In December 2022, Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC) workers announced they were forming a union. Non-management staff publicly declared a supermajority of support and submitted a request for voluntary recognition to the organization’s leadership.
In the following 8-plus months, the organization’s leadership fought unionization while misleading employees, supporters, board members, and the general public. Ultimately, eligible employees voted “yes” to unionize. However, a form letter from SEACC’s leadership last week doubled down on the organization’s anti-union behavior these past 8-plus months and made several inaccurate claims and other assertions that we strongly dispute.
Here is my full response:
Dear SEACC Leadership,
As a fellow mission-driven organization, we feel compelled to respond to your continued misunderstanding of the unionization process. We can only surmise it is indeed a misunderstanding which has caused you to continually mislead your supporters, board members, employees, and the general public.
The first thing we would like to clear up is that at no point during the NLRB process is voluntary recognition not permitted. At any point over the previous 8-plus months you could have simply recognized that a majority of your eligible employees wanted to form a union and honored that decision. Instead, you continued down a litigious path, wasting precious resources and putting unfair stress, pressure, and burden on your employees and organization.
You say you were “uncomfortable with ceding control over SEACC to the large and powerful organizations Communications Workers of America and its parent, AFL-CIO.” Let’s start from the beginning. Workers are the union. The Communications Workers of America is, as you put it, “large and powerful,” because it has empowered hundreds of thousands of workers from a litany of occupations to fight for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. Additionally, SEACC would not be ceding any organizational control to the Communications Workers of America. The union is and represents the workers. There is no management-union or board-union relationship, except for purposes of collective bargaining. Ultimately no organizational agency would be lost by unionization. And for the record, the Communications Workers of America represents hundreds of hard-working Alaskans across the state.
SEACC leadership bemoans that during the organizing process their employees, “never articulated specific demands related to these benefits and their compensation.” The implication seems to be that you believe your workers did not need a union. However, that is not for you to decide. The NLRB gives workers the right to decide that for themselves. And a worker’s choice to unionize or vote for a union is theirs and theirs alone. It is a principle of democracy. While unions have made great strides for workers when it comes to benefits and compensation, there are countless other reasons to form and join a union. Reasons like a voice on the job, the security and guarantees that come with a union contract, a spelled out grievance procedure, and so much more.
After subjecting your employees to eight months of gaslighting, dilatory tactics, professional pressure, and anti-union misinformation, no one should be surprised that your employees attempting to form a union all voted “yes” and then subsequently left for greener pastures. Who can blame them? You had clearly indicated at every step, from hiring the nation’s preeminent union avoidance law firm to refusing to voluntarily recognize, that you would continue to make the process as cumbersome and uncomfortable as possible.
It is a situation of your own making that your organization is a union shop with no active members. But the good news is that when you hire to fill the vacancies, those workers will have the power of a union and the ability to collectively bargain a fair contract.
When that day comes, we hope you will have learned something from this process and/or the tens of thousands spent on legal fees, and decide to work together with your employees to build a stronger organization that can best meet your mission.
The form letter you have sent supporters misrepresents the Alaska AFL-CIO and our affiliates by claiming our policy stances represent management. Never in a million years.
Joelle Hall is the President of Alaska AFL-CIO.
This post is a submission to The Alaska Current. Please send submissions to news@thealaskacurrent.com.