Gloria Prevost of Pawtucket Public Library Tells How AFSCME Local 1012 Helps Community

PAWTUCKET - Putting faces - and vivid green AFSCME T-shirts - to the anonymous budget lines governing their pay and benefits, members of city union Local 1012 turned out in force Wednesday night to press their case before the City Council that their new contract reached with the city should be given final council approval.
Approximately 130 members of the 320-member local, a unit of Council 94 AFSCME, AFL-CIO so jammed the council meeting held in the Municipal Courtroom that not only did 30 people have to stand, but many more spilled over into both side hallways.
Local 1012 was reacting to councilors' actions last week in recommending approval of a one-year mostly retroactive contract, to expire June 30, and tabling any action on a 3-year pact to follow it.

Gloria Prevost, a 25-year Local 1012 member who works as children's librarian at the Pawtucket Public Library, told the council that the city's outside attorney for the negotiations, Robert Brooks, had stated that the fact both sides were not totally happy with the agreement indicated it was a fair one. She also said public workers typically accept lower pay than the private sector in a tradeoff for "job security and benefits."
Prevost then put a face on her fellow Local 1012 members, saying they were the people who dispatch police, plow streets, tend ballfields, clean sewers, repair city buildings and vehicles, register voters, record births and deaths, serve seniors at the Mathieu Center, and perform numerous other important tasks.