UE NEWS Updates

The members of Sub-local 84 of UE Local 222 - the paraprofessionals, library and security aides in the Wolcott public schools - have a new four-year labor agreement with significant wage increase, and which retains their defined benefit pension plan. The negotiated settlement comes at the end of a long, hard battle which included a trip to binding arbitration.

After eight months of struggle and three contract extensions, UE Local 274 members who drive, dispatch, and maintain buses for the Franklin Regional Transit Authority (FRTA) approved a new contract on February 6. The agreement brings a 1.5 percent general wage increase retroactive to July 1, 2012, the expiration date of the old contract; a 3 percent raise in July 2013; and 2.4 percent in July 2014. The contract will expire on January 31, 2015. The union also negotiated a $100 increase in the clothing allowance for maintenance workers.

Workers at the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service Center (USCIS) in Chicago were fed up with pay cuts and insults from supervisors. They began organizing last August, and on October 18 they voted nearly unanimously for UE in a National Labor Relations Board Election to UE. They then got down to the work of building their new union, UE Local 1118, and preparing to negotiate with the company, federal contactor FedConsulting Inc. (FCi).

Contract negotiations for workers in the Highland Local Schools were delayed for several months past the old contract's June 30, 2012 expiration date because of an effort by an anti-union group to get rid of UE Local 741. The local soundly defeated that attack, and then overcame a terrible set of management proposals, and an anti-union lawyer representing the school board, to negotiate a three-year contact with good wage increases and other improvements.