(The following story by Jere Downs appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on March 19.)
PHILADELPHIA — Nine hundred people jumped to their feet for union leader Jean Alexander, who this week preserved health-care and lifetime prescription benefits for SEPTA workers. Applause echoed off ballroom walls hung with banners of unions representing 1 million members of the AFL-CIO. Leading the labor convention, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO president Bill George shouted praise for the Transport Workers Union Local 234 president.
“It is time for the labor movement to draw a line in the sand, and that happened here in Philadelphia,” George said of how Alexander gained a one-year contract for 4,700 SEPTA custodians, mechanics, drivers and cashiers. “Her courage has taught us to come together.”
And, some say, the contract she negotiated could influence talks as the city’s municipal workers’ contracts expire in June.
TWU official Harry Lombardo scanned the hotel ballroom for Alexander. But she was nowhere near the Wyndham Philadelphia at Franklin Plaza.
Instead, Wednesday morning found her at the dingy yellow headquarters of Local 234 on Spring Garden Street, opening mail stacked up during weeks of contract talks and processing grievances for arbitration.
“That is Jean. She is not in it for the glory,” said Lombardo, a former Local 234 president. “She is a basic meat-and-potatoes president who spends more time than perhaps she should taking care of her members.”
When Alexander, 67, showed up later in a purple pantsuit and heels, union delegates crossed the room to wrap her in a hug.
Health-care disputes are the number-one cause for strikes, George said. In Minneapolis, transit workers are in the third week of such a walkout, and California grocery workers just ended a five-month strike.
After a decade of double-digit annual percentage increases in health-care costs, labor is energized by the SEPTA contract, which preserved veteran union members’ free health-care benefits.
For an embattled SEPTA and a disorganized union, the one-year contract achieved Sunday was a stroke of good fortune. The deal worked for SEPTA, which is still trying to build goodwill to fill a projected 2005 $70 million deficit. The pact worked for Local 234, which restored Alexander to power after serious internal bickering in mid-January.
In part, the deal was a freak of circumstance that only delays the pain – made possible because SEPTA’s rates from Independence Blue Cross are locked in until 2005, when both sides expect a 30 percent increase.
So the city of Philadelphia and an estimated 400,000 transit riders were spared. Now, some predict a ripple effect before June 30, when Philadelphia’s municipal unions’ contracts expire.
Labor leaders say Philadelphia’s trash collectors, social workers, street cleaners, librarians and office workers are encouraged that SEPTA blinked.
“There is buzz about it,” said Kathy Black of AFSCME District Council 47, which represents 3,700 city accountants, engineers, nurses and supervisors. “It is certainly heartening to see somebody take a strong, militant stand.”
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Jean Alexander asserts that no worker should have to pay for health care. “Maybe I’m crazy,” she said. “Once you start paying, you never stop. We have got to… deal with this national problem.”
Lifetime prescriptions and other benefits Local 234 employees still enjoy are virtually unheard of in today’s workplace.
Over a lunch of corned beef and cabbage Wednesday, Alexander waved a bony finger and spoke of how, for her, the health-care issue mingled with her pride as the first female ever elected to lead the very male and very militant Transport Workers Union Local 234.
This is a union whose members speak plainly and suffer no insults. They have gone on strike against SEPTA – and paralyzed the city – 10 times since 1975. Only 700 of 4,700 Local 234 members are female.
Alexander sensed that if she allowed SEPTA to force them to pay for health care, she would never live it down.
“From day one, I knew I was the first woman president, and I was not going to be the one to bring copays,” Alexander said. “They would say, ‘You put a woman there; now we are paying.’
“So I said what I had to say, that I was going to strike rather than pay for health care… . and I was praying to God that it would not happen.”
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After stints as a lab technician and owner of a mom-and-pop store, the mother of four first slid behind the wheel of a Route 23 trolley in 1978 at age 42. SEPTA was her first union job.
She brings to it a stubborn streak inherited from the paternal grandfather who raised her on a North Carolina farm. His doctor had told him to stop drinking. He replied, ‘If I stop, it’s going to kill me.’ ”
She got her name from her other grandfather. His name was Eugene. Her name is Nellie Louise, but family dubbed her “little Jean,” because she resembled him.
She is not little. She stands 5-foot-9 in heels. In a solemn, broad face, her brown eyes stand out, gleaming when she laughs. Short, curly hair hovers just above trademark gold hoop earrings.
Hers is also a face lined with care after a year of two coup attempts by her union’s all-male Executive Board. Both times, the TWU International assisted Alexander in regaining power.
After 10 years as a business agent and elected officer for the union, Alexander became president at a difficult time. Local 234 was emerging from a trusteeship imposed by the TWU International in New York for union and financial mismanagement. Later, a bookkeeper pleaded guilty to embezzlement.
Alexander remains close to Lombardo, instrumental in the trusteeship and the suspension of then-union president Steve Brookens, recording secretary Jeff Brooks, and two other elected colleagues for mismanagement. Many still believe that had Brooks been allowed to run for office, Alexander would not have won.
Today, some Executive Board members – and many Brookens allies – view Alexander’s ascendance to power as a continuation of the International’s “meddling” in the local’s affairs, Executive Board member Thomas Casey said yesterday.
“Our situation was always about the International interfering,” Casey said. “It was never about Jean Alexander personally.”
For Alexander, it was about being a woman. Upon her first of two suspensions last year for failing to follow board directives, she picketed her own union hall, with the support of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, the NAACP, and other female labor leaders.
“She has had to navigate some pretty deep water,” said Pat Gillespie, business manager of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, a federation of 42 unions representing 70,000 members. “It is refreshing to see a labor leader like her. I think Jean is one of the more courageous labor leaders I know.”
But will her own members reelect her in September? At a TWU gathering earlier this month before contract talks began, Brooks’ supporters circulated fliers in anticipation of his September campaign for union president. Then 1,800 union members gave her a standing ovation, with one holding a sign that said “In Jean we trust.”
On Sunday, Alexander will know more. At the Blue Horizon, a boxing venue in North Philadelphia, she will take questions from members before a contract ratification vote next Friday.
“I don’t know what to expect,” she said.