After months of planning and coalition building, 13 unions representing bargaining units across ten different university campuses and branches around New Mexico, including UE Locals 1466 and 1498, gathered in Albuquerque for the first Higher Education Labor United (HELU) summit in the state. The summit included presentations covering legislative advocacy, New Mexico Tax Code, and successful revenue campaigns in New Mexico and Massachusetts. Participants also began to draft HELU-NM's vision statement.
There are seven comprehensive universities and seven community colleges that call New Mexico home. Year after year, these schools and their workers are pitted against each other at The Roundhouse, the state capitol, as they compete for the same, ever-shrinking pool of money. Additionally, higher education workers are not included in the same language that mandates and standardizes employer-sponsored insurance coverage for other public employees in the state.
After attending a convening in Boston on tax revenue reform, UNM faculty union President Ernesto Longa sought to change that. Longa invited two speakers from the convening to discuss ways to generate more money at the state level to support higher education and the workers that keep those institutions running.
One of these speakers was Amber Wallin, Executive Director of the State Revenue Alliance. Amber spoke about the years of work she and an army of other organizers in NM put into a successful tax revenue reform campaign, Stronger New Mexico.
The goal of this campaign was to reform the tax code to generate a stable source of revenue that could be allocated to programs and policies that benefit New Mexicans. In 2022, this new tax code was enacted, implementing a new top tax rate for high income earners, reducing capital gains deductions, increasing the corporate income tax, and increasing the royalty rate for oil and gas production. Through the revenue generated from this new tax code, the state is now able to offer, among other things, universal free childcare.
A second speaker, Max Page, President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and organizer for the Fair Share Amendment Campaign, outlined the work of a similar organizing effort in his state. This new code taxes those who earn over a million dollars a year and in doing so, generates three billion dollars, all of which goes to public education and transportation.
Michelle Granger from the faculty union at New Mexico State University - Las Cruces campus said:
I'm so excited about the ways we can collaborate. and I'm so tired of the gatekeeper mentality that's keeping us separated and isolated. And even though we come from different unions, obviously we have so much more in common than we do that separates us.
Following in the footsteps of these successful campaigns, higher education union members in New Mexico are now working to win new revenue to cover the policies that they so desperately need and that the state legislature insists they cannot afford. This marks a massive shift as many of these unions have never met each other, partially due to so many of them being newly established.
Many locals have been independently working to expand healthcare coverage for their bargaining units at The Roundhouse. The state of coverage varies sharply with employment type and university. Throughout the summit, this disparity in insurance coverage was the most galvanizing issue for the union members in attendance. UE Local 1498 steward Jeremy Doniger at New Mexico State University said, “I just hope that we continue meeting and working together to push to get this healthcare coverage for all employees first and foremost.”
To get the work done, members of the HELU-NM steering committee are making sure to center organizing first. In all of the successful campaigns, strong unions were at the forefront. To make this work possible, and because union shop is illegal for public employees, first steps for this coalition include working to increase member density across the industry. Additionally, work needs to be done to help workers understand that their employer is not going to give them the insurance benefits they deserve just by asking nicely.
“I think our next step is a layup, because I think the legislature is already primed for 80/20 [insurance split], so I think that we get a good win there.” said Andy Herndandez, an organizing committee member from the faculty union at Western New Mexico University, “It teaches us how to win and then we move forward to the next win.”