In the wake of a labor ruling that will allow New York City's bike-share workers to unionize, a group of workers for Chicago's Divvy bike-share program have filed union cards to join a national transportation workers union.
The group of 43 Divvy employees signed union cards that were filed with the National Labor Relations Board last week, and the board is slated to hold a hearing Monday to determine who will be able to join the union, according to Nick Bedell, an organizer with the Transportation Workers Union Local 100.
Bedell is spearheading the effort to unionize bike-share employees in Boston and the District of Columbia, and he said a national bike-share employee union is also in the works.
"A union gives you a collective rather than individual voice to address issues on the job," he said. "For bike-share people, a lot of that is operational issues. There are problems in the way the systems are run, and the workers feel like they need to be partnered with management to develop how the work is done."
Alta Bicycle Share, the company that operates Divvy and bike-share programs in several other cities, employs full-time and seasonal workers who repair bikes, make sure there's a balance of bikes and empty parking slots among stations around the city, and maintain the stations, among other jobs, according to Nicole Cipri, a Divvy bike mechanic who is organizing the unionization effort.
By joining the union, Cipri, 29, of Pilsen, said Divvy employees would be able to use collective bargaining to standardize how their wages are set, how their schedules are set, how to earn promotions and how to discipline employees who, for example, show up late for work. She also noted that seasonal workers who work outside during the city's coldest months are not all equipped with the right jackets, boots and other gear.
Managers from Divvy and Alta Bicycle Share declined to comment Wednesday.
"It is a complicated and big operation that they're running," Cipri said. "The majority of workers at Divvy are part time or seasonal, with no benefits at all, and for a lot of us our wages are kind of stagnant."
Cipri, who said she makes just over $12 an hour, said managers told her she would get a dollar raise this year, but instead gave her a raise of about 34 cents. Cipri said she would like to see the union tackle employee wages after it elects its leadership and begins collective bargaining with Alta managers. She thinks the unionization could benefit Alta, too.
"Most of us know the system better than management," she said. "We want to be able to do our jobs better and make the system more efficient in a lot of ways."
Companies typically frown on employee efforts to unionize because it is usually easier to make business decisions without an employee contract that requires union input, according to Michael LeRoy, a labor professor at the University of Illinois. He said that a national bike-share union likely would make the process of expanding bike share in current cities and to new cities more complicated.
"Flexibility is key, the ability to unilaterally adapt, especially for a start-up where there's a lot of risk," he said. "It is, in any event, an impedance in the business plan."