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From the September-October 2005 issue of Union Democracy Review #158
Reform breakthrough in Ohio Operating Engineers L. 18
Patricia Kohl, heading an insurgent slate, has just been elected to the executive board of Operating Engineers Local 18 as one of the two delegates from her Division 6. It was a remarkable achievement. Most members of this hardhat local are men who run the big equipment you see on construction sites. In her 2,700-member division, she outpolled two men to win election.
Even more impressive was her campaign for president of the whole local; she came out second in a three-way race with 1,244 votes, or 27.7%, running well ahead of the third candidate, a man, who got 827 votes. Kohl was one of only eight women among some 300 candidates running in races in all six of Local 18's divisions. But these bare facts hardly tell the full story:
Local 18, with its 14,000 members is one of the largest in the International Union of Operating Engineers. Its job sites cover 85 of Ohio's 88 counties and four in northern Kentucky. It had a long history of blacklisting, beatings, and suspect elections. At one point back in the late 70's and early 80's, represented pro bono in court and at Congressional hearings by Stephen W. Gard a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, an earlier insurgent group put up a valiant battle; but, worn out by over ten years of defeat and the death or retirement of its active leaders, it vanished from the scene. At the time, AUD, in touch with the movement, told their story in Union Democracy Review. But for many years, until the appearance of this new reform group, we heard little from Local 18.
This time, in the 2005 elections, the insurgents surpassed their predecessors. In Kohl's district, her slate elected five of the eight candidates it ran for district advisory board, Paul Gonter, the slate's candidate for local financial secretary got 1,404 vote, or 33% of the total. John Ginley, an independent candidate for the top job of business manager, got over 35% of the votes. In the three-way race for local president, the two oppositionists got a combined vote of over 46%.
Patricia Kohl, who headed the insurgent Members' Voice slate, wrote that she had been fired after five and a half years on the staff of the union's apprenticeship program. "I could have kept my $78,325 a year job "by just keeping my mouth shut," she says, "I just couldn't do it. Her campaign criticized the local's "one-party system of government." The Members' Voice platform insisted that "every union should be thoroughly democratic in its own internal life." It called for an end to "blacklisting, blackballing, and retaliation," for the election of business agents instead of appointment, for opening the pages of the union's publication to members' opinions, for full accountability from all union funds.
In its campaign, the group distributed lengthy excerpts
from AUD's book Democratic
Rights for Union Members and suggested that local members visit
AUD's website.
Other
articles on the IUOE:
Confronting
corruption charges in Operating Engineers Local 3
(11/06-12/06
In
the Operating Engineers (IUOE)(11/05-12/05)
Reform
breakthrough in Ohio Operating Engineers Local 18(9/05-10/05)
Action
in Operating Engineers locals 18 and 66(7/05-8/05)
New voices at AUD construction
trades conference (1/03-2/03)
"Women's Project launches Operation
Punch List" (10/00-11/00)
See also:
Manual for Survival for Women in
Non-Traditional Jobs
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