Employees at Latin American aid agency vote to unionize 

The American Federation of Government Employees added a new chapter last week when employees at a small, nonpartisan agency tasked with awarding development grants to Latin American countries voted to unionize. 

According to a post from the nation’s largest federal employee union on Monday, 33 of 34 eligible employees at the Inter-American Foundation voted to unionize on Sept. 11, joining AFGE Local 2211, which represents 202 employees in the Washington, D.C., area as of June 29, a Labor Department filing shows. 

The IAF formed in 1969 as an independent agency providing grassroots funding for community-led development in Latin American countries, including projects around sustainable agriculture and food security, human capital and job skills development, natural resource management and other operations. 

The agency had a budget of $47 million in fiscal 2023, mostly from direct annual appropriations, but it also has received inter-agency transfers for strategic priorities and can accept donations from corporate and philanthropic partners.

District 14 Special Assistant Peter Winch, who led the IAF unionization campaign, told Government Executive that he would be meeting with the agency’s president and CEO, Sara Aviel, this week to get a sense of management’s perspective on the issues facing IAF, but workers expressed frustrations over high turnover and a recent return-to-office policy from management. 

“I had a group of several IAF employees contact AFGE and we formed them into an organizing committee and they told me what the issues are,” he said. “The message I’m getting from employees is they don’t backfill. It’s not really a budget problem, they just don’t know how to stop all the turnover they have at this agency.” 

Another issue that prompted employees to organize, he said, stemmed from a recent return-to-office policy from management that would require employees to be in person several more days per pay period.

“If an agency goes too far in that direction in this post-pandemic period, they have a lot of people leave,” he said. “We’d like them to look at that again and not implement that change, which I think is due by Oct. 1.”

The addition of IAF employees comes as AFGE — which 750,000 represents federal and D.C. government workers — made international gains last year, unionizing 400 employees at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, followed by another 200 workers in May at the Army Enterprise Service Desk, 2nd Signal Brigade, in Kaiserslautern, Germany and Army’s Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

Winch added that the challenges within IAF — who he said outsources human resources operations from service providers in the Interior Department — were similar to the workforce at another agency, the Millenium Challenge Corporation, which has since worked with the union to resolve many of its issues, with members from the local AFGE chapter helping advise IAF employees.

“It’s going really well there,” he said. “MCC was making a lot of errors in hiring and classification and so on. And they’ve really changed a lot for the good since we’ve formed a union there. And what they did was hire some people to work the HR and labor employee relations functions in-house.”

Officials from the IAF were unavailable for comment at press time.