Nearly 250 workers at the Vermont Service Center located in St. Albans and Essex gained UE representation on September 21 in an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (UE). The vote was 176 to 38 in favor of UE, the largest union victory in Vermont to date this year.
"We are happy because the Union will give the contracted workers some stability. It's about time this happened," said Lynn Corbett, a general clerk at the St. Albans facility.
This win brings into UE a group of workers whose organizing effort came up short in the initial 2008 UE organizing campaign and NLRB elections at the service center. Their opening for a second chance came a few months ago, when the old group of federal contractors who ran the center were replaced in a rebidding of the contracts by the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal agency ultimately responsible for the center. Workers at the Vermont Service Center are now employed by FedConsulting Inc., a Virginia based company. These employees perform data entry and file maintenance tasks for USCIS. In the January 2008 NLRB elections, 90 of the employees, then employed by Northrop Grumman, won union representation and formed UE Local 208.
The local recently completed negotiations with FedConsulting - along with UE Local 1008 members at the California Service Center in Laguna Niguel - resulting in a contract which guarantees unionized employees raises equal to 3 percent for each of the next four years, protects benefits and includes provisions to recognize seniority, protect against unjust discipline and more.
The newly organized workers will automatically be covered by the vast majority of the provisions of the new union contract. The union and the company will need only to negotiate wage increases for the new union members.
The election victory makes UE Local 208 the "wall-to-wall" bargaining representative for all workers at the Vermont Service Center, as well as all workers at the California Service Center. Pam L'Esperance who is a member Local 208 in the existing union bargaining unit said, "We feel like we are all one now."
Local 208 and the newly-organized Service Center workers were assisted in the campaign by UE International Representatives Kimberly Lawson and Karen Hardin.