The Virginia Worker

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The Virginia Worker correspondent Christopher Sloce interviews IAFF 539 President Kurt Detrick on the challenges eastern Virginia firefighters face and their ongoing struggle to win the right to collectively bargain in the city of Portsmouth

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As of 2021, Virginia finally repealed a law that had contributed to a robbery of its municipal workers. Municipal workers begin at an immediate disadvantage: speaking as a library technician, I am likely to be paid up to 29% less than my peers in the private sector.

This very real gap leads to a very real problem: the constant possibility of more money versus the satisfaction that municipal work can bring once it’s balanced against how much less you’re making. Underpaid services are understaffed services, and understaffed services will fail to deliver on their goals. That is a fundamental law of staffing, one people understand when they go into a McDonald’s, and yet, magically, municipal workers in cities are supposed to do more with less.

Teachers buy their own classroom supplies with their own money. Social workers take on higher case loads than what anyone can realistically keep up with, because they have to. And in the case of something like firefighting, low-levels of staffing can make our communities less safe. 

Then we take Virginia. This is already a labor hostile state: the best state for business in the country is the worst state for worker’s rights. Until 2021, it was one of the three states in the country that had banned collective bargaining agreements for public sector workers. Public sector unions in Virginia effectively had their legal backing made illegal. Now that the law banning local public sector has been repealed, unions and municipal workers have led a charge to begin getting representation in their workplace. One union is IAFF 539, the union representing the Portsmouth fire department. 

Over the course of last month, I’ve been speaking with Kurt Detrick, the President of IAFF 539 about these topics. IAFF 539 is situated in an interesting place: one of the oldest IAFF chapters in the state, yet one that was unable to bargain under the prior laws. With the change, they’ve since been working as a union to begin the bargaining process with the city. All of this has resulted in the vote taking place at Portsmouth City Council on November 14th. I dug into IAFF’s strategy, the challenges and frustrations of local city governments, and more. 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and time. 

Christopher Sloce: So you guys have had Chapter 539 since around 1937. What’s the history of the union before the provision changed? 

Kurt Detrick, President IAFF 539: Our local chapter, should be the second oldest in the state right behind Norfolk, their local 68 and then there’s us. So it’s got a long history and any union, they go through ups and downs. One of the neat things about being the president of a local that old and [that] has that much history is we have file cabinets and records. I can go into the back storage room and I can open up a file cabinet and pull out a letter from the Union president to the city manager, talking about pay and vacation days and sick time and a lot of things that we’re talking about today.

So from that aspect, that’s neat. But what it forces us to do, not having that structure in place to bargain, is when we need to get things done and when our concerns need to be heard, it really only leaves us the political route. So in 2014-2015 the city started going through some staffing challenges and the decisions were made to start putting units out of service. There was a hiring freeze put on at one point. And what that did was it really limited our service delivery, and then it added more workload to the people that we had working. The peak of that was in December of 2015, one of the stations that had a unit placed out of service due to staffing shortages. 

There was a fire in that neighborhood only blocks away from the station and it resulted in a fatality of one of the citizens. Time is critical and seconds count in fires. And having those three firefighters not there at that station blocks away could have made the difference between life and death. As a union, we’ve been saying this is a problem, this is gonna lead to that happening, and unfortunately it did. 

So we took it to city council members, we took it to the fire chief, we took it to city management, and ultimately the response from the city from that incident was to suspend the union president at the time for speaking to the public and the media about city business, which just happens to be protected speech, as matters of public safety is concerned. We’re allowed to do that under the First Amendment. So that suspension was overturned. 

That year, we started a political action committee. We invested money, we endorsed candidates, we worked the polls and we made our expectations to city council members made known. They talk about supporting safety, but supporting public safety is staffing, resources benefits, keeping the people we have here. It’s not hiring people, training them, and then losing them to other jurisdiction because we can’t keep up with pay. And then our workload is too demanding, and they can go to another city and have a better work life balance.

Through that four-year window, we were able to get the staffing levels back up. We got pay adjustments to stay competitive in the region. 

CS: So beforehand it sounds a lot like, without the collective bargaining agreement, what you were dealing with was the union existed and it was recognized, but it had no legal standing. 

KD:  Yeah. Everybody knew the firefighter union. Politicians would come and ask “Will you endorse us,” and in the past, it was “Yeah, Go ahead, we’ll endorse you,” and it never really had any teeth to it. And we never really got active until about 2015.  

Our local is a charter member of the Virginia Professional Firefighters, which right now is about 60 IFF locals that does all the lobbying in Richmond for all the firefighter bills, like the cancer stuff we’ve done over the last few year. They worked with the AFL CIO. They were on that group that worked on the collective bargaining repeal. 

We’ve had a lot of strong labor leaders come out of local 539 across the state. We’re a progressive labor union. We’re active. We have 90% membership in our department and that’s pretty damn impressive in a right to work state without a contract. so, I’m pretty proud of that. 

And we continue to add members every month. We’ve expanded to our dispatchers. We represent dispatchers in our union. We’re ready and it’s time that this gets done for us.

CS: Just speaking of somebody who 1) who understands numbers and 2) was also trying to organize card signings recently, 90% card sign is great. 

KD: Yeah. Other places we wouldn’t have to do a vote.

CS: How did you build that majority? 

KD: We listen to the membership, we address concerns and we can show progress. It makes it very difficult without having a contract and it requires a lot of support for the Executive Board. Or even for the union leadership. Because sometimes things, it’s not as easy as picking up a phone and saying, “Hey, we need to sit down and make a deal on something,” or if a policy changes that isn’t really working out the way it was intended. If it’s not working for the guys and girls in the station we can’t just say, “Hey, we need to have a labor management meeting and we need to adjust this.” Ultimately at the end of the day, management still retains all the authority in that. 

All we can do is make recommendations. but we take a kind of pride ourselves as a local in using logic, facts and figures. Whenever we take issues to management, whether it’s the city manager or the fire chief, we’re not just going to complain to complain. We’re going to talk about the issues that affect us in the community and we’re also going to show you ways that we can fix it. We’re smart enough and have been around long enough. We know that there aren’t printing presses in city hall and everybody’s got the same piece of the budget that they’re fighting over, but public safety is always talked about as a priority on every campaign trail and you can talk about it on the campaign trail, but you got to back it up whenever you’re sitting behind the podium there on the city council.

EMS side is where one of the call volumes is, and that’s the same everywhere.  So, advocating for additional medic units, advocating for the pay to stay competitive in the region. We work with a lot of other Local presidents. It’s a competitive market. People can live in one city and work in another city. So everybody’s got to stay pretty close to stay competitive. 

We’re all on the state VRS retirement down here so you can hop from one city to the next. Your retirement goes with you. So we got to do something that’s a little bit different that can provide something that other cities aren’t necessarily doing collective bargaining right now.

Fire and rescue, across the country, is struggling to recruit people right now. People will come from out west and they might look at Virginia, especially if they’re coming from a city that has contracts and they have the benefit of that and they see what it provides to them as an employee. They might look at that and it might open up our pool of candidates if we can get this done.

CS: Why is it such an issue recruiting for fire and rescue across the country right now?

KD: You could see the trend, at least in our city, before the pandemic with recruiting, with people showing up to take the exams.I think pay is obviously an issue with it and public sector work in general. And in a lot of cities, pay is falling behind over the last few years as the economy did really well for a while there. We saw people leave for the private sector that we wouldn’t usually see in the past. 

Usually people get in the fire department and they stay and do their 25 years and collect their pension. But for whatever reason, stagnant pay increased call volume, more workload, then going through a pandemic, I think people just said “I did it, it’s not for me. I’m gonna do something else now.” That’s kind of a new thing that we’re seeing in the fire service.

Our city doesn’t have a pay scale and a pay plan. So if you’re a brand new employee and you come in, I can’t tell you how to get to the top pay in your grade and your rank. If you’re a firefighter, I can’t tell you how you get to the top of your pay scale, if you’re a lieutenant, I can’t tell you what you have to do to get to the top of the pay scale. Because there’s nothing in place. We have a minimum and a maximum. and that’s something that I think people see and they look at, there’s this number here, that would be nice to get to when I retire. We have 10-year firefighters that were making the same amount of money as one year firefighters. Employees weren’t feeling valued. That’s one reason why they left.

Then inflation hit, and they weren’t really seeing the return on them as an employee when it came to their pay, and their salaries but that might be something that we were facing in our city, and in our region, But as far as across the nation, I don’t know why you’re seeing a decline in numbers.

CS: What’s it been like working with the city so far to try and get a contract agreed upon?

KD: It’s been one-sided. The communications come from us and it really went through a couple different phases. When you go back to 2020, when they passed that first resolution as Resolution 20-p2e and the city council passed it, seven to nothing, it was unanimous. And that resolution required or directed to collective bargaining. It directed the city to recognize labor unions to enter into contracts to negotiate in good faith, and then at the end of that resolution, it had a part about the city will convene a work group of labor, and city attorney city manager’s office. They’ll create an ordinance on how collective bargaining will work in the city and bring it back to city council no later than May of 2021. Because, remember May 2021 was when the law went into effect. So, we worked on that, from October to March 2021 with a representative from the City Attorney’s office, I was there for the labor side and then we had a lobbyist that we had hired on there as well to craft this ordinance. It looks very much like the ordinance in Richmond, they all have the same language. 

What happened? We had. Meetings probably every two weeks through that six-month window. And it came to a screeching halt. We were supposed to meet in March to kind of go through line by line and make sure the punctuation was right, that the Ts were crossed and Is were dotted. When we got on the call in March, somebody from the city manager’s office got on there and just said, “Why are we doing this? We can’t afford to do this. The city doesn’t need to do this,” and it really kind of derailed the whole thing. 

Right around that same time, we had a new city manager come in that was hired. And she did not want collective bargaining. When I met with her, she made that perfectly clear. She did not want to give up the terms and conditions and the ultimate decision making that city managers in Virginia enjoy, which is unilateral decision making authority over their employees. So there’s a lot of scare tactics that went on there, a lot of misinformation that was presented to city council. It was a newer city council that took over in 2021 and we did not maintain the support that we thought we had. Some of the Council members that voted for it in 2020 turned around and voted against it in 2021.

They like to state, “we just can’t afford it,” which is not true. They can’t agree to money that’s not there. And we can’t make them agree to money that’s not there.

Hey, how do you guys keep focused. How do you keep them from just Screeching you guys in the hall.

CS: So when city council is going back on its promises and members are getting frustrated, how does your union stay focused?

KD: I won’t lie. It was very disappointing, especially when we had council members that, stood in our union hall and said that they would support it and then turn around months later and vote against it. So, that was disappointing. But it showed the importance of political action, politicians especially in public sector jobs. From the day you start and you take the oath to be a firefighter long into your retirement, a politician has a say in your pay, your staffing, your protective equipment, your health insurance, your workers comp coverage and protections. Your pension. 

If you just stop right there and we give up after that defeat you got to remember we’ve gone how many years where it was illegal [to have a public service union]? We’ve had a local for over 85 years without a contract. Just because it became legal a year ago and we got shot down, we’re not going to close shop and go away. It highlighted the importance of political action. Because all it takes is to give our members the voice that they deserve, and that they should be at that table.

So we retooled our internal organizing as a local. We went back to the drawing board as an executive board. We had a long, all day meeting locked in the conference room. And we went through all of our programs and said,  “What worked? What didn’t work? “

It was clear turning in 90% membership cards that we had done a good enough job of educating our membership that they wanted to have this. They felt like this was important enough to sign a card and to support the union. So, we went back to the drawing board and we really focused on our political action. We had gone through a couple election cycles. We had been pretty successful, in our election cycles with endorsing candidates that won. But how do we take candidates that win and turn that into actually getting them to support what they say? 

We took that year to rebuild our political brand and try to figure out what our priorities were when it came to elections. We invested more money in this last election cycle and time than we’ve ever done. We spent weeks ahead of time, we hung almost 10,000 door hangers and neighborhoods across the city and over multiple days with members on their days off, coming in to go knock doors and put door hangers out. That was something we had never done before, and we had members show up every single time to do it. So that was reassuring, that people get it and they see the benefit of this. 

We had a successful election last year. Three of our candidates that we endorsed won. On paper, we should have enough council members that will vote for collective bargaining, because we made it perfectly clear that collective bargaining is our locals number one priority and we’re not going to support a candidate that doesn’t support our voice and our right to have a seat at that table and have our voices heard.

CS: So now that the laws have changed in Virginia, have you seen other municipal workers in Portsmouth taking advantage of the collective bargaining laws changing?

KD: That’s a really interesting question and it’s been interesting, because to my knowledge, we are the only municipality in Virginia that has gone through the collective bargaining process that does not have any other union in place for public employees. The teachers have a union but they have to go through the school board. So for the municipal public employees, we are the only group that has petitioned with authorization cards and is actively working on it.

One of the things we started in January was this community outreach. we have a Facebook group “Collective Bargaining for Portsmouth, Virginia Employees”. We show up at civic league meetings and we talk about collective bargaining. Why? It’s a benefit to the citizens to have your firefighters at the bargaining table with the decision makers. We’ve had overwhelming support from the community. When we do this, I always get somebody that works in another city department that comes up to me on the side and says, “Hey, we want this to happen. We’re watching you guys. We’re pulling for you guys. We want it too.” 

I hope they do it. I’d love to see them all organized.