Deke's Note: My third attempt tonight to play "catch up" after a hectic week!
This post features John Westerman, running for ATU757 Vice President.
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| John Westerman |
1) Please briefly introduce yourself to the membership. How long have you been a transit employee and in what capacity?
Brothers and sisters. My name is John Westerman. I’ve been with TriMet for 2.5 years. Before moving to customer service, I was an operator out of the Center St. garage. Before I came to TriMet I had recently finished a master’s degree in library and information science, but I graduated from that program right into the pandemic. I had a plane ticket in my hand to a college in Minnesota for a librarian position, but because of Covid I was never able to take that flight. The jobs for librarians quickly dried up and I was already frustrated with the labor situation in higher education. So, I was happy to fully return to my working-class roots when I got a job as an operator with TriMet.
My father was a logger and a roofer, and I’ve been working either in the woods or on a roof since I was 10 years old. During university I worked with the Laborers Union. In fact, I helped build the MAX light rail tunnels under the zoo. My brother has been an organizer and business manager with the IBEW out of Newport and Coos Bay for the last 30 years and before that my grandfather was a union Millwright in North Bend. I am a proud member of the working class and unionism is in my blood.
I believe that this opportunity to organize with and fight shoulder to shoulder with my brothers and sisters in this union is the greatest opportunity I have ever had. But all is not well in our Union. The leaders, such as they are, are comfortable making decisions without us behind closed doors. Together we can change that and reclaim this union for the Rank and File.
Those of you that know me know that I have a PhD and you might get the idea from reading this that I’ve spent a fair amount of time with my nose buried in books, and that’s true. Some weeks in grad school we’d average 1000 pages a week. But I’ve also spent years in the field doing research and working and traveling the world. I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan as a civilian aid worker in 2002. I’ve negotiated with Warlords over small grant funds in Lash Ker Gah and I’ve built schools and helped rebuild farms in the Arghandab river valley. I’ve helped respond to earthquakes in Pakistan and I’ve traveled extensively throughout the Ferghana Valley of Central Asia and many other places as well. These were all difficult places to work in, and the people I worked with were always the absolute salt of the earth. What drove me to do work and research in these places is what still drives me now and that is a fundamental belief in the right all of us have to a better life.
2) What are your unique skills and experience which make you a logical choice for the office you are seeking?
I believe that the only real requirement for a leadership role in a Union is to be a member in good standing and have a willingness to stand and fight for your brothers and sisters. Having said that, I do bring a useful skillset to this position. I am an excellent and experienced researcher and for any problem that comes before us, I will be able to thoroughly research and understand not only the problem but the history of that problem. For instance, the recent claw back MOA signed by our current president, Shirley Block, is probably one of the strictest and most punitive in the industry. These so-called TRAP (Training Repayment Agreement Provisions) agreements exist in a shaky legal context and are increasingly being challenged in the courts. A small bit of research on the part of our leadership would have revealed that these kinds of agreements are bad for labor. Any consultation with the rank and file in this union would have been met with a resounding “hell no”. This is the problem with our current representative model of unionism. We are handing over our power to an expert leader who goes on to make decisions behind closed doors that affect our lives and livelihoods without our consultation. This is what I want to change. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we simply need our Union to act like a union. So many of the decisions of our current leadership are clear violations of the Union’s duty of Fair Representation. Together we can change that.
I bring an understanding of Unionism and a willingness to organize and fight shoulder to shoulder with my brothers and sisters. And I will work tirelessly to not only fully understand the issues before us but to share that knowledge with our membership. I firmly believe that knowledge is power, and I will work to ensure that we know the issues better than anyone else at the bargaining table.
For example, on the very first day of my new job in customer service I realized that TriMet was stealing wages from me and everyone in my shop. Management had been asking us for years to start work 5 minutes before we clocked in. Since we work with phones and on computers there is actually a bit of work to setup that takes place during those 5 minutes. I asked around and people told me, “that’s just the way things are”. So, I started doing some research. It turns out that this 5 minute period was something called “compensable time” and not only was it illegal to not pay us, but other workers in very similar situations had won a case with the 9th Circuit Court. We managed to stop TriMet from stealing from us, but our current leadership failed to bargain in good faith on our behalf and never negotiated a payment for our stolen wages. Again, knowledge is power and what we learned about compensable time was enough to force TriMet to change its practice, now we simply need leadership that is willing to act on that knowledge and negotiate in good faith on our behalf.
3) In these post-Janus times when union-eligible workers can "opt out" of their union, how do you plan to retain them and grow our membership?
Right now, in Salem, we have an executive board officer, Mikel Burke, who is doing incredible things with his membership in terms of bringing them fully into the union. I met one of his operators, a former Marine, who told me: “I don’t go for this union stuff, but I pay my dues so my brothers and sisters don’t get hurt”. That is the bare minimum that we need from our new members. We need to follow Mikel’s example here and get our Union membership fired up as they come in the door. To keep them in the union there is only one solution, we have to fight for them. If we aren’t seen to be working on their behalf every single day they will know it. So we also have to communicate better, be more responsive to their needs, and we need to actively start organizing among them and with them. One of the first things I want to do as Vice President is to bring all of our shop stewards together and build a communication network that we can utilize to disseminate information up and down the ladder. But I don’t have to come up with every solution to every problem, because I know that I have members out there who can share in this work, who have ideas about how to organize, and who already know which issues are important to them. So I want to very intentionally lean on the systems we already have in place.
For instance, we were declared an open bargaining union by the International in 2022. I don’t believe that anyone in our current leadership has even begun to think about what that might mean for our membership. The 2022 resolution by the International say that 10% of each bargaining unit has a right to be at the negotiating table. So, at the very least we need to form an open bargaining committee to explore how might achieve this. These are the kinds of tools that we need to implement in a post-Janus world.
4) Is management adequately addressing our safety? What do you think can be done to provide a safer work environment?
In a word, no. The new extended shields are a good example of management doing too little too slowly and too late. I believe our operators need training in both self defense and de-escalation. But this training must be accompanied by a review and revision of our current SIP program.
We also need more boots on the ground in our fare enforcement teams, and we need to bring security in-house and expand our security workforce. I think we already know which of our routes are potentially dangerous. So, I think we need to develop a heat map, not for fare evasion, but for problem areas as they are identified by operators and customers and pre-position security personnel in those areas.
Finally, our operators need more time off to decompress from what is becoming an extremely stressful work environment.
5) Please share your added opinions on a topic which has not been covered in my previous questions.
This campaign has really forced me to think about how all the pieces of our immense local – the 757 – fit together. I really believe that we already have in our local the key pieces and personnel to move us forward and re-enter the labor movement. What I’ve learned is that the power of our union is in the willingness of its members to activate that union. Right now, we feel ignored, pushed aside, and poorly treated by our leadership. But we must remember that this is our union. If management and the current leadership want to claw back money from our newest brothers and sisters, then maybe it’s time for us to claw back our union from those who would trade us like chips on a bargaining table.
Solidarity forever.
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