LONG STRUGGLE CUNA WORKERS FIGHT BENEFIT CUTS AFTER RECORD YEAR BUSINESS

Nearly six months after negotiations began, the unionized office workers at CUNA Mutual Group's Madison headquarters are still waiting for a new contract.

Though the company logged record earnings in 2021, it has proposed to reduce employees' pension and health insurance options and raise wages less than the rate of inflation, prompting months of pushback and informational pickets from the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 39, which represents roughly 450 workers at CUNA Mutual's Madison office.

Joe Evica, a qualified plan specialist at CUNA Mutual and chief steward for the union, considers the proposals hypocritical.

"Our motto is to protect and invest in people's futures, and yet ... they want to eliminate our pension plan for new hires, which would leave us less financially secure," Evica said, noting that the company provides insurance for thousands of credit union members but wants to eliminate its HMO option - its most popular health insurance plan - for its own employees.

"What we want is to provide people with quality insurance and quality retirement plans ... but we also want to be compensated fairly for doing it, and we want to make sure that our employers' values also get applied to their own workforce," Evica said.

The company has proposed raising wages by 4%, but the union wants larger increases to keep pace with inflation, which hit 9.1% for the 12-month period ending in June.

"Our feeling is that if you're making record profits and we're helping create those record profits, then there's really no excuse for proposing things like cutting benefits, eliminating our health care, freezing our pension plan or offering wages below inflation," Evica said.

The union is also demanding that the company add language to their contract guaranteeing that it will fill union jobs when workers retire or quit. That's important to the union, which has seen its ranks shrink by about 1,200 since 2002 - a change the union attributes to the company outsourcing, contracting out or transferring work to other offices. The union is also calling on the company to allow workers, most of whom have worked remotely throughout the pandemic, to continue to do so permanently.

In previous years, negotiations have typically lasted two to three months, Evica said, with the last round of negotiations taking place three years ago. Now, as they head into their sixth month of talks, Evica said they're "still pretty far apart."

Management seems willing to accept the union's remote work proposals, he said, but has shown little movement on the union's other priorities.

Still, he thinks there's plenty of room for progress.

"Instead of thinking about it as being deadlocked, I would say that the company is really attempting to drag their feet through this process because they recognize that they have no financial justifications for the proposals that they're putting forward," Evica said. "They are trying to drag the process out as long as they can to avoid having to provide the things that our employees need."

In an emailed statement, CUNA Mutual Group spokesperson Barclay Pollak said the company has a "decades-long, positive relationship" with the union and has been "actively negotiating."

He said the company has been meeting with the union regularly to "discuss issues that are important to the union and the company and exchanging proposals."

"We are committed and focused on reaching an agreement that provides a fair and competitive compensation and benefits package," Pollak wrote. "CUNA Mutual Group respects the collective bargaining process and therefore, we are not going to go into details on any specifics."

The union's contract expired at the end of March, but workers will continue to earn the wages and benefits dictated by the last contract for as long as both parties continue to negotiate in good faith.

If either party begins bargaining in bad faith, someone can file a charge of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), prompting an investigation by the regional office, said NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado.

Union hopes to avoid a strike

Michael Childers, a labor education and business professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researches unions and teaches classes for union members and for business school students who might one day negotiate on behalf of an employer. He's been observing CUNA Mutual's labor practices from the outside since arriving in Madison in 2005.

"They've always been a really aggressive, hard-bargaining, very much union-avoidant employer," Childers said. "That's what these workers here in Madison are facing."

It's not uncommon for negotiations to last this long, Childers said, pointing to the 2021 events at John Deere and Kellogg's as other examples of protracted process. In those cases, when negotiations stalled, workers went on strike, halting production at the factories that turn out tractors and cereal.

But Childers isn't sure that approach would work for the unionized CUNA Mutual workers, speculating that the company might just divert the workload to its other nine sites across the country, none of which are unionized.

"The workers going without a paycheck, I don't know (if that) would apply enough pressure to get CUNA to move towards some sort of mutually agreeable settlement," Childers said. "That's why they're still trying to bargain."

Evica said the possibility of future strike isn't off the table, though the union has no set timeline for stopping negotiations or possibly calling a strike vote.

"As a bargaining team, we're really prepared to do whatever it takes to move our employer in the right direction," he said. "If our employees are ready to engage in other kinds of collective activity, we'll support them through that process."

For now, he's hopeful the union can find ways to apply pressure without workers forgoing their paychecks.

"We prefer to avoid the idea of having a strike just because of the difficulties that members experience through that process," Evica said.

The parties have been meeting weekly, but the union asked management this week to begin meeting more frequently. As of Thursday, the union had not yet received a response. In the next couple weeks, he said, workers will meet to discuss their options.

Evica said the members are "really committed" this time around, getting more involved in the contract process than in the past. He thinks they've been inspired by seeing workers across the country unionizing or striking - at Amazon, Starbucks, John Deere and even Sun Prairie's Trachte Building Systems.

Like those workers, he said, they're pushing for their share of the corporations' growing profits: "I think it's a sign of the times that employees are really starting to feel undervalued and try to take more power back into their own hands."