High stakes for Iowa's public workers as union recertification votes begin

Elections beginning this week and many more happening in October threaten to upend public sector unions in Iowa, potentially decimating organized labor’s political power and workplace influence in the state for years to come.

Starting Tuesday, individual bargaining units around the state — representing public school teachers, city snowplow drivers and county sheriff’s deputies, among many others — will vote on whether to continue or dissolve their union affiliations, many of which have been in place for decades.

Union leaders decry the votes as a bald-faced attempt by Republican lawmakers to quash union power in the state — one that will harm public sector workers and, ultimately, all Iowans who depend on services as basic as road maintenance and police protection.

“It’s a wholesale attack on the trade union movement by folks who’ve never liked us,” Iowa Federation of Labor President Ken Sagar said. “The system was set up in such a way to almost guarantee that they’ll be successful in damaging or destroying people’s opportunity to join together and collectively bargain.”

The yes-or-no elections are one immediate and ongoing consequence of the sweeping labor reform law enacted by Republican lawmakers earlier this year. In addition to sharply limiting the items public sector unions can bargain over, the new law requires local unions to conduct and win recertification elections ahead of every new contract.

That means employees must vote to continue their union representation potentially every couple of years from now on. The elections happening in September and October represent the first wave of that new mandate.

Iowa state Rep. Dave Deyoe, who played a key role in passing the collective bargaining bill as chairman of the House Labor Committee, said periodic recertification votes will ensure unions serve the workers they represent.

“It’ll make the unions more answerable to their members,” said Deyoe, R-Nevada. “A lot of times they took it for granted that they had the support of their members. For a lot of members, they’re now going to see a union that’s a lot more responsive to their concerns.”

Thirteen local unions representing nearly 1,300 educators from the West Lyon school district in far northwest Iowa to the Danville district in the southeast will begin voting Tuesday.

In October, as many as 483 local unions and employee associations will face recertification votes determining collecting bargaining representation for more than 34,000 public workers. In the coming months and years, all 1,203 of Iowa’s public bargaining units, representing 120,000-some workers will face similar votes.

Previously, unions remained certified unless employees voted to decertify them. Many have been in place since public sector collective bargaining was enacted in the 1970s.

'It's an attack on the Democrats'

Union leaders uniformly cast the elections as a partisan Republican effort to weaken the Democratic Party in Iowa and burden local unions with additional costs.

“At a fundamental level, it’s an attack on the Democrats to consolidate power for Republicans,” Sagar said. “It’s really that simple: You attack the Democrats by attacking the trade-union movement."

For decades in Iowa, unions and their members have been reliable funders, volunteers and voters for Democrats. Sagar himself serves as treasurer for the Iowa Democratic Party.

But the broader consequence, Sagar and others predicted, could be an erosion of public services and Iowa’s middle-class workforce. In rural counties in particular, they argued, unionized public sector jobs represent the backbone of the economy.

“What they’re doing is lowering the standards for the people we all depend on,” said Nick Norton, assistant business manager for Operating Engineers Local 234, a Des Moines-based union representing more than a dozen county public works crews and other units up for recertification in October.

Without the protections and wider range of benefits afforded by union membership, teachers, law enforcement officers and others may overlook rural jobs or leave them as soon as better opportunities come along elsewhere, union leaders say.

“The unintended consequences are going to be felt in every small town and rural country where there’s a police officer on the street or a city worker or county snowplow driver on the job,” said Jesse Case, secretary-treasurer for Cedar Rapids-based Teamsters Local 238. “A politician in Des Moines trying to tell a county in northeast Iowa how to interact with their employees is arrogant and laughable.”

Teamsters 238 represents about 70 bargaining units up for recertification in October, encompassing a couple thousand police officers, sheriff’s deputies, county road crews and others.

Deyoe, the Republican lawmaker, dismissed that argument by noting most employees across the state work without union representation. As in other fields, market forces will ensure employers are making competitive offers to employees, union critics argue.

“In most cases, the elected representatives, superintendents, city managers — they’ll have to compete for employees anyway,” he said. “They’ll have to make sure they don’t lose employees to neighboring schools or another city. They’ll have to compete for those people in the workforce.”

Voting begins Tuesday

In the relatively small round of elections beginning Tuesday, the Public Employment Relations Board will mail paper ballots to eligible employees in every bargaining unit with a single yes-or-no question asking, in effect: Would you like your current labor organization to continue representing you in collective bargaining with your employer?

In the much-larger October round of elections, PERB has contracted with a vendor that will conduct voting by phone and online.

Elections will last two weeks.

Labor leaders say the rules governing these elections were intentionally written by GOP lawmakers to make recertification onerous. In the most significant guideline, unions must win a majority of all employees covered by the contract — not just a majority of those who vote.

That means that employees who do not vote are counted as “no” votes and that, for example, in a 100-person union, a 49-1 vote would count as a loss for the union.

“The rules are such that there is not a single elected official — including all of those who voted for this crap — who could be elected under them,” said Sagar, the Iowa Federation of Labor president. “Nobody had a majority of 50 percent-plus-one of all people who could be registered to vote in their district.”

Deyoe defended the high voting threshold by arguing that the people who don’t vote in a union recertification are most likely opposed to representation.

“I wanted to make sure it was a clear majority that wanted to be represented by the union,” he said.

In the event of a loss, an existing union will be immediately decertified, rendering its current contract unenforceable and preventing workers from negotiating collectively on another one. Following a decertification, a new union could not be formed for two years.

Additionally, labor groups must pay the cost of conducting the election, creating a new, ongoing cost for unions with each expiring contract. PERB has set the cost at $1 per eligible employee.

Campaign is underway

Given the high stakes, unions are ramping up informational and organizational efforts to persuade workers — whether they’re union members or not — to back recertification.

Iowa State Education Association President Tammy Wawro spent last week in western Iowa meeting with teachers whose unions are up for recertification, part of an ongoing statewide travel schedule devoted to the recertification campaign.

Among those facing recertification in September is the Ballard Education Association, the union representing about 125 teachers in the Ballard Community School District in southern Story County.

Association President Laurie Moore, a middle school literacy and science teacher, said she and other union members have been sending emails, going classroom-to-classroom in the district's four buildings and giving presentations at staff meetings to remind teachers of the looming election.

“I’m fairly confident that everyone knows it’s coming up,” Moore said. “Now I’ve just got to work to make sure everyone actually votes.”

To that end, the union is handing out sample ballots, and plans to take the first real ballot they receive this week into each school to demonstrate the process for voting it, sealing it in its security envelopes and returning it.

Retired teachers, Moore said, are making posters, leaving treats in the teachers' lounges and planning to make phone calls whipping the vote in the coming days.

Educators make up a huge share of the public sector workers facing recertification votes in the coming weeks. All the September elections involve ISEA-affiliated bargaining units, and about half of the 483 units up for election in October represent teachers and other educators.

In Sioux City, Hinton, Le Mars and elsewhere, Wawro said, she saw school employees’ eyes grow big as the voting process and the implications were explained to them.

“There is energy and there is a little bit of anger, but it’s really focused,” Wawro said. “These elections are giving them a way to direct their energy and organize and make sure people understand.”