 We're taking up testimony and we're 28 and I've been leading to collective bargaining. John, are you on the phone? Yes, I am. All right, John Clacky gets the gold star for staying home all feeling under the weather. And I suspect that Representative Gonzalez of the bag of air service staff will be here at some point. I have to walk out. I have to be out of here at two o'clock, but Chip will run testimony after that. So, Dennis, lead off hitter, please start. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. My name is Dennis LaBalme and I'm the political director for the Vermont AFL-CIO. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak about H428 card check, which only pertains to public service, public sector workers. Before I do, I would like to give you a little background on the Vermont AFL-CIO. We have 10,000 members strong and represent 24 different unions in over 120 locations around the state. They are American Federation of Teachers, United Professions of Vermont, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, American Federation of Government Employees, National Letter Carriers, Postal Workers, Firefighters, Steelworkers, Lapers and Plymouth and Piper to name a few. We just don't represent organized labor here at the State House, but all hardworking Vermonters throughout the state. Many issues we support, such as minimum wage, paid sick days, just cause, where an employer can fight you without any reason, is just some of the issues that we, that our members already have, but as I mentioned, we support all workers. We work on the issues, such as workers' comp, unemployment insurance and independent contractors that not only benefit union members, but all Vermonters. In my 18 years here, I can count on one hand bills that have actually pertained to organized labor and H428 project is one of them. A survey was taken and shows that 63% of workers said they would vote for a union, but were afraid of the consequences if the employer found out. Below is the reason why. A number of years ago, I worked on a campaign here in Vermont, where we had a shop with 250 employees. Our goal, as with most union drives, is to get 65% of employees to sign the card that said that they are interested in joining a union. Once the employer found out that union drive was underway, they hired a union busting firm to help discourage workers to join a union. They did this by holding captain's audience meetings, telling their workers if a union comes in, workers will lose their job, we won't be able to give you a raise if we want to because of the union contract, the place will close down. In a goodwill gesture, they fired the plant manager. They fired the plant manager. Sorry, I couldn't quite hear you. Could you please repeat what you said? Okay. Okay. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. Sorry, she's not recording anymore. No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. In a goodwill gesture, they fired the plant manager. Okay. In a goodwill gesture, they fired the plant manager as they were handed from employees that he was one of the problems. After a few weeks, we had our goal of 65% involved for an election with the National Labor Relations Board in Boston. The employer threw up roadblocks for a relatively quick election date by stalling on what employees should and should not join a union, to appeal cards that were signed, to appeal the election day as it would impact the production of that specific time, et cetera, et cetera. During the whole time, the employer in the union bus confirmed brought in employees daily, one at a time and met with them to discourage them from joining a union. Finally, after five months, which isn't unusual to go that long before an election, from the start of the union drive, an election was held. And as the employees were falling into vote, supervisors were lined up to intimidate them for voting yes. We lost by 60 votes. Even though crack check is for public sector workers, it has been my experience where the private or public sector, the tactics from employees are the same. Towards the end of last year, four individuals from the municipality of Johnson went to the IBW local and wanted to join a union. All four of them signed a union card, but the town would not accept them as being a union. The town hired a union-busting firm which cost the taxpayers money. IBW filed for an election with the Vermont State Labor Relations Board and it took almost too much before an election took place. To be fair, some elections take place, which quite frankly is faster compared to how often it goes. Those four members voted yes. By having crack check, this would not have happened. Which ironic, two weeks prior to the signing of the cards, the village had of Johnson had five employees sign union cards and the village accepted the union. In many cases, having crack check would save both the town and union money by not having to go through a lengthy process. And furthermore, working-class people should not have to hire high-paid lawyers to navigate the Vermont Labor Relations Board process if they wish to form their own union. Crack check makes the process fairer and more democratic to workers. With crack check, you do not need four years of law school, you do not need four years of law school for a union. Rather, workers simply need to have a majority signed cards and they are a union that day. And as such, they can rapidly move to negotiate a fair contract with the employers which aims at liberal wage, medical leave and safer working conditions. Crack check is the right thing to do. Crack check provides a more democratic process for workers to be empowered and to have a positive impact on their life. Therefore, the Vermont AFL serial employs the Vermont House and Senate to pass this bill. Thank you. So Dennis, tell me what a union busting firm is. How do you find that you go Google union busters? No, pretty much. Some of the things that they just... Well, what happens is that employers would hire them and, of course, they're experts on labor law. And so they were talking to employers and telling them, you know, what tactics work in the past to try not to get a union in there, such as having captive audience meetings. And, you know, we hear that the employers, well, let me back up a little bit. When we were discussing crack check, there were a couple of employers saying that, well, this will take time away from them being on the shop because the union organizers want to talk to them so forth and so on. Well, the employer would hold these captive audience meetings. Now, these individuals don't have a choice if whether they want to go or not to these meetings. They got to go. And so then they will tell them things like, well, you know what? If the union gets to me, we're going to close the shop down. You know, you've been here for 25 years, you know, Tommy, and you know, we might have to get rid of you because we don't need your department anymore. You know, things of that nature. So this is what these union buster firms do. Do they reach out to employers or do the employers reach out to them when they have? The employees reach out to them for the most part, yeah. And these are usually law firms. So I appreciate your testimony. This bill, of course, is strictly related to public sector unions. Most of your work is in private sector, but still you're supporting this as a concept, as a, I mean, explain a little bit why you would fight this fight. Well, I mean, we, the Vermont AFL-CIO, as I mentioned earlier in my testimony, have a whole gamut of different affiliations, and a lot of them are in the public sector. And for years, on the national level, we've been trying to get this passed to them in Washington on a national level. And even though, as I said, even though, you know, public sector unions, union organizing drives, the tactics are still the same. Any further questions for Dads right now? Thank you. Thank you. Next up, we have Jess Krauss. Yeah, for Dennis. How are you? This is actually the first time, sorry, Dennis, Dennis, we've seen him often, so he knows who we all are. I'm Representative Tom Skevee, Waterbury. I'm Representative Dan Gonzalez, I'm from the U.S. Now our other members, Brindle's up from Barnard. Representative Lisa Hendo from Berkshire, Representative Marianne Dimash from Swanson. Tommy Walts from Garra City. Mary Howard from Rotland City. Just trying out off of the standard. Thank you. And on the phone. And John Karaki from South Burlington. Thank you for not infecting us. So welcome, you came to testify here on the collective bargaining jail, would I think that there's a general understanding where we've heard the main focus of this bill is on municipalities and on state universities. Yeah, state employees. So good afternoon everybody. My name is Jess Krauss. I am currently the Chief HR Officer at the University of Vermont. I'm a lawyer by trade. I always tell people, please don't pull that against me. Prior to going to where I actually came to work at UVM and by way of background, it might be a little bit helpful just to direct affirmative action equal opportunity and kind of got looked into to HR later. But prior to UVM, I worked for the Vermont State Employees Association for about nine years. Prior to that, I was a police officer in went to law school and then before that was a police officer in the city of Winooski, Vermont. I was president of my union there for three years. So I've worn a whole lot of different hats over the years on both the union and management side of things, which I think is a little bit unique to Vermont. And I'm sure you get to do that so much in other places. But I want to be clear at the outset that I'm here really to tonight comments are confined to the State Employees Labor Relations Act which covers UVM employees that cover state colleges employees and state employees. I know that you're going to hear from Sophie and from John Burrard a little bit later on specific to their concerns or interests. I don't want to minimize. I am quite sure that what Dennis says is absolutely true that especially in the private sector, I think some private employers go through great lengths to ensure that their employees don't unionize. And I don't want to minimize the importance of that. What I do want to say, you know, specific to UVM is those are not tactics that we use or that we have ever used at UVM. And we certainly don't hire union-busting firms. Some of the benefits that many public sector employees, including UVM employees, whether or not they're unionized or already enjoy are things like just cause protection, $14 an hour minimum wage, which is even higher than the legislature has dictated recently, as well as excellent benefits. But we have four primary concerns or issues with the car check bill. The first one is it would eliminate the long-standing and very well-recognized right of employees to cast a secret ballot when they're making a really, really important decision. The second is that this bill would eliminate the pre-election period, which is a time when a lot of employees are having a lot of conversations about what's good about a union, which union do I want if there are multiple unions? What should I care about? What kind of questions do I have so that they are casting a very, very well-informed ballot before they make that choice? The third is that while this bill would make it very, very easy with car checks for unions to get in and to represent employees, there's no such similar measure if the employees change their mind and say, you know what, this union isn't working for us. I think we would really rather be with this other union. And I'll talk in greater detail about these. Lastly, this would be a pretty dramatic change, taking away an employee's rights to cast a secret ballot. And I think that there should be a clear reason before anybody makes that kind of a dramatic change. And I will tell you a little bit about some of the statistics for union elections in Vermont. We don't think that there's any such reason here that would warrant making a change. It's probably maybe helpful to the committee, but you all can let me know where to go through how the process works currently under the State Employees Labor Relations Act. I'm gonna refer to that as CELRA, right? Because that's a lot quicker and easier. So right now, if somebody wants to organize a group of employees, they have to go and they have to get employees to sign cards. And if they can make a 30% showing, so if they can show that at least 30% of the employees in the Desired Bargaining Unit are willing to sign a card, then they go to the Vermont Labor Relations Board, or the VLRB. Definitely saying, VLRB, we think that these employees are interested in joining the union. We'd like there to be an election. The employer can either disagree with that unit of employees or frequently they may push back on which employees are correct. The stuff that comes up frequently with this is, for example, well, that employee is a confidential employee because they're the assistant to the chief HR officer. That employee actually supervises employees so it's not proper for them to be in the same bargaining unit with other employees. So those details get worked out at the Vermont Labor Relations Board and the board then orders an election. And during the election process, the board observes, it's held at the employee's work site. Employees can vote by mail order, by mail ballot if they can't be there to work. There is no campaigning by either management or unions allowed around the election site. Everybody goes in and casts a ballot and lo and behold, majority 50% plus of the ballots cast wins or the election or loses the election as the case may be. So that's how the process currently works in Vermont. It's worked that way for many, many years. So while we've not had car check in Vermont, actually under the National Act, the NLRA, and that pertains some of the stuff that Dennis is talking about to the private employers, there used to be car check many, many years ago, okay? So the National Act, which was originally passed in 1935 used to originally allow for something like car check as a showing of interest to form a union. Well, both the National Labor Relations Board and the Supreme Court subsequently believed over the years, came to believe over the years that there were problems with that system and that it wasn't the most reliable means of getting, recording what an employee's wanted to do at a work site. And most importantly, both the Supreme Court and the NLRB have said over the years, we can't get confused that the National Act, much like our state act, is an employee-driven right. It's not a union right. It's not an employer right. It's an employee-driven right. And what we're most interested in is in making sure that employees can make a free and fair and informed choice and that they can do it free of any interference. So starting in 1947, there has been no car check very, very intentionally under the National Act. So this bill would take away that longstanding, at least at the national level in here in Vermont, ability for employees to cast a secret ballot. There's a lot of reasons why there's significance to being able to vote secretly on this sort of thing. First of all, people sign cards for a lot of reasons. So if you're approached by a union rep and to sign a union card, one of the reasons is you really want a union and you want that union to come represent you. And if that's the case, that's great. And presumably that's how you're gonna go vote in the election too. But some people sign cards because they really don't like their boss. They had a disagreement in particular with their boss. They sign cards because they're out with a group of people for lunch that really, really support a union and they don't want to look bad. They sign cards because of peer pressure and because they want to get somebody that keeps visiting them at their work site off their back or one of their coworkers who's been pushing them on this off of their back. It's very, very easy to just sign a card one-on-one. A lot of times employees don't even necessarily understand what that means. They may think that they're signing a card and that means that there's gonna be an election at some time, but I'm just signing and saying, okay, go ahead with the election. So peer pressure is really not confined to the high school cafeteria. And the card check approach does not guarantee that an employee's decision is gonna be uncourced or that it's gonna be private. The union is gonna know exactly how the employee voted. Their coworkers are probably gonna know how the employee voted. The employer may know how the employee voted. And we don't think that that informs a free and fair choice for the employee. Eliminating this secret ballot election period, the process that I described at the outset would also eliminate the period that employees have right before an election where they know that an election is coming and they probably wanna talk with their coworkers. They may wanna talk with members of other unions to say, well, how is this union represented you? They may wanna talk with their friends and loved ones who've had experiences in one way or another with unions. They wanna have some sort of a robust debate and they wanna make sure that they understand exactly what they're voting for before they cast a ballot. This wouldn't allow for that. This is, once you sign something that you may not even know what you're signing, you're gonna, there's going to be a union if it's 50% plus one. So we don't think that that's the best way for there to be a free and fair exchange of ideas before employees make a really, really important decision for themselves. And again, this is not for or against unions in general. It's really for a democratic process and ensuring that employees have an opportunity to engage in this democratic process. There's really not a need for this dramatic of a change. So here in Vermont, and I've gotten some statistics recently at least from our VLRB and the elections that the VLRB is responsible for overseeing. It doesn't count the elections that Dennis was talking about under the National Act, which would go to the NLRB and the private sector largely, okay? But going back to 2009, so a little bit more than the last 10 years, there's been 75 union elections conducted by our Vermont Labor Relations Board. And unions won 63 of those 75 elections. So that's a success ratio of about 84%. So comparatively speaking, even under the National Act, the success rate for the last ad available was about 71%. So we've outdone by a long shot already under with our existing processes and our existing procedures, clearly employees feel that this is working for them. They are voting in unions under the secret ballot system and I have no reason to think that they wouldn't continue to do so. So some might argue that this law is necessary because of management coercion and discrimination. We heard some already about how times when that occurs, never has UVM been accused of an unfair labor practice, never has UVM been accused of coercion or of management trying to lean on employees one way or another for a union. The last time we had union efforts on campus, we put up a website that's called Inform Choice says here's all the information, here's a Q and A about everything that you need to know on what will happen. But it was very, very factual. We've never even taken a position on whether unions should or should not be in our campus. We simply want our employees to be well informed and to know the facts. There's already a method, if there were to be any concerns by employees or by a union for that matter about poor behavior on the part of managers, you could file an unfair labor practice charge at the Vermont Labor Relations Board. It's very clear that you can't go in and make promises to employees about their working conditions right before an election. You can't coerce employees. You can't ask them how they voted. Anybody who has worked in this, and I think you'll hear from my colleagues who've worked in this for even longer than I have, knows that those are the rules and you don't get to do that. And it's an unfair labor practice charge if you do. And as I've said, I can't speak in terms of statistics for other public sector employers but I can speak for UVM and say we've never had charges filed against us for anything like that conduct. And in fact, we've had seven elections at UVM. Just specific to our elections and our process, I just alluded to this, but we have had seven and union have one and this is going back to, boy, I think the late 90s was the first time at UVM that we had a union come in. And all but two were successful. And the two that weren't successful, there was a range of three different unions, one small in-house union, the Vermont NEA and the Vermont State Employees Association that were all vying for the same group of employees that they were trying to organize. So the reason that that election ever failed in my view is because there was infighting among the unions in this group of employees. And I don't know how that election would have turned out if there was just one group organizing the employees instead of multiple unions organizing the employees. So I just want to stress again that the State Employees Labor Relations Act is not unique. So while card check would be unique to Vermont, the State Act very, very closely mirrors the National Act and its intent is clearly the same as the National Act. The intent is not to force unionization on employees or to make it as easy as possible for a union to win. It's designed for the employees and for the protection of the employees and to make sure that employees get to make a free and fair and informed choice before they cast a ballot. And the only way they really, really get to do that and the only way that they get to feel free to express what their desire is in terms of whether they want a union or they don't or which union for that matter and they may want to represent them is if they have some confidence that their coworkers, their unions are of course not going to know how they've voted. That's all I have. Thank you. So you told us a lot of different examples of why individuals might vote on a secret ballot card check. Peer pressure and grievance with their boss and so on and so forth. But tell me this Jess, historically labor unions were formed by grieved employees who felt that they were not being treated properly by their management. So I haven't heard that from you as a possible explanation or reason why people might vote for a card check. So I kind of questioned some of these situations that you proposed to us that kind of whacked, for me, some historic, so the example I just gave actually, so first of all, if those employees were grieved to your point and they really thought that they're getting a bad deal of work and that they weren't being treated fairly, presumably they're gonna vote the same in a secret ballot. If they're willing to sign a card, they're probably gonna be willing to vote that way in a secret ballot too, right? But the example I just provided you, there was a lot of confusion among our employees when there were three different unions trying to, a lot of our employees and a lot of the questions we were getting, they really didn't understand which union was which, what it meant, what was going on, they weren't clear sometimes if they were voting for an election or if they were, so if we'd had card check in that instance, there was not a lot of clarity around that to the employees and before folks are union, we really don't take a position on whether employees wanna be union members or not, but there are employees before they're union members and we have an interest in making sure that their wishes are followed, that they feel comfortable in the workplace and that they know, that they can get their questions answered and that they know what they're doing when they make a decision. Excuse me, I'm gonna step out just right now, so he's in charge, saw his hand here and I just want to point out from where I'm sitting, I see unions on one side and management on the other. He's gonna be arm wrestling, is that pretty sure? That's not real. That's not real. That's not real. Okay, we did have some kind of a rant. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So, what's the question? I may have been zoning out and I apologize. Did you say where you live when you introduced yourself? I did not, South Burlington. Do you go, you don't have town meeting in South Burlington, is that right? No. But you know the vast majority of Vermont towns have town meetings? Yes. And you're aware that most of the business conducted there is not by secret ballot? Yes. Do you think that's a problem? Do you want to? Well, I'll tell you what, when it came to voting on a $200 million bond in South Burlington, I think I'm very glad that it was by secret ballot. So, do you have a problem with the business in my town, for instance, being conducted not by secret ballot? I think that's gonna be up to the town town works. I think secret ballot would be a better method of doing things, yes. So you have a problem with Vermont town meeting? I'm not saying that I have a problem with Vermont town. Do you have a problem with not using secret ballot at town meeting and your proponent of having secret ballot at town meeting? I think that secret ballot is a better way to record people's votes on things. I think it's a fairer way to record people's votes on things. And if the vast municipalities of Vermont disagreed with you, they would be mistaken in your view. I'm telling you who my opinion is, so that doesn't mean that I'm passing judgment. I want somebody else's opinion, maybe. Secondly, when you have a concern with car checking you, I think you used the expression, that people didn't know what they were signed, right? And you have, this is a concern of yours. And you think that when people go in to secret ballot elections, you have every confidence that when they cast a ballot, they do know what they're voting on? I think they've had an opportunity to be better informed, yes. Because in the specific instance of the South Burlington bond vote, the news accounts by some of the school board members were, we think that the voters may have been confused about what they were voting on. And that sounds to me a bit like people who don't like the outcome of something saying that the voters must have been infused on a matter. I can't speak to what other people have said or thought on that. I can tell you that I've spoken to an awful lot of my neighbors who were all quite clear on what they were voting on. Right, and so if we have union members in here who say that they're quite confident that workers will be confident in what they're voting on when they sign car check, you disagree with that? We ask because I've heard directly from employees that have been confused in this. So I think that I have first hand information. That doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of union members, I think I said at the outset. You know, the first thing I said about why people might sign a card or sign a union authorization card is because they truly want a union. They understand fully what they're voting for. There are plenty of people for whom that is true. But I think it's not necessarily for everybody that that's true. We'll agree that there's an equal, no, we won't agree on that. We will agree that there is a possibility though that people who vote by secret ballot could be confused on the issue. Absolutely. The same way that someone signing a card could be. I agree with that. Any other questions? Lisa. To Randall's point and yours, I'm gonna propose a compromise here just to see very different views. I think in today's day and age with the availability of information, anything that either a union or a company or a municipality wants their voters to know they would post it somewhere prominently either on the internet or handing out handouts to people and they would be, the voters themselves would be as informed as they possibly could be. I don't see in today's world how you can be extremely uninformed when you're voting. Oh, 2016. I should say this. Anyway, I just feel like it's not a black or white situation. I think that in either case, people could be as informed as they need to be. That's not to take position either way because, that's all I'm saying. Understood. Yeah. Yeah. So just wanting to, so you mentioned the informed choice website at the time I was at UVM during that, the unions effort as you may recognize my face in that. And I heard from multiple people that that was the most anti-union website that they had ever seen. And so just wanting to say that that was a lot of the feedback from folks in terms of the presentation that you're having around neutral information. And when I read it, it was as an employee, it was very slanted as well. And so wanting to just make sure that that experience is also out there as you talk apparently neutrally about this website. Yeah, no. And certainly I will see if the committee is interested. I'm sure that there are other, I have to believe that we're not the other one, only ones who've done an informed choice website. I do think that their opinions are of course going to be subjective on this. I certainly have seen information and stuff in the private sector that is going out that is very, in my view, would be very, very coercive, right? So the stuff that Dennis was talking about of having these meetings where you're bringing people in and you're telling them they're going to lose all their benefits and they're going to lose everything. That to me is very objectionable. Whether, depending on your point of view, I can understand why you'd say, well, the answer to the question, will I enjoy the exact same benefits now as later if I sign a union card, maybe no, because that's going to be negotiated after the fact. Now, that maybe, that's a true statement. And you have to couch it in. And I believe we did. It was before my time there. It will know and here's why this is what's going to happen, right? But somebody sitting on the side of the union might take a position that, well, that's awful and that's really anti-union because you're telling people that they could lose their benefits that way. So, but I understood that people can have a lot of different points of view on one piece of information. You have to be careful how you present it. Lisa. But I think I need to clarify what I was saying earlier that informed voters can do more than just read a website or read a handout. The time to speak to other people or to look up something else, whether it be on the internet or in a book or wherever, I think that that's very important. And I totally get what you're saying about the peer pressure of card check that there, it may be like this, I have to make this decision right now to sign this card or not. So I'm actually proponent of informed voting. If that wasn't clear earlier. And going there. Yes. I prefer uninformed voting thing. I wouldn't have been here. I wouldn't have been here. I wouldn't have been here. I'm good, I'm good for sure. You may want to be silent about why that is, right? That's okay. Oh yeah, please. You walked me through the actual process. When, from the point that, a group of, okay, so you have employees working at employees and it's a sensibly at some point, they form a group of like-minded people in terms of discussing union on union. So at that point, what is the process? What does they have? Yeah, so it's a great question and I think it's going to vary some depending on the employees. So at UVM, we've had him now, whether the employees reach out to unions, first-year unions reach out to them, I really don't know and maybe others can- Do you know a tip or tip? So I'll give you two examples, right? So one, recently, our police sergeants, our regular police officers are already represented by the teamsters. Our police sergeants themselves got together and said, well, we really think that we want to be part of the union too. They sent a notice to the employer. We met with them. They initially wanted, there's only five of them and they wanted their own bargaining unit and our response is, well, we don't really want you to have your own bargaining unit because that's problematic for us in these ways, but if you want to join the other bargaining unit, then we're good with you joining the other bargaining unit and they hold an election in a way we went and that was it, right? So that was very much employee-driven. I think that most times when you're talking about a much big, because that's a small group of employees. If you're talking about a bigger union drive, then it's kind of a mix. So there's a few employees in a workplace that are probably very interested in the union. They may reach out to a particular union that they've heard good things about or that they have some contact with and say, hey, I've been talking with a whole bunch of my coworkers and I think we're interested and that union may then come in and feel out, okay, well, how interested are you really? And they may start helping that group of employees to organize on a particular work site or campus. So I think it's a mixed bag depending on how many people, where it's going on. I think to Dennis's earlier points, it's a lot, employee is a lot harder to do in the private sector, probably than the public sector, right? So in the private sector, the employees might be more afraid of getting immediate pushback because they don't have the protections that we already have in the public sector, like just cause, you can't just hire somebody because. But I think it's a little bit of a mix. Once the employees, once the union comes in and it's organizing a group of employees, they get employees to sign a card and if at least 30% sign a card, they can go to the Vermont Labor Relations Board and say, we think there's enough interest here to have an election. So that's the process currently. That's currently the process. And would that process change? Yes. So what would happen instead is when employees sign that card initially with a union, if 50% plus one sign the card, then there's automatically a union and there is no election. Thank you. That's very clear. Sure. Anyone else? Oh, Mary. So when you mentioned that there was a small group of people that, and you said it was problematic for you, how so? Just negotiations? Yeah, we already, so nobody wants a unit of five, you know, the VLRB and I think Tim's unit is awake today, but there's concerns about overfragmentation when there's a little tiny unit sometimes, right? If it's a city and there's only 10 employees there, that might be different. But when there's another group that they can go into that it's a bigger group of 40 or 50 employees, then it's way easier to just negotiate that one contract than it is to now have to go through a whole separate negotiating cycle and start over with a whole new contract with that group of employees. And I think that the unions, at least in that case, like the teamsters readily agreed to it, I think frequently the union would agree to. Sometimes when you go to the board over, you know, so if a union files a petition and says we think this group at UVM like happened before in 2012 and 14 is interested, like in the 2014 election, management agreed because they had already, who the unit was, the proper composition of the unit, at least in the public sector, usually what were disagreed, we usually work things out with the union on, oh, you know, if I said to Dennis or to Heather or whoever, gosh, you know, these three employees that you have on your list, they actually supervise people. They don't want supervisors in the bargaining union either, so they're gonna agree. Yeah, those don't agree in the unit or, you know, somebody's approached my executive assistant or my admin assistant and she's the one that provides the support for all the bargaining and for the chief HR officer, everybody's gonna agree that that person is confidential and probably shouldn't be in the unit. So usually you sort those things out before the election. Seldom, Seldom isn't a problem, though, to sort those things out. Usually the union is pretty reasonable and we're pretty reasonable on who belongs and who doesn't in the unit. Okay, anyone else? Okay, seeing none. Jess, thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming. It looks like there was a little switcheroo here and we're looking at John Burrard, director of labor relations, the partner union. Just like they get your seatbelts. Resources, yeah, we are. Okay, welcome, John. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, you're listening when we introduce ourselves. Well, enough with the advantages it's in front of me on the wall. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Good afternoon, thank you very much. For the record, John Burrard, director of labor relations for the executive branch, state of Vermont. So Jess covered, from my perspective, 98% of what my concerns were. From our perspective, this is an unnecessary change. The executive branch at this point in time is probably 99.9% already represented by union. And so from the state's perspective, there's really no reason for a change here. But I've been working for the state in labor relations for 15 years and I spent 15 years prior to that in the private sector doing labor relations. And again, I think the high points for us is that CELRA is set up so that employees can form or not form a union or join a union. That the choice is supposed to be theirs without coercion from either side. And while, certainly, I recognize the horror stories that have been told about how management does business in some cases, there was an acronym that management had in the private sector. We don't have it in the public sector, no way to set up. We have not had to go through an organizing campaign since I've been with the state of Vermont and the executive branch. There's really nobody left to organize. But the acronym was always, if you were management and you were dealing with a union election that you couldn't spit. It was illegal to surveil employees. It was illegal to promise employees changes to their existing conditions. You couldn't interrogate employees about their meanings, whether pro or for. And you couldn't threaten employees. And so, while I certainly don't disagree that there might be some employers out there who have engaged in the behaviors that have been brought forward, it is my understanding, and I say it's my understanding because I am not a lawyer, and don't hold that against me, that those would be, in fact, violations of our statute. They're violations of the National Liberals Act. And we'd be subject, any employer would be subject to an unfair labor practice charge for engaging that type of behavior. It really is, from our perspective, about informed consent, right? Being an informed consumer. And it, again, has been my experience, and this is drawing from my experience in the private sector, that there are a number of ways that employees sign cards, and I think that they covered most of them here. And I will give you an example of that. I know that one union who was trying to organize employees in the private sector, where I worked, they held a barbecue, free beer and free food. You only just had to sign a card to get in. And then afterwards, employees were asking us, well, how do I get the card back? It's virtually impossible without going through hoops and getting a lawyer to get a card back when you signed it as an employee. And so that period between signing a card, for whatever reason, and the period to actually make a decision and cast that in your own mind, without anybody watching you, is really the period of time that gives that individual an opportunity to work through all of the questions that they may have. So, again, it's about informed consent. It's about not pushing employees into a union, and it's not about keeping them out of a union from our perspective. And this card check change would effectively push them towards the union. It doesn't level the playing field for an employee. It creates an imbalance in favor of a union. And so it seems unnecessary. Thank you. Any questions? John, this is John Calachia on the phone, and he said with the administration, 98% of your employees are union members, like what kind of employees are not currently union members? So, employees who aren't currently union members, actually, I'm trying to think of a unit that could be that isn't. I would say we're closer to 100%. The individuals who can't be in a union are managerial staff, like myself. They're excluded by statute, confidential employees are excluded by statute, and temporary employees. And that doesn't include, obviously, the exams and appointments. Could your temporary employees, under this new bill, organize and become union members? No, this bill does not change that. There's a different bill pending on that. So no, this would not change that. It just changes the methodology of the selection. OK, thank you. Mandel? I'm a lawyer, and I like to pretend I'm one. Right on on TV. And the way that I like to pretend is I usually like to know the answer to the thing about the S1 I actually don't know the answer to this. In the example you gave about the barbecue, and where they were told by union reps that they had to sign this card to get their free food. And beer. Don't forget to. Would that union actually have standing if there was a complaint file? If it was shown that they said people in order to get free beer and food had to sign a card for entry? Do you think that would be a valid card check process? It would be valid. It would be valid. Yes. So unions are not held to the same standard as the employer in these situations. Unions can effectively promise whatever they want. And it's been my experience that they do. They promise employees that they're going to keep what they have and get much, much more. As opposed to what I think that Jess was alluding to, that it's factually accurate and thus not a violation to point out that if there's an election and you elected representative by a union or former union, that everything becomes subject to negotiation through the bargaining process. And so there aren't any guarantees about where that's going to sugar off. So if the unions said if you sign this card, we'll give you $50. That would also be a valid election process in your estimation? In my experience, it would be I haven't had that experience with the Vermont Labor Relations Board to know what their position on that is. You'd have to ask Tim to do that. But you believe that it would, their position would be to approve a union that gave not money, but gave other things of value in exchange for signing a card? That has been my experience. Again, in the private sector, it can't speak for the Vermont Labor Relations Board. So are you suggesting that you mentioned promises that unions may make that employers can't? So you're suggesting that, for the most part, unions don't deliver on that? That people aren't better off if they're part of a union? That their benefits aren't expanded? That their pay is negotiated at that point? That could benefit them? There's a whole list of things that come along with representation through a labor union in bargaining with management that have historically been delivered. So I think that that's a case-by-case analysis. Depending on where they started and where they end up, I'm not taking a position one way or another for those individuals on whether it worked out better or for worse. To me, this isn't about not having a union or having a union. This is about the process of getting there and keeping that a process that is, again, provides informed consent or lends itself to having an informed consumer when they make what is a really important decision. Anyone else? John? Oh, Tom? Yes, I'm still struggling with testimony. So you seem to be working on the premise that period of time equals informed consent. And I'm not sure it's either logical connection at all. So it has to do with informing oneself. So for example, right, we don't vote for president on the first day of the primaries. And some people do. And that is a perfect example, right? There are some people who are going to sign a card. They're signing a card because they want a union. That's what they want. That's not going to change. They're going to vote for union in a secret ballot. But there are others who sign a card for various reasons who may not at the end of the day vote to be represented by a union for whatever reason. But they have an opportunity between signing a card and the day of the election to get as much information as they can to make an informed decision as opposed to just signing a card and then having that card turned in at some time in the future and having them be bound by that moment in time. It seems to me, and yes, I know, when we get voting in here, we can get into all kinds of strange places. But if you're trying to make a decision, it would seem to me, whether you're voting or you're signing a card, you don't well ought to be thinking about what you're doing. The process of getting here to me doesn't seem to make any difference. I think it has to do with how you get there. And people are messy. People are interesting. And certainly, people are subject to peer pressure or any other pressures. And from my perspective, I am generally not subject to those things. And so I would make an informed decision before I sign the card, but not everybody's like that. Yeah, but I would submit that would happen much as well. If there'd be pressure, give an example. Well, it's a secret ballot. So there's a secret ballot. But still, yeah. Anyone else? John, thank you very much. Thank you. You're talking now. Thank you. So I'm moving right along. Sophie. OK. Say your last name for us. Zadatni. Zadatni. Yes. So what do people struggle with that? Yes. And you're a general counsel for Vermont State College. Yes. So I am a lawyer, so you can all vote against me. Warrior, not lawyer, lawyer. I don't really have a whole lot to add. I think Jess and John kind of covered the concerns we have. At the Vermont State Colleges, we have six unions, most recently our CCV faculty voted to unionize. That was our most recent one in 2017. I would echo the points that we've already heard in terms of the importance of a secret ballot. Signing a card is a public act, a secret ballot. No one knows how you voted in the election. The other piece from the questions that have been asked about information. If we have a card check on the system, those cards can be gathered before an employer is aware that there's a union drive going on, that there are opportunity to inform the employees is gone effectively. So that, to me, is one of the benefits about having the process we currently have, is that the union gathers cards, submits them to the Labor Relations Board if there's sufficient interest. The board organizes an election. At that point, the employer is aware that there have cards have been filed and that we're moving towards an election. And that would be when there would be the information period. That would give the employees a chance to hear from both sides in terms of the benefits of joining the union. The other piece in terms of even handiness, one of the concerns I had just in terms of the proposed legislation, again, just echoing, I think, or both Jess and John have said, is even handiness for employees is really the concern rather than tilting the scale and favor of unionization. And one of the concerns I have is that right now, and I think Jess had touched on this, but if you use the card check approach to get a union in, there's no similar approach to get a union out or to change the union representation. And similarly, under section 942 of CELRA, election conduct, right now, the language, and this is not part of your bill, any interested person may file with the board a charge that employees eligible to vote in an election under this chapter have been coerced or restrained in the exercise of this right. So if you go to card check, that piece is going to be missing. There will be no opportunity for interested persons to file with the Labor Relations Board to say that employees have been coerced or restrained in exercising their right. So I think that goes to the question. I know that Randall had in terms of, you know, if you're buying votes or something like that, under what you're proposing with the card check bill, that piece is missing on the other side, that there isn't that same opportunity as there is with elections for somebody to file with the Labor Relations Board to say that employees were being coerced or restrained. So the other is that that actually happens? I think there is evidence that, I mean, I don't have the firsthand knowledge that John had in terms of beers and barbecues and things like that. But I mean, I certainly, from the experience we recently had with CCB, there certainly were reports that we received that employees, the adjunct faculty that were organizing, would promise things that they didn't ultimately get in the bargaining process. And then going to one of the questions, I think from Mike, in terms of were they better off, yes. I mean, they organized, they voted for a union, we had a collective bargaining process, and I think they certainly have a better than where they were when they were unprotected by a union. But that's not the same as they didn't get all the benefits that a lot of them had been promised that led them to sign cards. And I think that just goes back to the other concern that you've heard in terms of peer pressure and people being induced to sign cards without fully understanding when they sign that. They may be told, if you sign this, it means you're getting retirement benefits, you're getting medical care or whatever, and maybe you're not. So do they know that? And again, it goes back to the other issue we just talked about in terms of giving the employer an opportunity to share information about what can happen. And certainly with the CCB election, the same issue came up in terms of having to explain to people that once you've elected a union, then we sit around the table and we bargain over what benefits and things you get. And I think sometimes people don't realize that going in. They think that they're getting the same thing. Everyone else already has that's in a union, or whatever the case may be. But I mean, it's a continuing process though. I mean, there's annual, semi-annual, whatever it may be that collective bargaining happens so that it doesn't it go without saying that these progressions might ultimately yield the benefits that those people have been promised? Right. I mean, it could down the road, right? That's true. I mean, you're gonna be around the table and you're gonna be negotiating when the contract is up. But I think some people, we understood that people had been promised that and then obviously that shouldn't happen. In fact, you had a question. Yeah, I think my question was answered during that statement. It was, I was curious what types of things were promised before the signature. So it mostly revolves around extending benefits. Well, but that was particularly for our jump faculty. I mean, again, for our other employees, whether they're union or not, they've got a little bit of a wage and benefits and retirement and all that stuff. But particularly for our jump faculty, that's a very different kind of workforce than our regular full-time employees. So it's like a typical over-promising in your opinion? Well, something like that. That would be the one I have first hand knowledge of. Okay, great. But isn't that part of the education factor and don't benefit sometimes change? I mean, there are a lot of companies now not offering pensions or whatever. So wouldn't most people be informed that this could possibly change? So that's my concern with the education piece because if you have a card check, the employer may not even be aware that a union has gathered 50% plus one cards to submit to the Labor Relations Board and then the union is in. There has been no information provided. There's been no counterbalance to whatever they were told when they were signing cards. So to me, it's just important. Again, I would echo, we're not dragging people into rooms and berating them like don't sign up for a union or anything like that. But at least it gives the employer an opportunity to at least point out what collective bargaining looks like, what they can expect to happen just so people do have more information because if you go straight from a card check to having a union, you've lost that. The employer has lost that opportunity to have an information piece and to have a discussion about it. And again, the employer puts out and again going to the point in terms of a website, you know, if the union thinks, oh, that's, you know, we now need to re-inform. You know, that's what they're saying. This is what we're saying. I mean, there's a robust discussion there. So at least when people then get to vote, they've had the opportunity to hear from both the union side and from the employer side. Usually the union notifies the employer that there's interest in forming a union. And so the employer is aware that the union representative is going to be in their place of business. And obviously. I mean, not necessarily. I don't think that was necessarily true for CCV. I mean, there'd been a long time effort to organize the faculty at CCV. So for a long time there had been union reps talking to faculty at CCV. So in that case, I mean, it's perfectly possible. They could have gotten 50% cards plus one and then find out, oh, they filed it and now we have a union without having had that information period during the election. I don't know that an employer would necessarily know that that was imminent or likely to happen. Would you tell us who are non-union employees of the state colleges or do you have exempt employees? Oh, if it's a... We were a lot of different. Yeah, I'm just curious. Well, I'll tell you who is unionized. So we have our full-time faculty unionized at our three residential colleges. Our part-time faculty at our three residential colleges are unionized. Our part-time faculty at CCV are unionized. So we have three faculty unions. We have a group called the professional administrative and technical unit. And then we have a supervisory unit. Again, going back to what we said earlier, you can't have the supervisors in the same unit. And all of those, those five are all represented by AFT. And then we have our staff, federation employees and those are primarily custodial, administrative, public safety, vehicle maintenance, whatever. And they're represented by the Vermont State Employees Association. But we do have, I mean, our pockets that aren't unionized. And again, for the same reasons, John said managerial, confidential. Can you give a few examples of what you would like to, what Vermont State Colleges would like to inform people who are voting in these union elections about? In other words, what information would you give them that you think that the unions wouldn't be giving them? I think, you know, Jess gave a really good example in terms of just explaining that once a union has been elected or being selected, that then there's a collective bargaining process. So that promises about what will happen when there's a union of promises, but they're not guarantees of what's going to happen. I think, you know, people have questions about union dues, they have questions about what if they don't want to join the union? You know, again, there's been changes following the Supreme Court's decision in Janus before they would pay the agency fee, but just questions like that. And you would presumably inform them that any promises made by Vermont State Colleges would also not necessarily be kept either. I'm assuming that's part of your informed information. I haven't been responsible for preparing that kind of communication, so to be honest, I don't know, but we wouldn't be making promises. We would just be trying to just say very factually what's happening, like when the election would be, who would be part of the unit, just providing sort of concrete, factual information so they're aware of what's happening. Okay, so hold on. Now you wouldn't, now I'm understanding you're just going to inform them when the election's going to happen. Not just, so I'm just saying that it would be- Because one of the things you just gave an example of was that you would be informing them the promises that the unions are making aren't necessarily going to be kept. I don't think we would phrase it that way. I think we would explain that what's in a contract, what's in a union contract would be decided at the negotiating table, at the bargaining table. I don't think we'd say don't believe anything of the unions. We would be saying, so you understand this process, like when the union comes in. So for example, for CCB faculty, because we already had a part-time faculty unit, I think a number of them thought that they were automatically going to get whatever the part-time faculty had already negotiated previously, but CCB is a separate institution and there was a separate negotiation between CCB and their adjunct faculty. It wasn't a question of simply just having the exact same contract that the part-time faculty already had. And you think that the union misinforms them, or you just- I don't have personal knowledge of that. Just all I can base it on is questions that came back. Anyone else? Thank you, Sophie. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time. And next up, Rob Kidd, the old CEO who you're here to represent today. Rob, if you would. If you don't know who I believe. Yeah, so my name's Rob Kidd. I actually work for the Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club as the Conservation Program Manager, but I am speaking myself as a member of the Progressive Workers Union. It's the Sierra Club National Union. And basically what I wanna do is kind of talk about the benefits of how we see unionizing and carjack as making it a smoother process for workers to join together. Myself, when I first was hired by the Sierra Club over about six years ago, I was originally hired by Sierra Club National, which I was unionized. My job position transferred about a year later, and I was made a local Vermont chapter employee which has its separate books and separate entity. But when I switched over, I was told I could not be unionized anymore. Myself was, I had the sign to agree to be switched over, to be a non-unionized employee, and I looked at my local folks and said, I would agree to this if you follow all stipulations in the union contract. They agreed. So I was one of the few employees who was not unionized being represented in any way. So then for the next couple of years, I'd randomly meet different Sierra Club employees who work for the chapters who weren't unionized, and we'd have these kind of discussions about unionizing, about, you know, it's not fair that local employees don't have this opportunity. And we kind of built that relationship with each other within a small group of people because I'd be traveling to different national conventions. And our parent union, the Progressive Workers Union, was negotiating with the national organization about their latest contract, and they said, you know, one of the things we'd love to see is our colleagues and the states being able to unionize. And initially, the Sierra Club was a little concerned because there are operational differences. There's different ways we handle things on the local levels, a lot more democratic process. So there were kind of concerns on that. And we had, I think, I'm not sure the exact number, but at least 30 of us who were already publicly saying we were actively involved. And to just give you a reference to that, there's about 170 state employees for the Sierra Club. So we had 30 of us who were talking about how to do this. And we signed a letter, sent it to our national director. And the national director and national president looked at it and said, wow, you guys really wanted to be unionized. And they agreed upon to that process as long as we went through car check. And so we went through a negotiation process with car check about how we would proceed this. And along that particular way, one of the things that was kind of shocking to me, going through that first experience, because I've always seen this confrontational approach, like, oh, here's the employers on one side, here's the employees on the other side. We were kind of like, no, the Sierra Club was like, no, let's work together to create the best process. And from my angle, we were looking at this, we don't want a week in the organization, we want to strengthen it. So all of our employees were treated the same, treated fairly, equilibrately, across the board. So that's somebody who's doing my job in California is paid fairly for their vice versa as somebody, I know people who are doing the exact same work I'm doing getting paid $10,000 less in Michigan. So we wanted to see everybody elevated up along the way, and the builds a stronger organization. Also along the process, by us going through the books and to that we can see where the revenues are, we can see their sources, and it helps us make stronger overall club. By even as an employee, I am much happier that I have these protection. I come into work, I'm happy that I have a policy on the coronavirus, and I was actually told if I can stay at home and work at home. There's a policy, they adopted things like that. It's given me a lot of those for different protections. So I see this as a really good benefit for us being working to strengthen all of our public sector employees, that we have this opportunity to collectively organize and make a better process across the board. Now, I want to just step back to how we went about with even unionizing ourselves once we got that agreement about the card check process. Internally we had a group of five of us who made personal conversations with every single Sierra Club employee across the country, and we each had our signing conversations. And one of the things I took pride into was when I talked to somebody who wasn't really supportive of it. And I said, what's your concerns? I'd hear their concerns out. And we've compiled every single piece of data about why people were supportive of it, and why they were possibly opposed to it. And even the ones who were opposed to it, eventually, most of them I think came on board because we were listening to them. We didn't just take this on, it says, you know, we shoved this, we didn't have them just signed up for like a beer, actually had somebody bought me a beer who I was trying to convince, but we didn't do things like that. So it was kind of actually, I felt, I built a better relationship with the employees. And because we were done openly, we weren't hiding in secrecy, and we weren't trying to be, trying to get one up on our management. We were trying to work with it to improve our situation. So once we actually did file, we had 71% approved. And I take that as a really good testament that we were able to get 71%, because I know looking at our staff listing across the country, we have a dozen to 20 employees leave every month and within the Sierra Club. So we were always just trying to catch up to everybody who was new employees. So by, because we had a cooperative relationship with our employer, we were able to move ahead, move forward with the unionizing and not be hiding behind this, oh, do we have enough? Or are we gonna be surprised when we get to this secret election that we don't have enough people and we don't know about or we never even had that particular conversation? So that long story is, I felt it was more helpful for the overall organization that we were going back and forth and talking with each individual now. So, but I wanna also step it back is outside of that perspective with the Progressive Workers Union, the Sierra Club has always been a strong supporter of labor movements. And actually, in fact, we're one of the founding members of the Blue Green Alliance, which is a combination of the Sierra Club and labor groups talking about environmental issues and how we can work together to solve these common problems. Now there's a lot of times, a lot of there's been a lot of animosity with the unions about us taking away jobs. Well, we don't wanna take people's jobs because we live in this home too and our friends or neighbors are have those jobs. So we're trying to work together not working against each other. And that's the extent of it. So I appreciate the time to testify at this committee. I normally don't come into this. I normally am actually facing a lot of transportation issues all right now and then energy and natural resources, so. Any questions? Any questions for Rob? Good job. I actually do have. Okay. So I did follow your presentation, but so you started with the local union. I mean, you were unionized a local Sierra Club. Yeah, so I was originally, I was originally hired by Sierra Club National and I was originally unionized under their union. The Progressive Workers Union under Sierra Club National. My job as a category switched to the local Vermont chapter. So I became a employee of the Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club, which has a separate books. And so then we did a process of some employees who wanted to become unionized under the Progressive Workers Union. And then that union on a nationwide basis. Right. Unionized all of the Sierra Club. All the Sierra Club local chapters. Once we filed for that 71% approval. But that was nationwide. That's 71% nationwide. Of state chapters. The national employees were already unionized. Those who worked for state chapters at the Sierra Club. We got 71% of our total staff. And so they were like, there's a couple of different entities within the Sierra Club. And that is like the national employees were already unionized. And the local, like there's a chapter in New Hampshire. There's one employee there. Massachusetts, there's six employees there. And then Michigan, there's like 13 some. Thank you. I understand that better than nothing. Thanks. Thank you, Rob. Yeah. Thank you. So before we do move on, Damien, are you here for a walkthrough on this bill? I don't see you on the schedule. We've had one. Yeah, you've had one already. I have just here. You just here is okay. To listen in and if there are questions. Great. Bermany, if your name again. Heather Bimmer. Heather, yeah. Okay. Heather would like to have a few, make a few comments. And Heather, introduce yourself if you would at least. You know you've been here before. Heather Bimmer, AFT, Vermont. It's very interesting, obviously, to sit here and listen to employers who our union has organized in workplace and bargain with, say how great they are. And sometimes they're great, sometimes not so great, but I'll just tell you this. Bosses could change any day of the week. And so even if employers work here today saying we won't do any union busting today, it doesn't mean they won't do it tomorrow. And I think they've painted an overly glossy picture of organizing drives in the past. While we were here I texted someone who was the lead organizer at UBM when the service and maintenance folks were organizing. She said they had a whole list of unfair labor practice charges they could have filed against the employer. I'll tell you what, on most campaigns there's a list of ULPs. Unions don't always file, we don't file them when we win, right? Because it holds up the election. So the employer, we sign up 60, 70% of folks. We barely win an election. We don't file unfair labor practice charges, partly also because generally the remedy is a posting on the wall and the damage is done. Very, very, very rarely do you get another election. And often again, even if you got an election you might not win it because so much damage has been done. And I'll just give you an example from the UBM campaign. Bosses walked the most vulnerable people to the elections and made sure they voted. Walked with them to the election. So your supervisor walking with someone who doesn't speak English very well, right? Made with a vote no pin on the boss's lapels taking them to the polls. Lisa, yeah. Is this factual coming from you or is this just hearsay coming from someone else because I'm here to learn about car check. I'm not here to hear accusations against organizations who are unionized. So if you don't mind, if that's not out of line to ask to scale this back a little bit. I will say it on many campaigns, not that particular one, where we had a whole list of unfair labor practice charges that we did not file because we won the election. So, yeah, yeah. Question. If you won the election, how does that make a difference as to whether or not there were unfair labor practices? Why would you not have wanted to pursue that to prevent it from ever happening again anywhere else? One, it delays bargaining. So we have to sit down and bargain. And two, again, the penalties are posting, generally posting on the wall. So. So if you could stick to the car check. Absolutely. So there is a tremendous power imbalance. And so the bigger picture is a tremendous power imbalance between the employers and the employees who want to have a union. And so car check is one way to ameliorate that balance. And I do want to talk against specifically things. I heard someone say there's no car check under the National Labor Relations Act. That's not true. I know people who have organized through car check under the National Labor Relations Act. The workers at Hunger Mountain Co-op, in fact, had a car check process. And their private sector employees organized under the NLRA. Can you just clarify, though, that that's a mutual with an employee's agreement? Well, I agree with what you're talking about. I'm sorry. I'm just crowsing it for the record. I mean, that that's true if the employer with mutual agreement. But it's not one side. It is true with the employer's agreement. But I believe the testimony I heard is that it was not allowed under the NLRA. I would also say that this bill, when there are multiple unions, car check is not in process. So I think any discussion when there's multiple unions seeking to represent one group of employees, if this bill were passed, it would still go through an election process. So this bill does not change that. I do want to talk about these informed consent websites. Could I ask Damian to clarify that? If this bill went into effect with multiple unions seeking to unionize, there could be no car check? So what this bill says is that if you get 50% plus one of the signatures, you get certified. Presumably, if there are multiple unions, you could end up in a situation where you have three unions getting 30%, for example, or two unions getting 40%. It is still conceivable that you could have one union that gets 60% and then is certified at car check there. And this bill would allow 50% plus one. But if there's division between them, and none of them can get a, not a plurality, but a majority, sorry, hi. Right, so thank you. I needed that clarification because your statement didn't lend me to understand that. I appreciate it. Thank you. And I would just say, I have always been taught that unions promising things is an unfair labor practice charge. If I hadn't organized or working for me, who was making promises to workers, they would be pulled aside and told to stop because it is, my understanding is, it is illegal. And you don't do that. So I do want to talk about CCD faculty a lot because that one came up a bunch. And both of those, there was two organizing drives, both with our union, AFTE, one was before my time, one after. And the first drive, it was a different administration. And there was more anti-union activity, and the union lost. The second time around, there was less employer-sponsored anti-union activity, and the union did win that election. So I mean, this whole thing about the union promising things, again, I think is we don't do that. We tell people the only thing that we promise is you get the right to bargain, right? You get the right to negotiate. That's what you get when you form a union. We cannot guarantee the outcome of any contracts. And I just, well, we don't have to stop right there. But again, I feel some of these informed consent websites, we can have a long discussion about them. But often, we have the employer answering things that the unions could best answer. And look, we all can write things that slam things one direction or another. And generally, I have yet to see one that says, oh, on average, when unions organize, workers make more money. On average, when unions organize, these good things happen. So we can find one. I'll be happy. But I've never seen them. I've seen quite a few of them. So obviously, we think this is a good public policy. We think that card check has been done. It can be done. But right now, it is true. We need the employer's consent. And most employers are not going to consent to it, which is why we support this one. Thank you. Thank you, Heather. Any questions? I'm sorry. You're saying employers wouldn't consent to it. Do you have data on that? Every campaign that we've ever run, we have asked the employer to voluntarily recognize the union. I'm not sure it's allowed under CELRA. I just wanted to say, it is allowed under the National Labor Relations Act. It is allowed under the Teachers and Municipal Act. And so NEA can tell you about a number of times that they've asked for voluntary recognition and gave it. I believe under CELRA, which is the state employees, which is called NUVM and VSE, even if the union asks for it, I don't, and I'm seeing some dots over here. I agree. We actually had an instance with the AFT. Hello, this is Sophie Zidani, General Counsel for the New York State Colleges, and we did have a situation where we were prepared to move for voluntarily, and we were told by the Labor Relations Board that we could not under CELRA. So anyway, so we, outside of CELRA, our union has always, and you and I was with before, it was mostly private sector. You know, it asked the union to voluntarily represent that. Probably to recognize the union based on the majority of the work we're supporting, and they said no, except for Hunter Mountain. Just to have a little piece to that, as far as I know, the one public sector collective bargaining on Vermont that allows voluntary recognition expressly as the Teacher and Administrators Labor Relations Act for public school teachers. And that is, I believe, included in this bill with the current check option, but that's the only one where there's an express description of the process there of a process for a timeline for the school board to decide whether or not to voluntarily recognize or request an election. And that it's a different process than is set forth under the State Employees Act and the Judiciary Employees Act where there's a petition that's submitted to the Labor Board who reviews the petition and then decides if it's appropriate to hold an election. And then they settle issues such as disputes over the bargaining unit and so forth prior to that election. Identify yourself for a record. I'm sorry. David Leonard, Legislative Counsel. Thank you. Take that conversation. Make it fast. Oh, yeah. Oh, it was long. Wicked fast. That do a little refereeing, but that's OK. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Put your box up on the stone. It was good. Hello. Hello. Thank you. Yes, sir. Hi again, John. OK. Sure. We're on the record. Tiana and Matt are here. We just had a break. Yeah, we took a break. OK. Do you know? Um. Which one? What do we have here? Do 90 immediate hallways. That's fine. Thank you, Mike. Um, so if, um, what is the, is that optional result? Yes. No, sir. Oh, no. OK. Um, all right. So I shared, I shared, um, information over the weekend on this bill. Um, we have heard from a duff, a couple of different corners where, um, in some cases there is a desire to have some stronger language. And, um, basically, uh, I used rich, I have some language that I'm going to have Ron put up as soon as he comes back in that is additional language. In the results of the whereas. In the whereas. Oh. OK. So I could, I'm not sure I would like to say the concept. Um, I mean, I received immediate feedback on what I sent out from representative Todd and Hango and Walls. And, um, I personally had conversations over town meeting break at town meeting with folks who, um, who kept asking us to do, you know, to do have a little bit stronger language than what we're trying to do. And what we're getting at was, um, Ron, could you just put out the language? So rich whole shoe, Mike, I don't know if you saw it from the last time we talked about this, but rich whole shoe from Brattleboro was not able to make the testimony, provided some written testimony. And, um, which I think was part of the source for the second result. So this was language that some of this sort of exists. Um, if I can make one comment when we had talked about saying eugenics and not eugenic old earlier. Sure. This was, yeah. Um, so these, these two were based on my intention with this language was to put into, I believe this after the second existing whereas, uh, no, John, it's the language I sent to you an hour or so ago. Okay. I had that. I'm sorry. How did you share that with us? I'm sorry. I must have missed that. I'm sharing this with the committee as a whole right now. I sent it to John just a while ago. So how are we receiving it? Just by reading it up there? Yeah. This can be posted on to our website. Some of this, but not all of this is in the first part of the second part to the parts of it are already in here. The reference French Canadian mixed race persons with disabilities, et cetera. And parts of it aren't right. It's an expansion of that. And then the third, the second whereas on this page is I believe is new language. So in other words, what you're asking is that I take the, well, I think you probably want to leave at least part of the first one. I'm sorry. I got it. Sorry. Let me, let me, I got to pull it up. I can't. I've got to pull it up in my computer to be able to be clear to be, because I'm. I usually try to keep each result plus is one sentence. So I can do that by a semi-colon. It's a series which whereas plus. So this looks like Tom the first whereas on the screen would replace the first whereas that's now. No. So this would be, this would replace the, this would replace the third whereas. The third whereas. Online 18 on the current draft. Oh, I see. Whereas this. Oh, I see where you are. All right. And then, then that second whereas on that page would become the fourth one. And then we pick up with line where what's on line 20. So 18 and 19 would be, would be replaced with the first whereas. And then line, and then the next whereas would be inserted before what's on line 20. My one comment if I may, I'm purely drafting not addressing the substance at all here. I would, and at first I would use genics as opposed to genical and the first whereas. Yeah, that's fine. And Ron, actually, Ron, after this conversation you can post this on the website. But this is almost taken, this is taken almost pretty closely directly from the first one. It's taken from Rich Holshu's comments in his, in his written testimony. And the second one, the second one actually the first phrase of that is line 18 and line 19. Yeah. Right, so that is, that is that. That voluntary consent. So you're just adding to that. For the express purpose of protecting. So this line, this next line here came from, I believe this came from some of the reading that I sent. It was either Guardiola's or Abe's where it was, this is a quote from Henry Perkins. This is something that he said in the, well, in justifying the policy. I don't know that the average person is going to understand the meaning of that and just to throw that out there. Which part is it? They add on to after fully informed voluntary consent for the express purpose and then this part of protecting the so-called old stock by keeping the soil of their seed dead, et cetera, et cetera, rich, mellow and weed free. I don't know that someone reading that, if they understand that right. If I may on this, get on a word when we talked about the term so-called, it's rather colloquial for a resolution. If you want to leave it, that's your call. We had talked earlier. I remember we in one place used the word alleged as opposed to oats to itself. I just raise that as not again, substantively, but just as a word choice issue. Well, this is John. I think it's actually having perfect setback. We have him earlier in the. If it's this quote, then we leave it. We could just say to protect what Henry Perkins called. Because if that's what he said, I mean that we're quoting the right person. So not so-called is not alleged. And we mentioned in line nine of this. What I'm looking at though representative is the quotes. The notice is so-called. That's not in quotes. No, I'm hearing Lisa. And what I'm saying is if Henry Perkins actually said that, then we should put him in there and say that. I agree. If you're going to quote somebody, you should. Except I don't have documentation per se saying that he actually said that. I'll find that. Send it to you. Yeah. And I needed my editor to ask for it. And I would also ask for it as well. I don't even need the editor to question it. I'm going to say that in any resolution, the person X said ABC, I need to see some documentation. The person X said ABC. Yeah, that's fine. I can find that for you. I think it's an important thing that what's important in the comments about the soil of their seed bed is that it's an incredibly racist thing to say. And that's what we sold this policy on. It was an incredibly racist thing. Can you explain why that's racist and not just discriminatory in general? Towards the people who are being affected by this policy. Soil of their seed bed. Rich mellow and weed free. We want to keep these people out of our garden. Right. But why is that racist? Because this also pertains to disabled folks. I'm not understanding the racist. Well, it's ableist then too. So it's racist and ableist. I see the racism. Yeah, I get that. But it's not just racist. Right. It's hideous. Yeah. Anyway. Well, it tells sense that it's from every person. Can you just... No. I know you have... Michael, I will find that. Send it to you. Okay. I'm just answering representative Kalaki's question that whenever I say person X said item X, I need to see some documentation that person X actually saw. Okay. And that goes even as far as if it were President Lincoln at the Gettysburg address. Which is easy enough to document, but I'm just using that as an answer. Yeah. It's just... Yeah. So these were... This is what I came up with over break after town meeting. And then adding in the resolved, I think one of the things that was made clear in the testimony that we received, especially from Louise, was that they feel that... The first result. Okay. That they feel that the damages that were done back then continue to reverberate through their lives today. So that would... That would be added, perhaps. 15-ish resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives. We already have that in line 18. Yeah. It's part of that. I think if you want to expand it, you'd be in the second result, not the first. Because right now you have addressed the continuing impact of state sanctioned eugenics policies and practices. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That would be... Well, the question that... Of course. The question for that language is the second result says, recognizes that further legislative action should be taken to address the continuing impact of state sanctioned eugenics policies and practices, which is different than... We can rewrite on line 15 their families who were harmed and continue to be harmed is actually the only new language there. Because then it would pick up as a result of the state sanction. Well, then the credit is not there. Oh, right. Yeah. So you want that at 15-60? I'm putting it out there for conversation. I mean, yes. I would like this language to be included in this. I think it makes this bill stronger. It makes this... When I listen to the reporting and this conversation on the Christopher Tiffett podcast where the United States inserted a larger apology inside of the Defense Appropriation Bill in 2009 and never read it and said there were problems on both sides and just really managed it poorly, it kind of got raised my hackles a little bit that we've gone so far down the path of trying to get this to be as strong as we possibly can. And this is what I came up with after town meeting, after talking to folks who were affected. Yes, Lisa. So I don't know if everybody read the email chain, but I chimed in that I spoke at four town meetings about this and in the heart of the Abenaki Nation, really, which is my district, and no one questioned anything negatively or positively. So that being said, did you want to use harmed twice in the same sentence? Families who were harmed and continue to be harmed, or would you go for continued to be affected by? Because I don't know that we're deliberately or even not deliberately harming people today. There are a lot of laws in place that we shouldn't be harming people today. And yes, they are being affected by things that happen to their ancestors and their family members, but I don't know if harmed is the correct term. If I may just in a writing perspective again, the way I saw this is I've been merging the two so the word harmed would only appear once. Be consolidating the stronger elements into the existing language, but those elements that are already there would be left alone and just merged together. So how would you word that? Families who were harmed and continue to be as a result of? Families who are or continue to be harmed, something along that line, so the word harmed really are and continue to be, I want to go back a little bit. I just feel that saying that we are continually harming people is, it's not our intent to continually harm people. If it's effective, if it's effective is the right word, then so be it. I'm not sure. I just feel like we're apologizing for continuing to harm people. It's as if we haven't done anything yet and we have to. We are doing something. The way I'm hearing that is that we have heard that the harm does continue with 101-year-old Abenaki woman who is still afraid to be identified as a tribal person. So whether we intend for it to happen or not, or whether we consciously keep doing it, I think it exists. That's where I think. Point taken, but I'm still not in 100% agreement. Okay, fair enough. So I think maybe the difference lies in the fact that harm was committed and for those people who are still with us, that harm still exists from then. But we're not continuing in terms of new, doing new things to continue to harm. I'm not sure that phrase says that we continue to though. Well when you say continue, you're harming and continue. It's not in there yet. I mean it's not the way in which it would be phrased. It would sound as if harm was committed and continues to be. And maybe it's the way it exists. No, it's a 12. That's a tricky thing, right? We're apologizing for, I mean this has been, well... Which still has a present effect on some people, families and individuals have experienced this. But we're not continuing that kind of behavior on members of the tribe who were not subjected. They themselves were not subjected to, except for those people who were. But you've got new generations in other words. You've got the generations coming forth that have not... They've experienced the history. Well let's say they've learned the history from the elders. But they themselves have not been subjected to the kind of treatment that their elders were subjected to. No, not the specific treatment, right? Not a vasectomy, not a sterilization. But that it was, but that the result of it being... The result of what happened. Chief Stevens testified, and he wasn't the only one, that his family, when someone came to the door, people walked away or people went in, people went away. There was the fear of being separated. Which is something that is spoken to as a history that existed prior to the eugenics survey. But the racism, if you will, or the institutional, the fear of what someone who drives up into your yard. But does that fear exist today? Yes, that was testified to by a number of our folks. Same fear? Yes. So Tommy and then Lisa. Okay, I think we just have to figure out what the language is. I've got a suggestion. Yeah, well let me just throw one into my bag. That I'm looking at what lies 1415-16, right, is what we're talking about right now. And so as an actor. Wait, wait, wait, and continue to be hard as a result of discredited state sanctions. Reverse it. You're getting positive practices. I would reverse it too. Yeah, that's my suggestion. I would reverse it. My wordy would be, they're families who were harmed, and who continue to be negatively impacted as a result. To your point, I think Lisa. Yes, absolutely. Because I don't mean to negate that people are feeling things today. Absolutely not. Feeling things. All right, check that one. Thank you, James John. If I may, Mr. Chair, I was just playing with lion with chair, but I was wondering if the word residual should be there somewhere, possibly by the residual effect or residual impact? Interesting. Just an idea, I'm throwing it out. I like that better than negative impact, like residual. Because some of it is legend history. Some of it is past history that's being passed down to the younger generations in these stories that are coming out now. And the younger generations are feeling this now because of what they've been told. For me, it's a residual thing. Because it's not actually, well, it shouldn't be happening to the young people today, by law. And if it is, I've worked on that too, but that's the whole other council that's going to do that. This gets to something I started to say earlier and cut myself off, but that idea that while this is specifically for an event in the eugenics survey, it's more than that, we know that. And that's the point of the task force to form the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So this has been the tricky part for me is trying to figure out, like what is in the apology and then what is in the next step and the next step. And I want to be sensitive to the fact that the more steps we go down the line, we run the risk of not fulfilling the next steps. I mean, that's just the nature of our work sometimes. And I think we're trying to say that we are committed to making sure that the next step and the next step happen. And so here it's like, but this is still what we heard from folks. And again, I think the hard part in our committee work is that we have been really doing some hard, hard work listening and being tested about what we think and how we think about it in order to get this right. But again, the motivation for this language was to just make sure that what's written and is going to be in the books gets what we're trying to get across. Lisa? So it was discussed that we give the task of writing the apology to the task force, the Truth and Reconciliation group. And I still don't understand all the factors behind having to pass this out this week. And we have not heard from the French-Canadian population at all. They've been reached out to and there's a society in there they haven't responded. The society is genealogical in nature. Right. But we know from Nancy Gallagher's book in particular that had the most detailed information in it but also the other pieces that we've shared. And also we know that French-Canadian was also... It was specifically stated, yes. But it was also commonly used as just like other derogatory terms were used for descriptions of natives. I just feel like we have heard from everybody else have not heard from that. How different would their story be? I don't know, but like at the last minute we're hearing objections from the Native American community. All of a sudden at the 11th hour last Friday before we left we had a little sit down from leadership and they said, you know, hey, wait a minute. The Native American population wants this, this and this included. But we have heard nothing, zero, from the actual French-Canadian population. So that to me is a little concerning with rushing this through. And I just want to put that out there because I know the majority opinion is not like, you know, we need to wait on this. I'm not sensing that we're rushing anything through on this, but we've seen six weeks so far on this bill. Well, I mean, I would add that the process is a little weird. I mean, I thought we left last week or, you know, the last week we were here. I thought the committee had come to a pretty strong consensus on the resolution. And then it does now feel like three days from crossover, all of a sudden we're engaged in the task of rewriting it. And I just felt like we had a consensus. We had in a rare moment we had 11 people all on the same page and then just something to kind of gets dropped on us after six weeks. And I know that you were expressing frustration on a separate bill when the chamber was here after the bill had been here for six weeks. And all of a sudden they come in with objections and the administration does the same thing. They wait on a bill and they wait and they wait and they wait. And then the last minute they come in and they go, oh, here are all these concerns we have. And now here we are with the same process here. It's frustrating for sure. May I just as a point of information, a parliamentary procedure for you all to be aware that crossover does not impact this all as a resolution. Good to know. So you don't hear that. I don't offer that. We're conscious. Simply as an FYI. Thank you. You didn't know that either? I suspected that. This is a resolution. It's a resolution, so the crossover is immaterial to it. It obviously affects the later you wait in the legislative session, the Senate will have less time to deal with it. And in terms of crossover per se, you do not need a rules committee waiver to bring this up post-crossover. So is that less frustrating if you represent what's on? Well, it depends on what we do with it. We continue working on it to make it the best it can be. But I'm not interested in delaying this unless coronavirus stops our work. I'm not interested in waiting until January of next year when we may not be here to take this up. We've put too much time and energy and heart and soul into this whether you believe in it or not. Well, I don't think it's a matter of not believing in it. It is for some people. Some of us were the original sponsors of this bill. Right. I think that. I also get that sometimes when it gets really hard to come to the finish line on stuff, it's really hard to finish. Consensus doesn't necessarily mean that everybody agreed to it. I've been arguing for stronger language for two or three weeks. So I'm not really all that concerned about dropping another paragraph and a half of words on people to try to understand. It should be a fast thinking process here. Nor am I interested in rushing it out by the end of crossover, especially knowing full well that we can take a deep breath and we don't have to wait here until 9 o'clock on Friday night to finish it. What was the first part of what you just said? I miss that you're not interested in dropping another paragraph, meaning taking out something? No, dropping in. Dropping in another? No, no, no. That's not what I intended to say. I'm not interested in dropping the bill. Oh, I don't think anybody's really asking you to drop the bill. Well, it's been expressed. Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to express that. No, you weren't the one who expressed it. I just feel like maybe we need to do a little more. Well, I'm not sure where we're going to get with French Canadians because we have put it out there. We have asked for participation and we have done an incredible amount of participation and really intently to the people who have come forward who are very directly affected by this that a French-Canadian genealogical society hasn't responded yet is the only possible way of doing things is we can continue to reach out to them or reach out and find a way if you have an insight to where we can find folks then bring them forward. So what about reaching out to UVM since they issued their own apology and this survey commenced there? They must have some resources with the French-Canadian community. And to me, to not take testimony from a French-Canadian would be like saying we don't want to take testimony from the disabled community. And we did. We went through great lengths to get testimony from all of the affected communities and to not take testimony from one particular group to me is quite egregious. So what about reaching out to UVM? If you can look out to UVM to the folks that might have testified from us from UVM's office whether it's the President's office or I believe we had someone who testified from UVM early on and so we can reach out to him to find out if he has any folks that I would appreciate that. That would make me feel better. Not French-Canadian just for the record. So what are we doing with this language? Back to the task. Could we have our council write up what we currently have so we can read it all in one point by point and then maybe in the meantime get one more testimony from someone from that community? Yeah. Is there other language that people, I mean while we're talking about language is there any language that people either wanted to strengthen or soften? So a fair amount, Tommy and I had a conversation earlier today and there's a fair amount of pushback including from myself and from Tommy originally and from John about the term genocide. So Tommy and I had a conversation and we were talking about, I guess he and I at least didn't have a problem with ethnicity. I think that's a descriptive word that works in connection with what we're trying to do. But then we kind of went on and started thinking a little bit deeper and thinking well you know this was actually a cultural genocide. People weren't actually murdered but these people lost their heritage, they lost their language, they lost their land, they lost their costuming, they lost so much as a result of this that it was in fact cultural genocide. So Tommy and I thought about presenting that to the committee to see what thoughts were about adding that language since I was one of the individuals that were opposed to genocide because Tommy has presented the literal translation of genocide is a murder. And you know while that technically didn't take place I guess as far as it did in Nazi Germany and boxcars full of human beings going to gas chambers but the culture that was lost as a result of this and people hiding and not answering the door and not and being afraid of vehicles pulling into their driveway and denying their own culture. What's cultural genocide? So that's what Tommy and I were speaking about earlier. So I think at least the two of us would be, I don't know exactly where we would put it but the expressions ethnicity and cultural genocide. Ethnicide really is cultural genocide. I don't think the need to use the word genocide is warranted at all because the definition of ethnicity refers to the extermination of national culture. So maybe which, but I would argue the other way Lisa, people understand the word genocide I think. Yeah. So maybe instead of drop at the side and say cultural genocide. No. Sorry. You can do whatever you want. Because people may not know what ethnicity means but genocide they do understand. And I was looking things up as well and in terms of the we got the undergrad thesis and so I was looking into different scholars around and particularly around the word genocide and that I found a number of different scholars that are using the word cultural genocide to refer specifically to indigenous people and the governmental policies such as this that we are trying to acknowledge and that it did exactly, the argument that the two of you are just sharing right now is the argument that I found in multiple scholars. So I'd like to add that to the conversation. I think he knows where the scholars are. There's going to be, oh, yeah, holy. Yeah, it won't work. No, it won't. It won't go down. So if it were to be entertained as additional language, I guess then we would need to talk about where it might go. Michael. And I don't know if it won't and where it might as well result. I don't either. That third where it is in Europe. Can you pull it up again? Sorry. Can you pull up the, what do you want, Michael? I'm just thinking that if you do want to include the term cultural genocide, maybe it belongs in that new clause, the revised third clause, the clause that right now talks about voluntary consent, that yeah, right here. The third whereas? Yeah, somewhere within there resulting in cultural genocide or something along that line. Well, oh, you also have the program of legislative action. You have, if you posted that alternative one, we could just change that to cultural genocide there. Which in the new language, John? Yes. So I just posted under my name, Mary. No, no, it was a, well, it comes a committee website now. That alternative thing that Michael. That I merged in last week, now two weeks ago. Yes. Optional resolve language is called, so. Yeah. That one. Which is now in the text, at least as of the moment it is. The one that reads that the General Assembly recognizes that further legislative action should be taken to address this cultural genocide and the continuing impact. Right. It stopped. It stopped said, when we discussed this a week and a half ago, we stopped it at some point. We didn't include the last few words. Right. We were all uncomfortable with genocide, but I think what Tommy and Chip are coming up with, and the other, you know, it's interesting for me from a disability perspective, it's like, okay, in cultural genocide, I just don't know how to think from the Abadacian perspective of what cultural genocide is. I don't know, you know, and this is a number of groups and for the poor and other people, it's like, well, I kind of like where Chip is. Where are you all? So I'm wondering, on line 18 where it says action should be taken to address the continuing impact of state sanctioned ethnogenics, policies, and practices. It doesn't say ethnogenics. I'm not sure that's even a word. I'm sorry. I'm not sure if the term ethnogenics is a word. Somebody could use a word. Okay. I'm not sure if somebody could look it up and double check on me. Oh, ethnogenics. I'm sorry. Well, I would assume you wanted to leave the word eugenics in there, whatever you think. That's the base term. It is a word. Ethnogenics? Ethnogenics is a word. But it's more a study. I think it's dealing more with a scholarly study and not in a negative study of ethnic groups. I was trying. Yeah, you. Good one. You know, what were you saying about the, so I could understand what you were saying. Were you saying that with Jim and Tommy's voice, is that the more current way of talking about this is to say culturally genocide? That is what I found different scholars specifically looking at indigenous populations. Yeah. And so that the, and it goes beyond the government policies of eugenics, but in terms of taking children away from families for the express purpose of a racing culture and, you know, prohibiting religious practices and prohibiting language use. So the whole suite of governmental practices to systematically eliminate culture. Yeah. And so that that term cultural genocide is in scholarship, but specifically around indigenous people. So it doesn't address the issues of disability and folks that are impoverished. Right. And then, yeah, so. We'd cover French Canadians, though, as far as what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, it could be. It could be, yeah, in terms of disallowing language, in terms of disallowing religious practices. Right. I don't know what the rates of removing children from French Canadian households were in Vermont, but that that was a practice that happened in Vermont for indigenous folks and across the U.S. Lisa. So I had a couple of comments, but the only one I'm going to make at this point is that this may not be the end all and be all of resolutions in terms of this eugenics. Survey. The Truth and Reconciliation Council may come up with something much more specific and want to do a different resolution than a more involved one. I think we're getting pretty deep into this. On the optional resolve language, I'm just throwing this out because it seems to cover more iterations like John's concerned about the poor and disabled that we mentioned earlier. So we have where it says state stations, eugenics, policies, related practices of disenfranchisement. And this would, it gets kind of lengthy, but I think it addresses more than whatever. So we have disenfranchisement, and we could say an individual, family, community, and cultural destruction, which I think then, between family, community, and cultural, we cover all of the groups that we've mentioned before. It may be too clunky. It may not, I don't know. Could we throw religious in there too? Because some of the persecution against French Canadians was because of their Catholic religion. Sure, I thought that would have been covered potentially under cultural, but... I think culture's a little different than religion. I like the word destruction. Okay. Because that doesn't necessarily mean murder. It has a slightly different connotation than genocide. Yes. But it could include genocide. Could you read again, please? After disenfranchisement. Disenfranchisement and individual, family, community, and cultural destruction, and maybe religious manner as well. It's a longer way to enumerate much of what's covered by cultural genocide, but it also includes some things that aren't covered by the general cultural genocide, i.e. the poor and the disabled. But, significantly, we get the language. I think it brings it more back to where we were the Friday we left here. Sure. I guess before we were representative to we know which only some people heard from. Lisa, if you'd like to hear more from representative to we know, I'll be happy to set up your women. And you can relate exactly what you related to us, which I believe I related back to you. That's fine. Is that a yes? No, I read what you wrote to us, and I was half in the room and half out when he was speaking. I didn't know that it was a group conversation. I thought it was a prior conversation. So I was trying not to listen. Basic rule of thumb with the doors open. It's an open conversation. So just a quick question though. This is more, I don't know, is it a philosophical question? Is the distaste for the words that end in I-D-E or C-I-D-E, is that what it is? Is it really hard to accept that that's what we did? Or is it just are the words too ugly? No, I suggest an ethnocide which ends in C-I-D-E, as opposed to genocide, which I feel invokes the image of mass killing, as Tommy pointed out in your well-written email to us. Which I agree with. But it's cultural. Cultural ethnocide then. It's hard work folks again. And it's okay if we all don't agree. Some of us will vote for it, some will vote against it. But we were all in consensus when we were leaving here on Thursday. I'm not going to say Friday, but Thursday. Because Mariana wasn't here Friday. So I heard a potential next step of incorporating some changes. So at least you asked for kind of a clean incorporated copy to then look through. I think it's the... What I'm hearing the sticking point on right now of if we include the word cultural genocide in this language and it might be... We have some potential locations for that phrase, but it's not something that we are seeing written out, which is generally helpful for us to be able to see where the language is instead of just talk through it. And then I also heard the next step of continuing to reach out to French, Canadian folks that we have done multiple reach outs already and not gotten any interest in coming to testify and hearing that the chair is willing to continue to reach out to see if we can get somebody from that group to testify. So those are the next steps that I have heard us agree on in our competition. So for Michael, what are we tasking Michael with? Right. To words, to take the language that was provided under my name now on the website. Could I... And wordsmith that into the... Yeah. Could we scroll... I don't have a... I understand it's on the website, so I just want to make sure that I understand my directions before I leave this room. And my understanding is that for the moment, and I know everything's for the moment, the first two whereas clauses stay as they are. And then the new language that you had for whereas clauses would become the new three and the second one effectively the new four because part of that is already there and I would merge it together. And then there would be a new second resolve clause based upon the language, based upon both what's there and the language that was suggested and somewhere in there I need to get the term cultural genocide. And I'd like some direction where you want me to put that. I think we're where we're agreed to right now. Is that... Or ethnicity. It seems to be one step forward on those out of those two. And then if Randall, if you can provide perhaps... I mean, everything's still in play because we're still working on this, right? So if Randall can send you his language that change the additional language that you have presented. So we're talking about for the language that representative is looking at we're talking about the second resolve clause not a whereas clause. I was working off of the optional resolve. Which is now the second resolved in the text. Yeah. When I'm out calling the second resolve and which the gentleman who submitted the document he also was effectively modifying what's now the second resolved. And if that's what you're doing, that's fine. I will incorporate your language as the second resolved. As the new second resolved. Which is based in part on what's already there but expands it obviously. Right. And then there was some wordsmithing to be done about the harm the harm the harms. Yeah, and right to make sure I didn't use the word harm twice within three words of each other. Yeah. And then... There was a talk about negative, procedurally impacted or something to that nature. So most of what I want is on the website with the exception that representative Zot needs to send me an email so that I see the balance. Yeah. And I sent you an email with the link to the article that is also on our website from Mercedes to Guardiola and I gave you the page number where I found the quote of Professor Brooke in her resume. Yes. Fine. So I'll take out the cell call and I'll put in the Professor Brooke's reference. Yeah. What is your timeline? Thursday. Sometime on Thursday. And obviously I will... And that's Thursday to check in. I mean we're just going to keep checking in on... I certainly kind of all those changes made for Thursday. Once I have them edited I can send them to We have to... We have to schedule Thursday and Friday and let those open simply because of the rolling nature of all of the different things that we're working on. So... I will assume that it's going to be ready in time if you decide you want to do this the top of the morning on Thursday. So then that's good for me. So then if I see you're not going to see me till 3 in the afternoon. No harm done. I already have everything set. Great. But I'm going to try if possible to get this to run by the end of the day and mark the treatment like even simpler so that all of you could have a chance Wednesday night to see what I've done. Great. I'm not promising that but I'll make every effort to make that happen. Thank you. There was two questions from the last meeting in this committee and I have not done a new version of the bill so it's the same version you saw previously. But there's one question looking at the bill itself you'll notice that 9BSA 4502 is amended but in that subsection of that statute it does not include as protected category of persons with disabilities and some of it asks well how come and the answer is that in text you don't see in the bill in subsection B of the same statute it does deal with people with disabilities so it's simply how the bill looks you don't see the full statute does address people with disabilities. So that was one question and another question was raised if you remember you heard testimony from an attorney who's experienced with employment related law and he suggested adding some language which the committee certainly could do if it wants. I was not asked to add it in so I did not but I think there were some questions which maybe I can answer and other witnesses in the room could help answer which is what happens if someone is a member of a protected category can they still have an adverse employment action taken against them for a legitimate reason and the scenario that was discussed last time was if you pass this bill and homeless people are now a protected category if they're employed by business but they're continually late what could the business of anything do could they take an adverse action could they discipline a person for being tardy or even perhaps fired back and the answer is that under current law any of the protected categories you can take a legitimate adverse employment action against an individual for legitimate reason and you could do that I believe if you add housing status to these anti-discrimination provisions if you want to add some of the language that Steven Ellis suggested would certainly do that but I don't know if it's necessary to do that what would happen under current law and I believe would also happen if you add housing status to any of these statutes that you're looking at is that someone who believes that they've been discriminating against would make a prima facie case so they would go into the ledge that I was let's say they're fired I was fired for being homeless is so they would have to allege that that they're a member of a protected class that the other one they were qualified for the job that they were subjected to an adverse employment action and that the employer had treated a similarly situated individual outside that person's protected class in a different manner so that would be a prima facie case if they can allege that which is a very basic showing so it's sort of making the first showing then the plaintiff the employer would have the burden of showing that they can articulate a legitimate reason for that action to have been taken so in the scenario that was given they would have to articulate that the person was fired not because they're homeless but because they were laid continually they were laid ten times in two weeks or whatever it was but have to articulate legitimate business reason for the adverse action that was taken if the employer can do that then the burden shifts back to the person suing the employee to show that that is merely a pretext that they weren't really fired because they were laid they were really fired because they were homeless or a member of a protected class so this ties into something we talked about before which in any situations it would be fact dependent in case specific in other words it would be up for the Human Rights Commission or the courts to weigh if indeed it was a pretext circle so those are some of the issues that have been left hanging the last time I was here did I answer those questions officially are there any follow-up questions I can answer at this point yes you answered my question about the disability thank you so I'm still a little puzzled in terms of I understand what the burden of proof is in improving a discriminatory case but if someone's living in their car and they are continuously laid because of that isn't there a homeless situation causing that to be terminated from their job and isn't there a connection there there might be a connection but I think the employer can take action against some of the legitimate information related criteria factor regardless of the root cause I think this always gets into who's made the privatization case what's the evidence whether it's a pretext so I can't really answer more specifically than that because it depends on the facts of the case and what kind of evidence you have and you know what could be established and you should hear from other witnesses also to see if what I summarize is accurate any other questions does anyone else recall any other questions from the week before there was one that was brought up by the grossers association that had to do with job applications and the notion that if you cannot that you need an address in order to fill out an application I forgot to follow up on that I think that was discussed in testimony this bill has been around for a while it may not have been last year it may have been a part of any of it I think that issue was discussed and I thought for some reason that if you add an address that might be sufficient I did not follow up on that so I can try to do so but I didn't check on that I think that was tax information I was just thinking about tax information yeah this goes beyond there are some municipalities or states that are starting to do identifications for almost people that are giving them a we're not doing that people can get an ID card if they can quality if they can prove that they they can get one somehow but we're not issuing specific legal but we're talking like Chip was pointing out and we were just discussing with the address component needing that for documentation for the paperwork for the application process still need that for their HR paperwork for tax purposes soon so that's if you can look that up that would be great I don't know, have you hired a homeless person or a person without an address well I worked at John Graham Housing Services for years to get people back into the workforce it's always the John Graham address right and is that sufficient no it's only sufficient this sort of car scenario that we're painting a picture of with the person living in it is that a term what does that do to the address component of like mandatory filing paperwork with the federal government how did people at the John Graham House deal with it the person was living there living in the car I'm saying the employer the individual was living in the car the goal hopefully would be that if someone had a job totally agree with the place to live yeah but you got to start when you start to figure out you still got to spy on the W's when you hire yep so like what are you putting on that line on the W's if they're living in a camera well it could be a friend's house it could be a let's um I'm just curious like what's the legit answer what's happening can I get a temperature check on this are we like are we ready to find consensus to use the word from earlier today on this bill and it doesn't mean you have to vote for it doesn't mean you have to I'm just getting a temperature check have we gone over the language sufficiently to the point where we can put this on when the attorney comes back with further information if that's answered satisfactorily to our to you know to get us to the next level is the next level voting on this bill whether it's you know it's not going to be today obviously but whether it's Thursday or Friday yes Lisa um I still have notes like about um public disturbances and people interacting or law enforcement interacting with homeless folks and I don't know that we've really heard from very many law enforcement if any I can't go back that far that quickly and um the address the employment address for an employment application that concerns me because I think that's a federal law but I'm not certain about that um so I still have some unanswered questions yes okay as far as the police they've been invited we've invited a couple of different representatives from public safety and have gotten nos for answers specifically do we know why they didn't need to say they just said no um and then um so I think Luke I think we're done with you for today did you even hang out or can I run to the other committee uh you can can I ask before the police are you still in the room? I am um I know you had talked about the public accommodation and the county came up with kind of a bridging thing and I just want to make sure you're comfortable with where the language now stands did you raise earlier um right that was some weeks ago um so I just remember what the specific yeah the specific was wanting public accommodations as our language so that it wasn't a new category of carve out was the so that was with accommodations the spaces hybrid that we were discussing okay um well um maybe that question is to you Luke because I missed some of the testimony left in terms of where that end of landing if you go to so this is on the draft that's number three and the other left hand corner says to 2020 in my initials LLM if you look at that draft which is what I think the one we looked at last time if you go to page three so this is the only section of building with the so-called homeless building rights it's not the men's title nine later and the other stuff you'll see see the line 11 this is the language that the committee wanted put in yeah and it you will see one has public place or two a place of public accommodation with the consent of the owner or other person representing the place the history and in a manner that doesn't interfere so that was the new language in the latest draft that was trying to accomplish what the committee wanted to achieve yeah I think that um uh it feels like a little over explaining of the um of uh what we have talked about is already in law in terms of not interrupting normal business operations but that was always my my intent around accommodations and so I think so line 16 is good yeah so I think that's then that works for me okay good okay and I think the bill works for me and President Talbot you're asking us a temperature check thank you John um I guess while I still do you have a place to run to I do but I perfectly find a hang out here if it's okay of course it's okay I would just like to see folks who there are a couple of folks who've been in the room from the beginning um if I'm just if they have any further comments the floor is open or do you have any further comments on this or I think Luke did a really great job of explaining discrimination along the primary case and um the unfortunate answer is it to answer your question about if someone is late all the time because they are homeless how do we address that well it really just it's hard and it depends and we often deal with that with disability issues where particularly psychiatric disabilities where someone might be late because of psychiatric disability and um for the most part if an employer is firing someone or disciplining someone because of being late that is a legitimate non-discriminatory reason and uh discrimination cases are really hard to win because the respondents can come up with any legitimate non-discriminatory reason and oftentimes those are upheld so if there's a concern that we are taking rights away from employers here that's just not going to happen that's what I would say employers maintain all of their rights and they often defeat a lot of employment discrimination cases so well I understand the concept of prima facie so I understand that but it's just not quite going to get to the end well and it's hard and I think you might have heard of a person being terminated from a mental health agency because they were living in their car and they couldn't get to work and could get there clean if you had an employer who was allowing some employees to come to work late because of kids or because they have other committees that they have to go to but someone who is not allowed to come in late because they are living in their car then the only difference you have there is the fact that they are homeless and in that case it isn't a legitimate non-discriminatory reason Thanks for the opportunity to comment again sorry I came late emergency housing issue next door in corporations I understand I'm just looking at understanding from Luke that really this has remained unchanged from the last draft that you saw just before the break which we were fine with we liked Representative Waltson's suggestion around the place public place and a place of public accommodation and that compromise and I don't know if I think the ACLU is in the room but I know from talking to Foco Schilling that they were fine with that with that so we're good to go and hope you guys can pass this bill out before crossover Anyone else? We will see if we can get you for Thursday or Friday morning Sure and so the only take way I have is the question about forms and what kind of address we need to be in the forms Is that right? Yeah like what would be sufficient for filling those fields with the IRS Lisa Are there any attorneys and legislative counsel who deal with law enforcement who would be able to answer questions about that? That's my background I don't do judiciary anymore but that's also you know Eric and Michelle and the brain I think if you're asking a little more of a policy question that you need I'll talk to you offline and see if there's a legal question and we can come and try to answer that but it's not a little more of the impact of the bill I can talk to you outside if you need but we'll see if we can help Thank you very much