Election Information

Our Election Agreement

On March 29th, we signed an election agreement with Propel. You can see the official document below this explainer.

This agreement has some confusing technical details, but it also ultimately gives us everything we wanted:

• We will move forward as one group (as opposed to eight groups, which Propel originally argued for).

• All the positions we considered part of our “community of interest” will be eligible to be part of the vote and subsequent union if the vote succeeds. (Propel argued for leaving five groups out.)

What is a Sonotone Election?

We petitioned the NLRB for a union of professional educators. In this case, “professional” is a technical term in labor organizing. Propel said 5 positions on our list of professionals were actually non-professionals. (We continue to believe those professions are professional, but the fight is moot now.) The NLRB, however, DOES allow for professionals and non-professionals to join together in a single “mixed-unit” union. This requires a process called a Sonotone Election.

In a Sonotone election, two different ballots are mailed:

• Non-professionals receive a ballot that asks them to vote yes or no to joining a union.

• Professionals receive a ballot that asks them to vote yes or no to joining a union AND vote yes or no on including non-professionals in their bargaining unit.

So what? Here's What You Need to Know in Order to Cast Your Vote

The ballot you receive depends on your job category:

“Non-professional” educators, including Student Support Specialists, Literacy and Math Instructional Specialists, Staff Nurses, and Creative Arts Advisors will be asked one question:

• Do you wish to be represented for the purposes of collective bargaining by PSEA?

Professional educators, including teachers, counselors, coaches, special ed coordinators, therapists, school nurses, and school psychologists will be asked TWO questions:

• Do you wish to be represented for the purposes of collective bargaining by PSEA?

• Do you want to be in a union with non-professionals? (We ask that say yes to this question so that we can include as many positions in our union as possible.)

PLEASE NOTE: The non-professionals you are voting to include are ONLY those listed above and in the election agreement. Custodians, paraprofessionals, administrative assistants, and cafeteria workers are not included in this election. The union organizers believe these educators DO share a community of interest with us and believe their needs and ours are similar.

The election will be conducted by mail.

Ballots will be mailed by the NLRB on Thursday, April 8. They must be RECEIVED by Thursday, April 29th at 10 am to be counted. If you do not receive a ballot, you must request a replacement by April 15th; reach out to medgell@psea.org if this is you.

All ballots are secret ballots. You will fill out a ballot and put it in a privacy envelope. Then you put the privacy envelope in another envelope and sign the outer envelope. Your identity, once it is matched to the list of educators eligible to vote, will be uncoupled from your ballot.m

NO ONE from PSEA or Propel will ever see the ballots. The only people who see the ballots are NLRB employees. But even they won’t know who voted yes and who voted no.