCME continues to be on the frontlines in the fight to end wage discrimination. Throughout the years, thousands of other AFSCME members have benefited from more than half a billion dollars in pay equity adjustments, resulting from negotiations at the bargaining table, agreements by state and local legislatures, and through political action.
Organizing for Power
AFSCME continued to grow throughout the 1960s and 1970s, adding 1,000 new members a week to its rolls. In 1969, a young Pennsylvania organizer, Gerald W. McEntee, led a successful effort to secure passage of a collective bargaining law. Pennsylvania’s public employees at the time worked under the patronage system – they were hired and fired at the whim of politicians. The law’s enactment spurred a large-scale organizing campaign that earned
AFSCME more than 75,000 new members. With the creation of Pennsylvania Council 13, AFSCME won comprehensive statewide public employee contracts that guaranteed members full health coverage and other benefits.
The photo above shows jubilant AFSCME organizers celebrating their victory after winning a runoff election for 20,000 employees of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDot). McEntee (in striped tie, right of center), who was a staffer at Philadelphia’s AFSCME Council 33 a few years earlier, was then an International union area director. In 1975, he organized the largest public employee strike in U.S. history when more than 70,000 state employees walked off their jobs demanding wage increases. The state settled by the third day of the strike, paving the way for a successful three-year contract.
Winning a Voice
For many years, home-based child care providers were largely unorganized, geographically dispersed and, despite their significant numbers, often lacked a voice in government decisions that affected them. They could not form a union and meet collectively with state officials to negotiate improvements to their reimbursement rates or to the services that they provided. Today, they have that right.
At AFSCME’s 1974 International Convention, delegates adopted a resolution supporting comprehensive child care. Delegates also resolved to promote the best possible care for America’s children by bargaining for child care provisions in contracts and by winning decent wages and benefits.
For more than half a century, AFSCME has been organizing child care workers, representing approximately 150,000 family child care providers in California, Iowa, Kansas, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania. AFSCME is now the leading union in the field of child care.
