Leadership in AFSCME DC 37 is Stifling Rank and File Engagement, Members Say

(Reprinted from The Chief.)

Members of District Council 37's Local 3005 in New York City say that attempts to mobilize their coworkers over the last two years have been stonewalled and met with apathy by union leadership.

Current and former members say that since the pandemic, they have presented proposals to create a membership committee, speak out about city budget cuts, fight for telework rights and other efforts and that all were slow-walked or shot down by the union’s president Jeff Oshins.

Most recently, some members have wanted to introduce motions calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and for the New York City Employees' Retirement System to divest from Israeli bonds and securities. Members have been trying to raise motions on the topics for eight months but leadership has responded by saying the union can’t get involved in political matters, that open meetings aren’t the proper place for discussions on divestment and, in one case, by abruptly ending a meeting early.

"Leadership is doing anything to keep us out from any sort of democratic involvement,” said Kate Klein, a Local 3005 member who works as a city research scientist at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “They don’t want us involved in any formal way at all.”

Last year, members proposed reviving the union’s dormant membership committee to create a body that could help onboard members, maintain the email list and take other actions that members, some of whom had been in other unions before, felt should be provided by the local as a baseline of service.

“We were just trying to engage members and make them feel excited about the union that they pay dues to,” said a former Local 3005 member involved with the proposal.

Oshins responded to the proposal by writing in an email that those responsibilities were already being carried out by union leadership, and that the committee would be largely redundant and unnecessary. Members debated with Oshins about the matter for weeks, but the panel was never formed. According to its website, the union has no one chairing its membership, social or safety and health committees.

Meghan, a shop steward in Local 3005, said that the fight over the membership committee is emblematic of the union's top-down structure and leadership’s “antagonistic” posture towards militant, engaged members. “Leadership makes all the decisions and those trickle down to us,” she said, requesting her last name not be used due to privacy concerns.

Meghan argued that the structure has resulted in members who were once engaged over issues like telework or DC 37’s contract campaign no longer showing up to meetings because their concerns and questions will not get addressed or answered.

Oshins did not respond to requests for comment.

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Local 3005, chartered in 2018, has 1,100 members, all of whom work at DOHMH and the Office of Chief Medical Examiner Office. The members used to be part of Local 375, another white-collar local whose members have been frustrated with leadership, but Local 3005 broke away from the larger union when it was placed under administratorship in the mid-2010s.

Frustrated with the inability to bring motions and concerned with growing disillusionment because of leadership’s failure to engage the rank and file, Klein and dozens of other members initiated a new method of engagement in June to “turn up the heat.” Members discovered that month that the local’s constitution allowed for a special meeting to be called if 50 members signed a petition.

Last month, Klein and 62 of her coworkers signed a petition demanding a meeting on divestment by July 31.

“After months of our efforts being blocked through persistent—and what we feel is unconstitutional—interruption of motions, ending meetings early to avoid discussion, and empty promises to follow up outside of meetings, we felt like this was our only option left to be able to exercise our rights as rank and file members to motion for a democratic discussion and vote on this topic,” the members wrote in an email to Oshins accompanying the petition.

Oshins, in an emailed reply, told the members that he received the petition and would respond accordingly. But no meeting has been scheduled, and the members say that they plan to pursue charges through the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, DC 37’s parent union, if Oshins refuses to hold a meeting.

"Fundamentally, what I want is a union that is communicative, open to democratic discussion, transparent and helpful,” said Klein. Oshins “appears to not have the wherewithal to have a democratic debate, to be able to handle that."

The former Local 3005 member says the problem of top-down leadership is an issue across DC 37.

“People who are in leadership across DC 37 locals really don’t know how to react to productively engaged rank and file,” he said. “It’s automatically perceived as a threat. It threatens the status quo and the hierarchy just to have members who are not elected to leadership write a petition."

"Instead of being excited about the prospects of dozens of people, who otherwise would just never participate in the union, being excited about the union and seeing it as a vehicle for political change, they see it as a threat,” he added.

Duncan Freeman writes for The Chief, where this article was originally published.