Letters to the Editor
Further Stacking DC 37 Deck

To the Editor:

I am responding to your article entitled, "DC 37 Board Key Battleground," (Jan. 19 issue), where District Council 37's executive director, Sister Lillian Roberts, wants the executive board vice presidents' voting strength to be proportional to the number of members each local represents, instead of the one vote they each currently carry. I think Sister Roberts needs to relearn our democratic process.

First, virtually all governing boards have a similar voting policy where each member casts one vote, regardless of how many members they respectfully represent.

And secondly, the Delegate Body is the deliberative assembly that is matched in accordance to the number of members that each local has, thereby giving an appropriate membership weight to all locals.

The above scenario is the standard practice in AFSCME as far as I am aware. If the voting ratio on the Council's executive board would change, as suggested by Sister Roberts, this would concentrate all the power in the top three locals, which comprise about 60 percent of the membership. Thus, if they chose to align, the VPs of the three largest locals would have more voting strength than the remaining combined 53 smaller locals' vice presidents! This, coupled with the same voting strength at the Delegate Body, would place too much power in the largest locals, which would end up dominating the council. Do the math!

What Sister Roberts may not understand is that the established protocols of our bylaws and of most organizations are set up this way, which is similar to that of Congress.

The executive board is akin to the Senate, where each member has one vote regardless of state population, and the Delegate Body is akin to the House of Representatives, where each state is represented based on population size with each receiving a respective pro-rated number of voting Congressmen, each having one vote.

In a democratic society, the above format appears to be equitable, fair and reasonable. If Sister Roberts believes otherwise, I would strongly recommend to her that before she amends the council's constitution, she should first petition AFSCME and have AFSCME amend its constitution so that all AFSCME councils and locals are mandated to follow the same protocols of membership representation. This policy would give New York and California, AFSCME's two largest represented states, a near-majority and control of the International Executive Board! (On second thought, maybe I will change my view on this idea.)

If Sister Roberts is so intent on changing the voting mix of the executive board, how come she hasn't recommended the same for the United Nations' General Assembly, too? Instead of giving all the 191 represented countries just one single solitary vote, why not base their voting strength on their respective population size? This way, just six countries can dominate the voting: China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan. These would be the heavyweights in voting, being that they make up more than 50 percent of the world's population! These six countries combined have more people than the other 185 countries of the world put together!

In conclusion, I fall back on an old adage: if it's not broken, don't fix it.

MITCHELL FEDER, DC 37 Delegate Local 375