Shelly Baskin, Delegate to HELU from United Campus Workers Southeast (CWA 3821)
Faculty and staff in the Georgia University system are being told that they have to come in to work five days a week or get laid off. Some of these workers were originally hired as remote workers and live at significant distances from their campus. Faced with the choice between losing their jobs or dealing with family responsibilities that require flexibility and the high costs of transportation, workers have turned to their union, United Campus Workers Southeast, a Communications Workers of America local.
UCW Southeast is one of the labor unions that represents workers in the 17 states where public employees do not have collective bargaining. In these states, workers can form unions and take action to protect their work, but they cannot do it through collective bargaining and they don’t have contracts. In some cases like Georgia, collective bargaining is explicitly prohibited except for firefighters. Therefore, while this mandate disrupts working conditions in a way that would be a contract violation in other states, in Georgia the union has to make its case through protest and public opinion. This requires extensive organizing and in many cases, basic education about what labor unions can do.
Public protest and influencing public opinion is keeping UCW (CWA Local 3821) busy. Members have been fighting fiercely to Defend Remote Work at their state institutions. On October 14, members in the Atlanta area held a rally at Georgia State during the Board of Regents meeting, gaining positive press coverage and prompting a response from the University System of Georgia. Their petition demanding that remote and hybrid employees not be forced to return in-person contains this powerful messaging:
“Mandatory in-person work will disrupt the lives of numerous employees, many of whom were hired as hybrid/fully remote, or may have health, elder, or child care needs that depend on the flexibility of remote work. Workers will take on the financial burden of increased transportation and parking expenses, and will be forced to spend more time in traffic, away from their families. This reduction in the quality of working conditions, increased personal risk, and mounting financial burden are unacceptable. Workers who are unable to comply with the return-to-office mandate will be forced to retire or find new jobs, increasing already high turnover rates.”
HELU member unions can support this fight. Sign and share the petition here! Spread the word and take a listen to the interview that members David Hyde and Julie Carmine LaCorte did with the WRFG Labor Forum to explain the stakes of this campaign. Their part begins at about 33.09.
To learn more about how CWA organizes unions in states where there is no collective bargaining law, see: https://ucw-cwa.org/about-us