School Workers Replace Union

Non-teaching employees in Inglewood’s schools have voted decisively to decertify their longtime union, the California School Employees Assn., and replace it with an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, according to election results released this week.

Employees voted to replace CSEA, which has represented the roughly 500 classified employees for more than a decade. The new representative is California Professional Education Employees (CalPro), a division of the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades and an affiliate of the 14-million-member AFL-CIO.

CalPro organizer Christopher Graeber and several classified employees said CSEA was slow to respond to employee complaints.

Graeber said CalPro is “going to be there when people have problems.”

Ophelia Jackson, a records clerk at Inglewood High School who was the local president of CSEA, said the decertification resulted from dissatisfaction from “a lot of misinformed people.” She said the classified employees have been divided since CSEA staved off a decertification attempt in 1987 by the American Federation of Teachers.

“People believed we could move mountains,” she said. “When we moved them, they weren’t satisfied. When we couldn’t, they complained.”

CalPro, which received 187 of the 352 votes cast, beat CSEA’s 60 votes and the 98 votes that the Inglewood Classified Assn., another challenger, received. Six employees voted for no union. The ballots, cast between December and February, had been impounded by state labor officials for several months pending the resolution of appeals.

CalPro will represent the district’s aides, peace officers, truck drivers, records clerks, secretaries and other staff members. The results will become official if none of the parties contest the election results by May 7.

Mike Cole, a truck driver at district headquarters who favored CalPro, said: “We finally decided for a change. A lot of people are real happy. That’s what everybody was talking about today.”

Diane Chambers, a budget technician at the district headquarters, added: “I was sick of what CSEA wasn’t doing. People with problems weren’t getting their problems solved. . . . The numbers tell all.”

Cheryl Bell, who led the decertification effort for the Inglewood Classified Assn., said CalPro’s decertification effort was the best organized and did the best job of reaching employees with the union’s message. She said the voting clearly shows that “CSEA wasn’t doing their job.”

The decertification proceedings began last May when the Inglewood Classified Assn., a branch of the Inglewood Teachers Assn., filed a petition with the Public Employment Relations Board to take over representation of classified employees from CSEA. CalPro filed a separate petition a week later.

CSEA appealed both decertification attempts on the grounds that they contained irregularities that made them illegal. But PERB eventually denied the union’s appeals.