The POLITICO analysis showed how wide the gulf can be — with top salaries in offices ranging anywhere between $45,000 and $115,000. | Getty Images Council staffers to officially launch union effort Monday

Nearly 150 City Council staffers have committed to a unionization effort that will formally launch Monday, leaders of the initiative said.

The staffers plan to begin a card campaign, which entails gathering signatures and is a key step to demonstrate support when trying to form a union. The announcement will take the legislative body into uncharted political territory, with the potential to upend the way it operates.


Labor law only requires 30 percent of employees to sign cards before an election, but most campaigns wait for a majority to ask for formal recognition. To achieve a majority in this case, roughly 306 people will have to sign on, a number that reflects the nearly 600 people in the potential bargaining unit, said Zara Nasir, director of the Council’s Progressive Caucus and a leader behind the unionization effort.

Staffers backing the union say it is the best route for addressing unrest over large pay disparities among employees and low salaries in a job that often requires long hours and weekend work. A POLITICO analysis found that some full-time and part-time employees are making salaries that border on minimum wage, in a Council that typically presents itself as the vanguard of progressive ideals.

“We want a voice, we want a vehicle, to make the changes we want to make,” Nasir said. “We want to be able to negotiate with management and get more protections and better salaries and better benefits, but also when the members and speaker changes, we want to be able to get those standards.”

Council staffers are organizing as an unaffiliated union named the Association for Legislative Employees. Some staffers had met with large international unions to gauge their interest earlier in the year, but there were concerns over the strong ties organized labor has to Council members, Nasir said.

Those involved in the unionization effort are currently looking to organize staff in member offices and certain divisions within central staff, which is directly overseen by the speaker, amounting to nearly 600 people. Central staff divisions that are being targeted include the finance, legislative and community engagement divisions.

If the unionization effort is successful, it will kick off a complex and unprecedented negotiation process for the Council. It’s unusual for the staff of legislative bodies to unionize because the nature of their job includes heavy turnover, with staff members typically replaced when new members take office.

Nasir said the unionization effort doesn’t conflict with the way legislative bodies typically function, but simply ensures there’s representation for staff for the time they do work at Council.

“No one that I talked to is interested in keeping staff there when there is a reasonable turnover at the point of the transition from one elected to another,” she said. “That’s not what we’re fighting for. I think it’s actually very basic — the basic thing is we want recourse for employees that are fired outside of that framework.”

While staffers had originally planned to do a card campaign by the end of the year, the timeline accelerated once reports of the effort became public, said one staffer engaged in organizing who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely of the process.

Staffers behind the union campaign are calling on Speaker Cory Johnson to brief central staff management on the employees’ legal right to organize and set clear parameters on what it means to retaliate or interfere with unionization efforts. They’re also calling on Johnson to commit now to the voluntary recognition of the bargaining unit, contingent upon staffers getting majority support.

Johnson has said he supports unionization efforts.

“If the staff here at the City Council wants to take that step, I wholeheartedly support them,” he said at an unrelated news conference on Thursday. “I want to make it as easy as possible to do that, to engage with them in a way that is prescribed by law, because these things are prescribed by law, to make sure we do it properly and correctly.”

Although talks of a unionization effort have been percolating in the Council for years, the effort was galvanized by the recently revealed behavior and suspension of Council Member Andy King. King was fined and suspended for 30 days in late October after he was found by investigators to have misused Council resources and retaliated against staffers whom he saw as disloyal. In an open letter, a group of 137 unnamed current former staffers called on King to be expelled and said his behavior was representative of larger issues many staffers regularly face.

Staffers have also previously attempted to address disparate play, with 100 staffers calling on Johnson last year to address the issue as part of a package of proposed reforms.

Each of the 51 Council members is allocated the same base amount each fiscal year to run their offices as they see fit, dividing the pot between salaries and other expenses such as rent, supplies and furniture.

The POLITICO analysis showed how wide the gulf can be — with top salaries in offices ranging anywhere between $45,000 and $115,000.

And while Johnson has boosted operating funding for member offices both years he has been speaker, that funding only trickled down somewhat to employees. The total spent on members’ staff increased by nearly 16 percent between July of 2017 and this year, but during the same period the average salary in these offices went up only 9 percent. That suggests some lawmakers used the extra funding to simply hire more employees at lower wages.

“At this point, a union is important because it will give the protection that people really need regarding organizing — particularly considering our environment we work under,” said M. Ndigo Washington, the legislative director for Council Member Inez Barron who is also behind the unionization effort. “It will allow for some uniformity.”