For paraprofessionals in Albuquerque,“EA Day” was traditionally one of the year’s highlights. The celebration sponsored by the Albuquerque Educational Assistants Association—where the EA comes from—provided a chance for paraprofessionals who belong to the union to get together and be recognized for their important work. It made sense to limit the event to dues-paying members.

“That was a foolish mistake,” local president Kathy Chavez says in retrospect. “We were sabotaging our union.” Chavez explains that her union’s involvement in an AFT project on internal organizing made her realize that by limiting EA Day and other union events to members, the union was also limiting its opportunity to attract non-members and show them why they should join. “How else are you going to get to people who aren’t in the union?” asks Chavez, who is also an AFT vice president. The union started welcoming non-members to all of its events, and many non-members have now signed on.

The AFT project that spurred Chavez to rethink the way her union works is known as Membership Consolidation/Internal Organizing, or MC/IO for short. The three-year-old program has made a big difference in many of the 15 AFT locals—including eight in Florida—that have been involved with it. Some, like the paraprofessionals in Albuquerque, only include PSRPs, while others are joint teacher-PSRP locals.

A look at some numbers shows why MC/IO, which has also been replicated by some AFT state affiliates, is so crucial to keeping the union growing. For years, the AFT has been one of the fastest-growing unions in the country. Membership has increased annually for more than 20 years, including almost 40,000 new members in the last year. (See the chart on page 5 for AFT PSRP organizing wins during that time.)
If every non-member represented by the 15 MC/IO locals joined their respective unions, however, that would add an amazing 125,000 members. Even in a union with 1.3 million members, that’s a huge number.

As Rick Kuplinski, a deputy director in the AFT’s organization and field services department in charge of MC/IO, points out, the program was created in 2002 to increase membership in places where membership is strictly voluntary. That primarily means states in the South and Southwest, including some like Texas where collective bargaining isn’t even allowed.

“What we learned is that this is not as simple as doing a better job at recruiting,” Kuplinski says. “What it comes down to is fundamentally changing how one comes to know the union in the first place, how one experiences it on a daily basis—especially at work—and the nature of the relationships formed among those who call ourselves unionists.”

Four pillars
The project incorporates four main approaches:

•  reaching out to new employees and helping them get acclimated and become successful on the job;
• improving data collection and management to target potential employees;
• organizing around issues that concern potential members; and
• improving leadership by encouraging stewards to become more active.

One place where all four pillars are solidly in place is Pasco County, Fla., where the United School Employees of Pasco (USEP) represents the whole array of PSRPs as well as teachers. That sort of diverse membership, which includes everyone from low-paid food service employees to teachers with master’s degrees earning a decent living, presents a challenge to a local union and its leaders.

The data-collection piece is important with PSRPs because it allows the union to identify priority issues for different job groups and then develop a strategy for addressing some of those concerns. “We have to take some baby steps, have some success with that group. That helps build credibility with the whole membership,” says USEP president Lynne Webb.

Recently, for example, a bus driver was wrongfully terminated by the district. In the past, Webb explains, the union would have dealt with that as an individual problem to be solved. But with the new MC/IO mindset, they turned the dismis-sal into a major campaign that involved leafleting, picketing at the school board’s meetings and phone calls to board members. “The other drivers connected with this driver and saw how it might happen to them and understood why they need to be in it together,” Webb says.

Other examples of issues-based initiatives in the local include a wellness program for transportation employees, lots of activities around helping paraprofessionals meet the new job requirements of No Child Left Behind, greater involvement with the orientation program for new food service employees, and a survey of data-entry operators aimed at getting a handle on growing workloads.

“Now we look at everything we do under the microscope of internal organizing and how what we’re doing furthers the goal of increasing our membership and activating our members,” Webb explains.

The fourth element—leadership training for building stewards—has also helped nurture a new group of activists in the MC/IO locals. In Pasco, this includes people like Nelson Page, a custodian at Pasco High School. Page completed the union’s rigorous two-day “certified building representative” training. One thing the training taught him was how to approach people about joining the union and also some of the key issues that workers in different jobs face, says Page, the building rep for the high school’s PSRPs.

Teachers, Page observes, have regular opportunities to meet; support staff, by contrast, have to “just try to get together when we can” because there are not regular meetings. One advantage Page enjoys is that his wife is a teacher at the school—and the union’s teacher building rep. “We try to double team [potential members] sometimes,” he jokes.

No bargaining allowed
While a state like Florida has no law requiring employees to join the union or pay a fee for the representation the union provides, school employees at least are allowed to collectively bargain a contract. Not so in Texas. While bargaining is illegal, a handful of AFT locals have gained exclusive consultation rights that at least give them a formal avenue to raise issues with management. Corpus Christi AFT, another MC/IO local, is one of those affiliates with consultation rights. When school employees in the district were surveyed as part of the project, the results forced local leaders to re-examine what they did, says former president Linda Bridges, who now serves as president of the Texas Federation of Teachers.

“People liked us,” she says. “We had great name identity; they just didn’t want to pay for our services.”

As in Pasco County, the focus in Corpus Christi has been to find issues that are important to specific segments of the membership. Constituency group meetings are held—open to all employees—to discuss possible issues for the union leadership to address during consultation. As it addresses different issues, says Elaine Jones, the local’s MC/IO coordinator, the union makes sure to inform employees about what it is doing and arranges for union staff to visit work sites—always with plenty of membership forms.

While salaries and benefits are clearly priority issues in Corpus Christi, as they are everywhere, Jones says the union was able to make some progress on another issue that crosses the PSRP ranks. As an indication of their low status, support staff in Texas have no right under state law to regular breaks. Through consultation, the union secured a policy that gives staff two 15-minute breaks per shift. While that might sound minor to employees in strong union states, it was a big victory in Texas.

The bottom line
One obvious way to gauge the success of the MC/IO project is membership numbers. While signing up all 125,000 of those potential members is unrealistic, many locals are making steady progress. One thing the project emphasizes is not only looking at membership totals but also “density”—the percentage of workers in different job categories who are members. This is important because a local might be growing—or shrinking—based more on student enrollment than on anything it is doing to recruit members.

In Corpus Corpus Christi, for example, Jones says the union recruited almost 600 new PSRPs and teachers last year, one of its best ever. At the same time, the union lost 500 members, many of them retiring teachers. “Even though we did a great job of recruiting, our membership stayed pretty much the same,” she says. So the density approach gives a better sense of the progress the union is making.

Back in Albuquerque, Chavez says MC/IO has helped her membership total approach 50 percent of the bargaining unit—nowhere near everyone but up from just over 40 percent a couple of years ago. One change in focus has been to aggressively target new members because they are more likely to join than veterans. Energetic building reps like Carmen Baldonado are helping with that. “It’s hard because salaries are low and people can’t afford it,” she says. “But we keep showing them we’re out there and giving them support.”

One surprisingly obvious lesson from the project, Kuplinski says, is that some unions never even ask some potential members to join, at least on a one-on-one basis. Clearly, how people are asked to join and what the union has to offer are important, but many people won’t join if they aren’t asked.

The program is helping make a difference through activists like Baldonado, who are working to build their unions. “I figure my membership is my voice,” she says. “It’s time for me to get out there and recruit so the union can move ahead.”