IBEW Local 266 (Phoenix AZ) Member Tom Rees Speaks Out: IBEW is a "Good Steward"

Unions facing choice: Contract or infighting

Judd Slivka Special for The Republic (AZ)
Special for The Republic
Sept. 3, 2005 12:00 AM

It came down to the wire; the last six hours.

All the talking paid off. Management compromised with labor, and a strike was averted last week at one of Sara Lee's Phoenix-area bakeries.

Mark that one up as a victory for both sides. It's been a tough summer for organized labor. Two of the largest unions split with the AFL-CIO, and folks on both sides are still taking potshots at one another. Closer to home, a mine workers' strike against Asarco Inc. in Kearny and Winkelman has had little effect on the mining giant.

Closer to the Valley, America West's unionized aircraft maintenance workers are wondering if the airline will ever get closer to the union on changing a contract that's been open for two years.

But if you talk to the union guys, things are pretty good. They say the union is still the word and the shield of the worker, even in a right-to-work state where organized labor is a relatively minor player.

"We provide the labor, the technical skills that make a company profitable," said Greg Bell, the business agent for the Bakers' Union Local 232 in Phoenix. "Someone way up there, more often than not, is making a lot of money. We're here to make sure the guy slaving away in a bakery gets a living wage."

That's the ideal, anyway. This summer has shown organized labor as fractured. The three largest unions - the Teamsters, Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers - broke away from the AFL-CIO over a difference in tactics. As organized labor has lost political power over the past decade - signified by fewer Democrats in Congress - the AFL-CIO's political spending practices have come under fire.

To the guy on the street, it doesn't mean much. Except that one day the guy on the street may need his union, and a fractured union doesn't offer as much representation as a united one.

"Our life has not dramatically changed because of this," said David Hernandez, the director of industrial relations for the Valley's postal workers union. "Most workers, because we're focused on a 40-60 hour job, haven't had the time to look at it and analyze it."

Hernandez, of Phoenix, gets paid to examine the situation, and he likens it to a family feud.

"The strength of a democracy is in a diversity of opinion," he said. "We have to allow for that. Sometimes it gets so contentious that that someone has to leave the table.

"But, like a family, they always get back. We all have the same goal and there's more than one way to get there."

Tom Rees, of Apache Junction, is a substation electrician for the Salt River Project. Rees worked the mines in Morenci and was working there when Phelps-Dodge decertified the union in the 1980s. So he's been on both sides of that coin. When he came to work in Phoenix for a union crew - the SRP's electrical employees are represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local No. 266 - he liked what he saw.

"I've always believed that the union has to be a good steward, and all the members had to be good stewards of their jobs," Rees said. "I see that here.

"What I like the most is the relationship between the union and SRP. It's very amicable."

The two sides have worked hard to keep it that way - union members work side-by-side with non-union managers during volunteer work, for instance.

But the union contract is open again this November, and that's always a cause for a little nervousness.

Down at the worker's level, it doesn't really matter if the AFL-CIO is fighting with itself. What matters is that next contract.

"There's been ups and downs of unions," Rees said, "and I've seen 'em. I hope everybody can just work together and solve the issues."