UE NEWS Updates

UE’s General Executive Board, newly expanded by elections held at July’s regional council meetings, met over Zoom on September 21 and 22. Under the regional reorganization carried out over the past few months, each of UE’s two geographic regions is now represented on the GEB by the region’s president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer, along with five at-large members elected from the regional executive board.

Local 222 Vice President and General Executive Board member Margaret Dabrowski addressed a virtual town hall on Medicare for All organized by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on August 26. Dabrowski, a 911 dispatcher for the City of New Britain, spoke both about how the for-profit health insurance system affects people who call her as a 911 operator and about her own experiences with the healthcare system.

Faced with budget shortfalls due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kenyon College Board of Trustees chose to suspend all retirement contributions for their 600 or so full-time staff. Among those staff were the 25 members of UE Local 712, which represents maintenance workers at the liberal arts college. Local 712 — supported by a coalition of students, faculty, and alumni — were able to win repayment of the missing year of retirement contributions over the next three years, which will also be extended to the rest of the staff at the college.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading in the U.S. in March, it quickly became clear that the regional council meetings scheduled for late March and early April — large in-person gatherings of people from many states — could not be held as initially planned. But after lengthy discussions between national and regional leadership, assisted by technical expertise from UE staff, both new regions held their founding meetings virtually in July, over the video-conferencing service Zoom.