EPA lab workers vote for union

Employees of the Environmental Protection Agency's National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas voted Tuesday to unionize.

The national representative of the National Association of Government Employees, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, said either side now has five days to challenge the election.

"Considering the margin of the vote, I won't challenge it," George L. Reaves Jr. of Hampton, Va., said.

There were 73 eligible voters, and 40 voted for NAGE representation.

One of those employees, Kim Johnson, said she was pleased the employees voted to join the union.

"It will raise morale," Johnson said. "People will feel they have more control and more of a voice."

Pollution specialist Jeff van Ee said the Las Vegas lab employees were some of the last EPA employees to join a union. "More and more employees see a need for a union to have a voice," he said.

The vote could be certified as soon as Monday. Once the vote is certified and the protest period passes, Reaves said, it will take from two-to-six months to put together a proposed contract.

Reaves said the laboratory employees, both professional and non-professional, are not unionizing because of problems with local management but because they want a voice in policies that are handed down from officials at regional and national levels.

"There are a lot of outside factors, such as government down-sizing, that employees don't have a say in if they are not part of a union," Reaves said.

The laboratory is located on the UNLV campus, but personnel matters are handled in North Carolina, for example.

The move to unionize began more than two months ago, according to Reaves.

"This is the third EPA laboratory we've organized," he said, referring to ones in Florida and Georgia.

There are numerous other EPA labs around the country, but they are represented by different unions.

"This lab is one of the last to unionize," Reaves said.

He said President Clinton's Executive Order No. 12871 created labor-management partnerships "to expand bargaining," but there must be a union for the "partnership" to exist.

One local concern, according to Reaves, is a rumor circulating that UNLV wants the property now being used by the laboratory. The University of Arizona in Tucson and the University of Texas in Austin have expressed interest in moving Las Vegas EPA lab activities to their respective campuses.

"With the lab on campus employees have greater access to research material," Reaves said. The University of Nevada System has a lease with EPA that will be reviewed in 1999.

Another issue for EPA laboratory employees, according to Reaves, is that since the labs were created several years ago their missions have changed.

"People are doing work they were not hired to do because of the change in missions," Reaves said.

staff writer mary manning contributed to this story.

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