Pennsylvania’s two biggest American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) councils are off to a rough start to 2024, and their members should be taking notes.
On March 1, AFSCME 13 announced it was being placed under administrative oversight of the union’s national headquarters due to “serious financial problems.”
Make no mistake, though. The problems had nothing to do with the members’ getting poor representation in return for their dues dollars. A certain amount of that comes with the job. But when it’s the union not collecting its share, that’s something else entirely.
In this case, Council 13 got a bit sloppy about sending the national headquarters its share of the take.
But what can you expect from a local whose membership numbers have plunged from 32,851 in 2010 to 26,678 now, as Council 13’s have?
And guess who gets the credit for that. Last year alone, the Freedom Foundation helped almost 700 public employees leave AFSCME Council 13. With the recent takeover by the national headquarters, AFSCME 13’s members must be questioning their union’s priorities right now.
Will the boys from the home office be focusing on gaining more money for themslves or fighting for the workers they’re supposed to be representing?
Then there’s AFSCME Council 33, whose former president, Ernest Garrett, just got caught with his hands in the till.
Garrett was removed from his position after he began cutting staff salaries without the proper approval and hired his own family for jobs that created the appearance of improper conduct.
There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy when a union president is fired for victimizing the dues-paying members he’s supposed to be fighting for and protecting them.
The roughly 10,000 municipal workers AFSCME 33 represents can’t be satisfied with their former president’s actions and have to be questioning the union’s commitment to their concerns.
AFSCME 13 and AFSCME 33 have let their members down and eroded what credibility they had left. If a union can’t put its members ahead of lining its own pockets, what reason is there for it to exist in the first place?
