Mark Mitchell, executive director of the Vermont State Employees Association, is leaving at the end of the month. He is moving to Florida to take care of his 84-year-old mother who recently became ill.
“I’ve been gone my entire adult life doing union work around the country,” Mitchell said. “I feel like she needs me now.”
Mitchell says he is leaving the 5,000 member public sector union which represents state workers and staff workers for the state colleges, at a time when the VSEA is on good footing. Mitchell will stay on through the next VSEA board meeting on June 13 and help the union interview candidates for the new executive director position.
“We have the most highly functioning union in the state of Vermont,” Mitchell said. “I’m proud of the work our members have done to bring the union to a high level of effectiveness.”
Mitchell became executive director at a difficult time in the VSEA’s history — in November 2011, three months after floods from Tropical Storm Irene damaged the Waterbury State Office Complex. The 1,200 state employees who worked at the complex were sent to temporary work places in central Vermont and Chittenden County. Many of the workers had to increase their commutes by a half hour or more; some opted to quit because of the impact of long distance drives on their families. The union fought to protect workers who were relocated.
The Vermont State Hospital was closed in the aftermath of the flood and dozens of workers traveled to Brattleboro and Springfield to care for patients. Eventually, most were laid off with the promise that they would be rehired when the Green Mountain Psychiatric Care Center opens this year.
In September 2012, he proposed a dues increase for members in order to recruit union organizers. Since then, the staff has grown from 19 to 29.
Mitchell helped to negotiate two contracts with the state of Vermont, and he bargained a successful contract for workers with the state colleges. In both instances, the union established a “living wage” base for workers. He also started an effort to unionize deputy state’s attorneys and other workers in county prosecutors’ offices.
The Vermont Veterans Home in Bennington has been in dire financial straits for several years, and VSEA worked with employees and the Shumlin administration to keep the home open as a public facility.
Over the course of his two and a half year tenure, Mitchell has taken the union from a service organization in which the staff managed relationships with the Legislature and the governor’s office to a member-led union that gives rank and file workers more say in how the union works with the administration and lobbies at the Statehouse. The idea was to empower union members to become involved in union drives and issues that have an impact on their day to day work.
That shift was controversial, and led to a rift in VSEA management. About a year ago, two VSEA attorneys called for Mitchell’s firing. There was an investigation into alleged labor law violations. No wrongdoing was uncovered, and Mitchell was reinstated.
The controversy spurred union members around the state to get more involved.
Sheila Coniff, treasurer for the VSEA board, says Mitchell and the board of the VSEA survived that dark period by soldiering on.
“We dealt with some really tough dirty dealings from people outside the union and inside the union,” Coniff said. “Still, to this day, people are constantly try to do anything they can to discredit him and us, and we’ve gotten to where we can shake it off and keep going.”
Coniff says Mitchell took a “lethargic service-driven organization,” and at the request of the members turned the VSEA “into a member-driven organization.”
“He did precisely that, nothing more and nothing less,” Coniff said. “It’s so successful that we have the wherewithal to do what we need to do.”
In a service model union the staff “are kind of the big brother,” members go to the union staff with problems and ask them to fix it. In an organizing model, she said, the members are involved in lobbying at the Statehouse and rallying behind individual members who have been unfairly treated. “What we want is something built on the reality of 6,000 workers standing shoulder to shoulder,” Coniff said.
The VSEA legal team is aggressively pursuing contract violation cases, Coniff said, in order to ensure that the Shumlin administration takes the contract language seriously. “The contract is the contract,” she said. “We’re not going to sit back and do whatever the administration wants us to do.”
This new spirit of unanimity and aggressive protection of workers rights is all due to Mitchell’s leadership, Coniff says.
“I can’t overstate how much he has done for us,” Coniff said. “His drive got us all in gear because of his desire to have members be the driving force of the union and we’re taking that and we’re running with it.”
