AFL-CIO worker urges students to get involved

Sam Smucker and Cathy Stoddart visited a feminist theory class in the Cathedral of Learning to… Sam Smucker and Cathy Stoddart visited a feminist theory class in the Cathedral of Learning to spread the word about unions and injustice in the workplace and to recruit potential union organizers.

Smucker, a coordinator in the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, is visiting select classes and organizations this week, giving brief presentations on what the Organizing Institute is about and asking for student participation.

Stoddart, a registered nurse discussed her personal experiences in starting a union at Allegheny General Hospital in conjunction with Smucker’s presentation.

The function of union organizing is to assist workers in starting unions at their places of work.

Smucker has worked for the Organizing Institute for six years and said that he came to Pitt to recruit students for union organizing and to encourage them to consider it as a career. As an organizer, Smucker speaks not only to employers, but also to workers at their homes about the conditions of the workplace. He said that his efforts are not a sales pitch, but rather an attempt to bring about change.

The Organizing Institute sponsors two programs for those interested in union organizing.

The first is a four-month paid apprenticeship for those strongly considering union organizing as a career.

The second, which is called Union Summer, is a four-week paid internship that goes on over the summer for those who want to learn more about union formation. Both of these programs offer students first-hand experience working to get unions started. The creation of unions involves working on union organization campaigns, contract campaigns and helping to organize strikes. Through these programs, students are sent to major cities across the United States to work on the formation of unions.

Smucker said that students had both good and bad experiences during the apprenticeship program and Union Summer. He explained that many students in the program made progress in helping the groups they worked with start unions. Others encountered difficulty in forming unions, which mostly arose from Union Locals that didn’t have good plans, requiring the students and group working to form the union to draw up plans from scratch.

During her presentation, Stoddart shared her and her co-workers’ experiences in starting a union for health care workers at Allegheny General Hospital. She said that there are no laws in the United States that limit the number of hours nurses, doctors and health care workers can work. She said that it was typical for nurses to work 20 hours a day and added that mandatory overtime was “indentured servitude.”

In addition to the long hours worked, “[Nurses] didn’t have the right to say how many patients we could take care of,” Stoddart said.

She also pointed out the increased risk of injury to both patients and nurses involved with rest-deprived nurses caring for patients.

After Stoddart and her colleagues formed their union, they reached a contract agreement with Allegheny General. The agreement put limits on the number of hours nurses worked, specifically by prohibiting mandatory overtime, and on how many patients they see at one time. Stoddart said that she received her first raise in five years as a result of the agreement. Other parts of the agreement included a condition allowing workers to obtain a union leave of absence to work with other hospital workers in forming unions.

Stoddart pointed out that people who start unions are not professional lobbyists but middle-class workers and that they often “don’t realize that you can fight a big organization.”