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STANLEY WORKERS PETITION LABOR BOARD FOR UE ELECTION




















December 28, 2007
St. Albans Messenger

Stanley Workers Petition Labor Board for UE Election
CIS contractor 'unfair,' say employees

ST. ALBANS CITY— United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America have formally filed for union recognition on behalf of the about 400 Stanley workers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services center here.

The petitions, bearing signatures of two-thirds of center's contracted workforce, were presented to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) late on Friday, Dec. 21. Workers themselves presented Stanley with a request that it voluntarily recognize the union on Wednesday.
UE, Stanley and its subcontractors now need to look at the possible composition of the bargaining unit — which workers the union would represent — and whether Stanley and its three subcontractors would be a joint employer for the purposes of union representation, according to Kim Lawson of UE, who now has a Federal Street office in St. Albans.
If the companies cannot reach an agreement with the union on these issues the NLRB will hold a hearing, either in Boston or in St. Albans.
The NLRB would then choose a date for a secret ballot election in which workers would decide whether to adopt the union. A simple majority of union workers is required to make a decision either way.
Sharon Bigelow, who has worked at the center for four years, told the Messenger, "Contractors come and go, but the workers stay." She now believes that it is "only through having a union … that we're going to get a fair shake."
Bigelow pointed out that when Stanley took over the contract on Dec. 3, it was data entry clerks who received pay cuts, but "in three years it may be all of us."
Clerks at the center do file set-up and data entry of immigration forms that are then sent on to Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) employees for adjudication. The work is put out to bid by CIS periodically. Stanley recently won a three-year contract to oversee the file operations, set-up and data entry performed at the center.
Bonnie Machia, who did not suffer a pay cut, is also supporting the union.
"When you become a union everybody has a voice," Machia said. Machia, who recently returned to the center after working at Fletcher Allen Healthcare in Burlington, described UE as a union that is "of the people, by the people, for the people."
"When you get hired there, you get no training," Machia said of the situation with Stanley. She said workers are simply handed manuals full of terms they have never heard before.
Machia is doing file set-up, which she describes as a mailroom function. However, she is being paid less than mailroom employees.
When Machia will move from doing set-up to doing data entry is a decision that is in the hands of the unit manager, with no formal guidelines concerning length of employment or skills that must be mastered before she can be shifted to data entry, she said.
Marianne Goyette is supporting the union because, she said, "I feel like we need a voice. We need someone to back us up."
Goyette did not vote for the union during a failed 2003 union drive because she felt that workers talking directly with management would be enough. "This time I'm really for the union," she said.
"We don't need to get over it," one worker said, referring to a remark workers have attributed to Jerry Sharpe of Stanley at a "town hall" meeting on Thursday, Dec. 22. Sharpe reportedly opened the meeting saying, "In regards to you people who had a pay cut, get over it and move on."
Workers called the remark insulting and rude, and reported that a clerk who challenged Sharpe's behavior was rewarded with 10 minutes of applause from her co-workers.
One of the words that turns up again and again, when talking with Stanley employees, is respect. Bigelow said that Stanley doesn't recognize the value of the knowledge and experience many of the workers have. They're "not looking at their experienced keyers (keyboard operators) as any sort of benefit," Bigelow said.
She offered as an example another remark attributed to Sharpe in which he is said to have observed that less experienced workers were completing more files than inexperienced workers. Bigelow's response to that was to point out that more experienced workers are handling more complex files containing more forms and more beneficiaries. With more information to enter, those files naturally take longer.
"Stanley doesn't really listen to us," Goyette said.
Echoing what other Stanley employees have previously said, Bigelow talked about all of the factors that must be considered when workers handle a file. Clerks must make sure the fee has been paid correctly; that the file has been sent to the appropriate jurisdiction and is filled out correctly; and that the applicant meets the qualifications.
Workers also are concerned about an upcoming "cap."
"The cap," as workers refer to it, is a period during which the government accepts applications for visas from highly skilled workers such as doctors. The cap is short-lived but it can result in as many as 80,000 files arriving at the center in a single day. "Until you experience cap, you don't know cap," Bigelow said.
When Stanley took over the center it already was still dealing with the backlog created by last April's cap, according to Bigelow.
Goyette believes the wage cuts and reclassifications will make it harder for Stanley to deal with the upcoming rush of cap work. "The data entry clerks can't go to the mail room or the file room, so I guess we're going to be sitting there watching it," she said.
Stanley reportedly has been telling workers that they cannot afford to restore the workers' former pay rates for financial reasons. "They're bottom line is that they want to make money for their stockholders," Bigelow said.
"They said in a floor meeting that they will go bankrupt if they restored us to our old wage scale without reimbursement from CIS," Jeremy Murray, who has worked at the center for 6 years, said. "Over a half billion dollar corporation and they're trying to play the victim card."
According to their Security and Exchange Commission filings, Stanley, whose sole line of business is government contracts, paid $1.2 million in bonuses to company officers last year. Paying the St. Albans workers at their former rate of pay for a year would cost less than $300,000, according to Murray.
Stanley sent a letter to its workers yesterday signed by senior vice president Bill Karlson.
"We understand how frustrated many of you feel," the letter reads in part. "As we discussed with many of you last Thursday, we, too, have been frustrated. … Admittedly, Stanley and our subcontractors have not made a very good first impression."
Speaking of the letter, Murray said, "It basically made it sound that if we were well-educated about the situation we'd change our mind about the union."
"I'm not uninformed," Murray said.
"I don't know why they have to waste $800 per hour on lawyers to feed them lines that are tired and irrelevant," Murray said. That was a reference to Stanley having reportedly retained Seyfarth Shaw, LLP, a large law firm best known for its representation of grape growers during the growers' battles with the United Farm Workers Association in the 1970s.
Bigelow said that she believes Stanley employees need someone "not just speaking for us, but speaking with us."
She added, "They (Stanley) won't listen to us. We've tried."
"The union will stand behind us and protect us," Goyette said. She hopes that with a union, Stanley will "treat us with respect and dignity and recognize that we're intelligent."