State Agency Rebuffs NEPBA Attempt to Sever NAGE Members
April 21, 2010
The state’s Division of Labor Relations has rejected a petition by the New England Police Benevolent Association to sever Worcester’s emergency dispatchers from NAGE Local 495, which represents some 500 city workers.
Sean Maher, president of NAGE Local 495, said that someone purporting to be from NEPBA asked the Worcester employees to sign cards calling for an “informational meeting.” The cards actually allowed the rival union to petition the state to sever the dispatchers from Local 495.
“The other group had no case, and the petition failed on its merits,” Maher said. “But if you try something that underhanded, in the end, you’ll fail. Our members are happy to have this case completed and behind us.”
Background:
Worcester’s emergency 911 dispatchers were moved from public safety to civilian job titles in a unified “communications department” in the early 1990s. They had been part of NAGE Local 495 for years, had representation on executive boards and negotiating committees, had particular chapters of the contract that covered their special job circumstances, and had been represented by NAGE national representatives during that entire time.
In 2009, NEPBA filed a petition to decertify the dispatchers and senior dispatchers from NAGE. The DLR determined that the proper petition in this case was not decertification, but severance, the removal of those job titles from the bargaining unit and the formation of a new unit for affected members. In its amended petition, NEPBA contended that the communications department employees met both conditions required to trigger a severance in a union local: First, that the dispatchers comprised a functionally distinct unit with interests and negotiating needs sufficiently different from those of the rest of the unit; and second, that they were not being represented appropriately because of those differences.
NAGE stipulated that the dispatchers in the communications department were different from the majority of other city employees represented by Local 495. Their schedules and several job conditions were quite different—facts well represented in specific contract provisions.
The second prong of the test, however, was where NEPBA failed. NAGE Attorney Tim Bailey presented ample evidence at hearing that the dispatchers were well integrated into the workings of Local 495. They’d long had their own representative on the NAGE Local 495 executive board; a dispatcher had held the position of executive board recording secretary from as far back as 1996; and there was always a steward from the communications department serving as a department representative. NAGE had always included a dispatcher on the negotiating team and the dispatchers’ particular needs had been addressed contractually. In a recent question about a policy change regarding overtime, the local asked the dispatchers to take an informal vote on the matter and abided by that vote.
The three members of the DLR’s Employment Relations Board ruled that NEPBA failed to satisfy the requirements of a petition to sever the dispatchers from Local 495 and dismissed their petition.