Attack on public sector workers five years later

In the early months and night hours of 2017, the newly elected Republican majority in the Iowa Legislature made an assault on Iowa’s public servants by making drastic changes to Chapter 20 of the Iowa Code. Driven by out-of-state right wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers and Americans for Prosperity, and acting swiftly on an issue they didn’t campaign on, they stripped collective bargaining rights for 180,000 public sector employees in the state.

Relieving public employers from their obligations to bargain with their employees on almost every working condition, they unilaterally changed a system that had served both employers and employees alike for more than 40 years. A system that was created in a bipartisan fashion with a Democratic majority in the state House and a Republican governor at the time. In its place, they left a system where local entities like school boards, city councils and boards of supervisors get to decide if and what they want to bargain. This created a space for union-busting law firms and consultants to manipulate local elected officials, most of whom aren’t experts in labor law or the history of collective bargaining and its effects on the bodies they govern.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of when the Iowa Legislature destroyed those rights of our public servants to bargaining collectively. For more than four decades, public servants in communities large and small knew that Iowa had their backs and they could rest easy when they went home after work, knowing they had a say in their own working conditions and benefits. But five years ago, corporate owned politicians decided that snowplow drivers, sanitation workers, school bus drivers, teachers, nurses and other public servants shouldn’t have a voice on the job. And the results have been devastating.

Politicians from both parties sitting on school boards, city councils, county boards of supervisors and the state of Iowa itself, started voluntarily gutting union contracts after the law changed — not because they had to but because now they could.

Our union’s members have been sharing their stories of how this attack has personally affected them. A school bus driver right here in Cedar Rapids told us that his district took bereavement leave out of his union contract right before his mother passed away, and he didn’t have as much time off to grieve as he would have had just a month before. A snowplow driver tells us his insurance premiums keep going up and his wife has cystic fibrosis, and they are suffering both physically and financially because of this bad law. And a county jailer tells us they lost their longevity pay, and years of public service to the county now mean nothing.

And now our communities are feeling the consequences, too. Public service jobs traditionally have had a higher percentage of women in the field than their private sector counterparts, a higher percentage of public sector workers have college degrees, and public sector jobs used to be the best jobs in virtually every city and small town across Iowa. But now, we’re starting to lose those workers. They’re quitting at a higher rate than ever before because legislators took away their right to bargain.

Right here in Cedar Rapids, the School Board took the path of stripping labor rights out of the union contract for school bus drivers after this law was passed. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This Labor Day, local officials across Iowa can honor the contributions of front-line public servants in the pandemic and beyond by committing to bargain over a full range of workplace conditions with their workers. And in Cedar Rapids, School Board members can celebrate the contributions of bus drivers and other district staff by restoring lost rights.

Jesse Case is secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 238 and vice president of the Iowa Federation of Labor.