Workers at several national parks in the Mountain West are voting to join labor unions amid a broader organizing wave among agency staff over the past year.
Employees at Grand Canyon National Park, Grand Teton National Park and Rocky Mountain Park are among the 317 workers who voted to unionize, according to a June announcement from the National Treasury Employees Union. Eleven workers voted against it.
The new chapter of the NTEU will cover about 650 people at 12 park sites or offices in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, Montana and other states.
Peri Sasnett is an interim officer for the union. She works at Glacier National Park and said momentum to unionize was growing last year with cuts to the federal workforce.
“We were watching our colleagues watching their jobs, people being pushed out of careers that they have invested a lifetime in,” she said. “We could see, at that same time, that workers who were unionized were more protected.”
Park rangers, scientists and administrative staff are among the non-supervisory staff represented.
Last year, workers at Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks in California joined another union, the National Federation of Federal Employees. Warner Vanderheuel, the national organizing director for NFFE, said workers at Death Valley National Park in Nevada will soon vote on whether to join his union.
Sasnett said the chapter for the parks that voted to join NTEU will focus on issues like fair treatment, pay and benefits, but that the goal is broader.
“Having the protection of a union, having representation is going to allow us to do our jobs as best we can and to take care of these places, which is why we got into these careers to begin with,” she said.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
