Day service workers at Arc Bridges went on strike for one day – August 1 – against the unfair labor practices their company is committing. The strike was a huge success, with 70 percent participation, and a strong blow against the employer’s effort to decertify the union.
The workers are members of the new amalgamated Local 1123, chartered as a UE local in March. Local 1123 is the former independent American Federation of Professionals, which represents approximately 400 public and private sector workers in Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana.
The Arc Bridges group, totaling some 280 workers in two units (residential and day services) serve 700 developmentally disabled adults at 39 locations across Northwest Indiana. The five day service centers provide the clients with training and productive work. Only the day services workers struck on August 1.
Arc Bridges workers organized because of bad working conditions, low pay, a healthcare plan that only 30 percent can afford to buy, and the employer failing to pay for some vacations and overtime. For more than 18 months – starting well before AFP affiliated with UE, Arc Bridges workers were trying to negotiate economic justice, as well as better conditions for both employees and clients, in a first union contract. But they are up against an arrogant, belligerent employer.
STATE, NLRB INVESTIGATIONS
The union filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board, along with strong evidence that the company was illegally directing and assisting an effort by a handful of pro-management workers to decertify the union. This is the ULP over which workers struck. The union has filed other ULP charges; the NLRB issued a complaint and on July 28-29 put the company on trial for allegedly withholding a scheduled pay raise in order to discriminate against workers for unionizing.
While Arc Bridges receives 96 percent of its income from taxpayers – in the form of federal and state Medicare reimbursements – it has been spending much of that public money on its efforts to bust the union. In 2007 the company paid approximately $200,000 to a union-busting attorney, and another $192,000 to the union-busting consulting firm Modern Management.
To stop this outrageous behavior, UE wrote to every member of the Indiana state legislature, asking them to question whether Arc Bridges has been illegally diverting state and federal money into its illegal union-busting campaign.
As a result, a special investigation unit of the Indiana state government has been assigned to investigate the union’s concerns and other possible irregularities by Arc Bridges management. This task force has set up an office near Arc Bridges’s office and is aggressively pursuing its investigation. State officials are now also examining the possibility that Arc Bridges improperly and fraudulently misused money received in grants.