Pearl River      Labor Day is hardly in the rearview mirror, but it must be on peoples’ minds, because items about the struggles of city workers in both New Orleans and Little Rock have both hit my inbox.  In both cases, workers efforts to get a union or maintain viable collective bargaining rights seem stymied at every turn by recalcitrant city governments.

The New Orleans situation, we know too well.  Local 100, then with SEIU, won an election during Mayor Marc Morial’s last term to represent almost all of the departments in New Orleans city government.  Several years before that we had won an election and bargained a contract to represent workers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  It took us several years, but we were able to win an agreement as well in New Orleans.  Then things got complicated.  SEIU dictated that Local 100 be reorganized in Louisiana in order to give our city and school units to a newly constituted local, 21LA, and we did so with regrets.

Then Katrina hit in 2005.  More than 1500 city workers were laid off, and the city was in shambles.  Some of the details were never clear to me, but the Baton Rouge contract continued to be enforced, but in New Orleans the union was denied dues checkoff and was unable to enforce the agreement.  Leadership of the SEIU local went through a number of changes.  Sometime around 2018, SEIU seems to have given the units away to AFSCME District Council 17.  The SEIU Secretary-Treasurer’s report for 2020-2024 at their convention indicated that Local 21 had essentially been abandoned with all public units going to AFSCME and all private units going to Workers United/SEIU, and the local only averaging 35 members during that period.

AFSCME has had no better luck with the City of New Orleans, under current Mayor LaToya Cantrell, and has been in the news repeatedly in recent years begging for a meeting and asking the city council members for help.  At Large Council Member Helena Moreno introduced a measure in March to create a collective bargaining process which is on the ballot this November, although has gotten no attention or publicity to date.  Maybe it will resolve things, maybe not, but the bottom line is that city workers in New Orleans have essentially not been represented for 20 years.

Little Rock city workers have a long-standing contract between the city and AFSCME DC 17.  They complain that the contract in being ignored and not enforced.  The language triggering reopeners is ignored.  The language that would allow meet-and-confer opportunities on a broad range of topics is being refused by the city.  More recently, the city told members that they would only operate as ordered by the NLRB, seemingly not realizing that as a public body they are prohibited from coverage under federal labor law restricted to private sector workers.

While workers demand representation, state legislators are steadily trying to close the doors.  In Louisiana, there were nine different bills designed to restrict public sector organization and unions.  One would require recertification.  Another would reject any collective bargaining.  None passed this last session, but this is bad writing on the wall.  The picture is no better in Arkansas, Texas, or other southern states.  Florida, which was the only southern state with a collective bargaining law and a certification process, has now eviscerated those procedures under Governor Ron DeSantis, as another part of his feeble presidential bid.

Public employees in the South have a hard road to travel, and it’s not getting much smoother these days, despite the fact that workers are continually demanding change, justice, and representation.