Converting a Union Skeptic

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/life-in-a-union/383306/

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Women garment workers on strike for higher wages (The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives)

ENOSBURG, Vt.—When the union representatives first came knocking at Audra Rondeau’s door in this rural part of the state, near the Canadian border, she turned them away.

They wanted her to join an effort to organize Vermont’s 7,000 or so home-care workers. But Rondeau had been raised with a healthy skepticism about unions: Her 93-year-old grandmother, who she says “still scares the beans out of me,” has a strong aversion to labor organizing.

But then they came back, and this time they asked Rondeau what she’d want changed in the home-care industry, where she works taking care of two young girls, one with autism and one with severe depression.

“They said, ‘What’s irritating you about the program you’re in?’ And I just started going off,” said Rondeau, who is 47, as she potted a plant in her kitchen, in the house she built herself.