Nevada board gives up supermajority rule for switching unions

A state board overseeing public worker union elections said it will change its 13-year-old policy that requires a supermajority for one union to oust another, noting that it was “a failed experiment.”

The three-member Nevada Local Government Employee-Management Relations Board unanimously agreed to make the changes at a meeting Thursday after ruling on a recent vote by Clark County School District support staff to determine whether Teamsters Local 14 would supplant the Education Support Employees Association at the bargaining table.

A decade-long fight between the two unions came to a head earlier this month when 71 percent of workers who voted in a special election selected the Teamsters as its representative.

However, only 5,190 votes were cast, which was short of the supermajority the Nevada Supreme Court has ruled is needed for one union to oust another. The ESEA has represented Clark County School District support staff for more than 40 years. A supermajority means the Teamsters needed 50 percent plus 1 of all 11,263 support staff to choose the union, not just a majority of those who took part in the election.

The board said Thursday that the Teamsters did not get the supermajority now required, meaning that ESEA would remain, for now, the representative union for the district’s bus drivers, janitors, cooks and other support staff.

In a second motion, the board said it will authorize a second election between the two unions after changing its regulations so that only a simple majority of those who vote will be needed to elect the representative union.

The board’s regulations had required a simple majority vote from 1969 to 2003. Then its members changed the regulations to the “so-called” supermajority, said the board commissioner Bruce Snyder.

“The board called (the supermajority regulation) a failed experiment,” Snyder said.

Snyder said a new election likely will be held in the fall of the 2015-16 school year.

Larry Griffith, Teamsters Local 14 secretary-treasurer, said he was excited by the Board’s decision to change the voting regulation to a simple majority. “Today was big victory for labor,” he said.

Griffith said there was a lot of work to do, but he hopes his union will prevail in the next election.

However, ESEA plans to challenge the state board’s decision to hold another vote.

“The new vote the EMRB ordered flies in the face of two Nevada Supreme Court decisions that set the rules for the election and the runoff election,” said ESEA executive director Brian Christensen. “The EMRB has clearly overstepped its authority and we are confident the courts will overturn its order. ”

On Wednesday, a conference room at a state office building on Sahara Avenue bulged with school district support staff, many in black Teamsters shirts.

Mary Dungan, a campus security monitor at Liberty High School, urged the state board to recognize Teamsters as the rightful union. Dungan said it would be nearly impossible to get a supermajority of support staff to vote in any election.

“It’s one man, one vote. I feel like the majority has spoken,” she said.

ESEA supporters said the union was doing its best to help workers.

Richard Mazurek, an ESEA shop steward, said Teamsters supporters don’t represent the views of the district’s 11,000 support staff workers. He said he is always busy working to help ESEA members with any issues.

The Teamsters Local 14 could have another route to challenge the Education Support Employees Association.

State law requires unions that represent government workers to have more than 50 percent of a group as members to be able to bargain on their behalf. But membership in the support staff union has teetered under 50 percent in recent years.

A recent public records request by the Review-Journal showed that less than half — 5,512 — of the school district’s support staff had membership dues deducted from their paychecks as of Feb. 4, 2015. Paycheck deductions are not definitive though because it’s not known how many workers pay their dues another way.

Contact Francis McCabe at fmccabe@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512. Find him on Twitter: @fjmccabe.