We saw with great interest the first mailing to County employees by the SEIU, purported to be written by Tammie Wongdong.
In our messages, we have been careful not to brazenly advocate in a partisan manner, but the mailing by SEIU contained so many blatantly false statements, we feel compelled to address them. We know County workers want to see unity and not partisan battling. But truth matters. If a union won’t be honest, and says anything to gain votes, how can you depend on them to fairly fight for you?
Let’s address some of the claims that have been made:
1. “Thousands of your fellow workers have joined SEIU….” (FALSE)
Numbers obtained from the Fairfax County Department of Payroll fully contradict this claim. In fact, SEIU has been losing members, and has been for quite a while. The last numbers we saw, (March 2023), according to County payroll, states the number as 1,561, a drop of almost 200 members in the past year. This is out of over 12,000 eligible county employees. Despite a 12-year campaign, the SEIU numbers are barely above where they were 10 years ago. (Source: Fairfax County payroll)
2. “We saved the defined benefit retirement from moving to a defined benefit contribution plan, which puts all the risk on the employee.” (FALSE)
The last major change to the Pension system was in 2019, when the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to eliminate the pre-social security benefit for employees hired after July 1, 2019. SEIU sat on the Board committee that recommended this and acquiesced to this. NOT ONE member of the Board of Supervisors, or the County Executive, or any staff, ever advocated eliminating the defined benefit system. While there was vocal disagreement about the changes proposed, there was never any danger to the defined benefit system. What is well remembered was the SEIU scare campaign claiming the DROP was being eliminated. There was also completely false. And despite these supposed battles with the Board. The SEIU gave tens of thousands of dollars to this same Board to ensure their re-election. (Source: Board Committee on Retirement notes, Public Hearings on the Proposal 2019, Virginia Political Action Project (VPAP)
“We won six weeks of paid family and medical leave for merit employees and six weeks of paid pandemic leave”. (partly false and misleading)
Every employee union in the County, including FWC, the Firefighters, and the Police, all advocated for this change. Other jurisdictions had already implemented these policies, and the Board of Supervisors were fully supportive of them. It must also be noted that Jon Miskell, of the FWC, was the first to openly advocate for this benefit enhancement in 2018, which was endorsed by all county employee unions. (testimony of Miskell to Board of Supervisors, April 13, 2018)
“When a union member’s job was threatened and their hours cut, we won the first ever unfair labor practice case under the collective bargaining ordinance…..” (misleading, full truth unknown)
Aside from the wholly inappropriate exploitation of a case in an email to all employees, this fails to really explain what happened. The employee in question, a part-time Parks employee, was allegedly distributing SEIU materials on and off duty at his work site and being paid to do so. We’ve never seen the ruling or know the full truth of this statement.
What we do know is that SEIU does very little in the way of representing county employees. In the last six years, SEIU has done possibly one civil service hearing in all that time (and lost it). An examination of case records from the Civil Service Commission reports finds zero representations by SEIU. Our biggest source of walk-in members are people who went to them for help and often didn’t even get a callback. (Source: Civil Service quarterly and annual reports)
It’s important that the Union that speaks for you tells the truth. It matters. You can count on FWC to tell you the facts and not demagogue issues for political gain.