This pay fight is no game
SOMERVILLE -- Forget the employment status of Theo Epstein of Brookline. Save your concern for the real job woes of Jennifer Rosenlund of Everett and Maureen Hurley of Melrose.
While Boston wrings its hands about a baseball whiz kid who walked away from a three-year, $4.5 million contract, these two hourly wage earners are fighting against the odds to get any contract at all.
The work that Rosenlund and Hurley do, helping developmentally disabled adults with basic skills, inspires no heated debate, elicits no public passion. But the uphill struggle of these two women and their 200-plus co-workers at the Walnut Street Center in Somerville to form a union says more about this culture and its values than the fate of the general manager of the Boston Red Sox.
Next week, the employees of the 35-year-old, private, nonprofit agency are scheduled to vote in an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board to determine whether Local 509 of the Service Employees International Union will represent them in contract negotiations with their employer.
Sixty percent of them asked for that vote, but the management of the Walnut Street Center is sparing no effort to persuade workers that the union wants nothing more than to pick their pockets. As the vote nears, employees are being forced to attend mandatory screenings of antiunion videos. Their pay envelopes and their home mailboxes are stuffed with fliers urging them to vote no on the union.
''We are a captive audience," said Rosenlund, who objects to being forced to attend one-sided meetings during work hours. ''I have asked why we can't hear from the union, too, and I've been told that management is only interested in getting its point across. It's intimidating to a lot of people."
More troublesome, she said, is the neglect that clients suffer when the staff is corralled for these sessions. ''It's a waste of my time," Hurley said. ''There are many more important things for me to be doing than listening to what I can only think of as propaganda. The tactic is to repeat over and over that the union is bad, bad, bad."
Both women care about their jobs, but they want more of a voice in the workplace. Why, 29-year-old Rosenlund wants to know, does she earn $11.30 an hour after two years on the job, while 54-year-old Hurley earns an hourly wage of $10.98 after 13 years at the agency? Why does their health insurance carrier change so often with attendant hikes in premiums?
''I can't get those answers on my own," she said. ''Maybe a union can."
John Keegan, the executive director of the Walnut Street Center, did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
Fifteen elected officials, including state Senators Jarrett Barrios and Patricia Jehlen, signed a letter when the union campaign began, asking Keegan to remain neutral in advance of the vote and ''to dedicate the precious resources of the Walnut Street Center to its clients and its workers and not to a fight against the workers' campaign for a union." That, clearly, has not happened.
More than the right to unionize is on the line. Basic fairness is at stake and not only in Somerville. For years in Massachusetts, state employees have earned between 20 percent and 50 percent more than their counterparts in the private sector who perform the same human services jobs.
The reason is simple: State workers are unionized, and more than 90 percent of private agencies are not. The paltry sum the state is willing to pay private agencies only exacerbates a problem that contributes to the high turnover rates among direct-care workers.
The work that Jennifer Rosenlund and Maureen Hurley do, caring for some of the most vulnerable residents of the Commonwealth, benefits all of us.
We ought to be at least as outraged that they have to fight so hard to earn a living wage as that Theo Epstein is temporarily out of a million-dollar job.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@gobe.com. 
