Significant union unit

The effort began several months ago, when all 21 were asked to sign cards committing to joining AFSCME as a unit. A “super-majority” of the aides signed up, according to Ally Chan, part-time legislative aide to Supervisor Noelia Corzo. The union card signatures and tallies remain secret under labor law.

The next step is for the board to vote to recognize their legislative aides as a bargaining unit, and then negotiations can begin for a contract. Early in the effort, Corzo and colleagues Ray Mueller and David Canepa indicated they would support the unionization of their aides, according to Julie Lind, head of the county Central Labor Council.

The aides’ wages and benefits are on a par with similarly classified county employees who have union contracts.

But it appears this effort was less about money and more about the sometimes-personal role the aides play in the work, lives and careers of their bosses, and the nature of being at-will employees.

The role of a legislative aide is unique among county employees; they are expected to work nontraditional hours and perform a wide range of duties representing supervisors within county government and the community.

The organizing effort revealed some uneasiness that aides are asked “to perform work outside their duties and responsibilities … outside their scope of work,” Lind said. Aides felt they had “been treated poorly or spoken down to by a member,” she said.

There has been a personal element to Lind’s push for this effort. A former legislative aide in Sacramento, she said her own experience included “a series of duties that had nothing to do with my actual job” — picking up a legislator’s children at school, picking up dry cleaning, or organizing campaign events at a member’s home. “There were multiple times and places I could have really used the protections of a union contract,” she said.

But, she added, it was a “minor number” of county aides “who wanted to embrace representation because they had concerns about their employers.”

“It’s not about right now,” Chan said. “It’s protection for the long term.” Protection, specifically, from the kind of upheaval last year in the Sheriff’s Office. The office rank-and-file staff were able to resist what they regarded as unfair and improper management by then-Sheriff Christina Corpus. Leading the fight against Corpus’ practices and policies were two union units — the Deputy Sheriff’s Association and the Organization of Sheriff’s Sergeants.

Ultimately, both organizations and the labor council were key backers of Measure A, a successful ballot measure that empowered the supervisors to fire Corpus.

“They saw the DSA and the OSS standing up for their members and fighting back,” Lind said. “Members of the Sheriff’s Office did not have to go through this in a vacuum. … Watching what happened during Measure A, and what it meant to these workers to have a union representing them and the labor council … demonstrated the power of their union. Had there not been representation in the Sheriff’s Office, (Corpus) probably would still be there.”

The aides remain at-will, a status codified in the county charter. This has meant they could be fired or disciplined outside the normal scope of procedures accorded other employees.

Negotiations for the new contract have yet to begin, and they can be expected to take a year. It appears the focus will be on personnel practices and policies.

“When AFSCME presented this to us — grievance procedures, potential for more parity across the (supervisorial) offices, what our role looks like — what we heard all along is that by unionizing, it’s the only way to increase what we have,” Chan said.

This is a big win for Lind and the labor council.

She said this is only the second legislative body in the state in which aides have unionized. The other is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

A DISSENTING NOTE: In last week’s column I referenced the value we place on dissent. I ran out of room, but I wanted to take particular note of those regular irregulars who comment on my column. They rarely agree with me, often are offended by my thoughts, but they are loyal — maybe not to me, but certainly to a fundamental American value.