WASHINGTON—Small pay increases Maximus management recently doled out—including 19 cents an hour to one worker and a dollar to the other—aren’t stopping the hundreds of workers at that top federal contractor from continuing their union organizing drive.
After all, the two said in interviews with People’s World after the group of representative workers received recognition and an award at the AFL-CIO’s Martin Luther King conference, the Democratic Biden administration wants all federal contractors to pay their workers at least $15 an hour.
And Maximus, a top contractor for the Department of Health and Human Services, is defying that mandate.
“We are essential workers who work for a federal contractor and should be treated like federal employees—and get paid like federal employees,” one of the two responded.
Maximus workers, aided by the Communications Workers, have been campaigning for union recognition for months. Maximus employs approximately 10,000 workers, most of them women of color, at call centers to handle and direct callers seeking to enroll in the Affordable Care Act’s state exchanges, Medicare or Medicaid. It has a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to do so.
And many of its workers make the minimum wage, in low-wage states such as Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi. One bilingual worker, from Orlando, Fla., can’t even afford to pay public school fees for her teenager who wants to participate in basketball, let alone buy him one. “We’re asking for a livable wage and health care” the workers can afford, she adds.
The MLK conference award helps their fight for recognition, says the other, Katherine Charles. “It means people are listening to us and our concerns,” she says. “Ans it means the other [Maximus] workers will see us and how we’re looking for better wages for our families, better health insurance, and decent lives for our children.
“We’re also sending a message to Maximus that we will continue to fight.”
The call center workers’ struggle has featured several signature moves: A one-day strike that forced the firm to close two of its centers, the journey by one worker to D.C. to personally hand a critical report CWA authored about Maximus’s exploitation of workers to Biden administration HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, publicity the union has posted for them, and filing labor lawbreaking charges “over wrongful terminations” of pro-union workers, adds Charles.
The company’s pressure hasn’t stopped, Charles says. She was a top-rated call center worker who loved her job helping people. She still does, but the top rating is gone.
“They also tell people ‘You will be fired by this date, and if you don’t want to work till then, you won’t get overtime pay” when you deserve it, said the other worker, who declined to give her name because of potential company retaliation. “Working on the phone” dealing with people seeking medical signups “and having your own issues” trying to find another job at the same time “is tough.”
That prospect, plus the lack of opportunities to grow on the job and move up in pay and prestige at Maximus for herself and her coworkers, doesn’t stop the nine-year veteran from organizing her colleagues. “I’m going back to Florida to continue to talk to my co-workers. The more people we have, the louder our voices will be.”
There’s another type of pressure not to unionize, too, one of the two adds: Layoffs. The “high season” at the call centers ran through mid-January, a deadline of sorts for people to switch health care plans by signing up for the ACA’s exchanges, Medicare or Medicaid.
After that, the volume drops, and the layoff threat looms. “You encourage them”—fellow workers—“to be active in organizing, and they can’t. They’re scared,” she mused.
“We are essential” to people getting affordable health care, the Floridian says. Maximus CEO Bruce Caswell, who makes millions of dollars yearly from the HHS contract with his company, “can’t sit on the phone and work those calls” like the workers can.
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