Working Out the Reasons to Unionize : Nina Demora Had Her Doubts, but Then Saw a Need to Organize

Nina Demora has had a lifelong relationship with unions.

Her father was a longshoreman in Brooklyn and an ardent union man. Her former husband, who worked for a telephone company, likewise was a union member. Labor organizations had served her family well, she said.

But when a union tried to organize employees at the Regional Center of Orange County about 10 years ago, Demora and her co-workers voted it down.

“It fell flat on its face,” said Demora, 50, a 17-year employee in office services at the Social Services Agency in Orange. The regional center contracts with the state to coordinate services and placement for developmentally disabled children and adolescents in the county.

Where once Demora had felt sympathetic to unions, at the time she felt the labor organizations had “lost something along the way.” She believed that unions oftentimes wound up allowing poorly performing employees to bring down the standards for other workers.

Besides, the Anaheim resident was comfortable in her job and did not feel her position was in jeopardy. “I thought that we’d outgrown the need for this.”

In the ensuing years, though, she saw how businesses everywhere were downsizing. The social workers in her office suddenly were handling burgeoning caseloads. And the workers had not gotten a pay raise in years.

“In the last couple of years,” she said, “I could see how we needed it back.”

When the Service Employees International Union tried once again to organize the workers last year, Demora did not hesitate to vote yes. The overwhelming majority of her co-workers did likewise.

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“People were doing work they’d never had to do before,” she said. Social workers were becoming responsible for ever-increasing numbers of cases, and employees were worried that the needs of the brain-injured, often physically incapacitated clients they serve were “falling through the cracks,” Demora said.

“When I first started, we were handling about [a total of] 6,000 cases,” Demora said, “Now we’re up to 10,000 and getting lots of intake calls. I know these numbers. I order the charts.”

Since the employees unionized, they have received a 2.75% raise plus bonuses of up to 8%. They came close to striking before the contract was approved last spring, union organizer Jim Moreau said. Management initially opposed any pay raise and, before the union was voted in, was mandating after-hours on-call duty by employees, for no increase in pay, the organizer said.

State officials, alerted to low employee morale and other problems at the regional center, ordered local authorities to find ways to reduce caseloads, improve training and repair relations with workers. Moreau said the union helped bring those concerns to the attention of the state leaders.

Demora said she is working less overtime now; she used to do so regularly whenever she felt the extra hours were needed, but now she stays late only when her boss requests it.

More social workers are being hired now, with the goal of reducing each one’s caseload from 120 clients to 80, Demora said.

“Unions are more of a necessity now. There are a lot of demands on individuals, much more than before,” Demora said. “We used to have two or three people doing a particular job, and now it is one person doing the job of two or three.”