A Small Town Union Leader on Building Vermont’s Labor Movement for a New Generation

In Middlebury, Vermont, the largest town in rural Addison County, 46-year-old Jeremy Rathbun is one of those public servants. He grew up on a local dairy farm, went to college and worked as an engineering contractor out of state, and then joined the town’s Public Works Department which serves the town’s 9,152 local residents along with the students, faculty, and staff of Middlebury College, a 224-year-old private liberal arts college long known for its writers’ conferences and language schools, and more recently, thanks to Bill McKibben, its environmental activism.

Rathbun and his fellow AFSCME members, who work in the town’s Wastewater Division, play a critical role in protecting the local environment, including a major stream which flows into nearby Lake Champlain. As Rathbun explains, their work has become more challenging due to climate change-related extreme weather events, a reality given yet another forceful reminder last week as the remnants of Hurricane Beryl pummeled Vermont with heavy rains and flooding last week.

Rathbun spoke with Barn Raiser about his day-to-day work and building the union movement in Vermont.

What was it like growing up on a dairy farm in Addison County, Vermont?

In 1967, my father’s father moved the entire family up to Vermont from Connecticut, where they had been for generations. They bought a farm up here that allowed them to have three families on it.

My grandparents lived at the farmhouse on the farm. My parents lived roughly 500 feet down the road and my uncle’s family lived 500 feet down the other road, and we all worked together. So I grew up on a multi-generational farm.

It was a neat way to grow up—very much a family affair. Everybody worked on the farm. We got all our vegetables from the farm kitchen garden that my grandmother maintained, which was just enormous. We didn’t have to buy for much. We’d butcher one or two dairy cows a year to provide meat. Milked about 125 Holsteins. I think we had a total herd size of about 250. And all of us kids worked on the farm as need be.

I did quite a bit of work, but I was a lot luckier than my father and my uncle because my father, at the age of eight years old, started milking 30 cows every morning before he even went to school. And he did that from the age of eight until 54 when we sold the farm in 2002. They wanted us to help, but they didn’t want it to be like when they were kids—they wanted us to have a childhood.

Now you live in Middlebury, where you work.

Yep. I’ve lived here for almost 20 years now.

At what point did you make the transition from the private to the public sector?

A few years ago now. It was a combination of two factors. Number one was to do hands-on work. It was difficult for me to be drawing plans and then handing those off to other people to build. I missed those hands-on aspects from all the time that I had on the farm.  If you’re a tinkerer like me, it’s a lot of fun.

And the other aspect was that my kids were getting older. I would work on projects where I’d leave on Monday morning and ride to another state, and then I’d come home on Friday night, or I’d be doing a lot of late-night meetings, and I wouldn’t see them.

I always thought about doing a public service job. I like the idea that what you’re doing has a direct, real world impact on the people around you, the community around you.  If I end up having to stay and work through the night, it’s because there’s some kind of an emergency. A pump gets blown up. I’m not staying late because at 6:00 in the afternoon a client decided to be a jerk and say, “I need this blueprint in the morning, or you’re no longer going to be my engineer of record.” It’s a lot easier to go and work your butt off because what you’re doing has an impact on your community.

Was going to work for the Public Works Department in Middlebury your first opportunity to join a union?

It was. I’d always been interested in trade unions, but I wasn’t in them. Working with those construction folks, as an engineer, was wonderful.

Going to work in a union shop was neat. When I started, the steward in my department did exactly what you’re supposed to do with a bunch of union members—he made us feel we were part of something. He would take five minutes and explain, “Well, this is what we’re working on with the town and, these are the issues we’re concerned about. Do you guys have issues that we’re not covering as we’re dealing with these other things?”  Eventually, I ended up becoming a shop steward myself and, and just getting more and more involved.

What kind of infrastructure does the Public Works Department maintain in the small town like Middlebury?

We have three utilities and then road infrastructure—a water utility, a wastewater utility and a stormwater utility, which doesn’t have its own department yet, it is currently being managed by the road department. We have an aquifer right here on the edge of town, by the Green Mountain National Forest. So the water utility has to provide public drinking water to the entire town of Middlebury. It is responsible for maintaining the water, maintaining the water distribution infrastructure and doing the limited chemical treatment and sampling that is required for the water infrastructure. At the wastewater utility, we manage a pollution abatement facility, which is what sewage treatment plants are called by the Environmental Protection Agency. We process about a million gallons a day, even for our little town.

We protect Lake Champlain. Our primary care is phosphorus treatment, what we call biological phosphorus removal. We also are, polishing it up, so to speak, removing as many solids as we can. We clean the system up and then treat for E.coli coliform as well as we can. And most days we’re able to do a pretty amazing job when you consider we’re working with what is now almost a 25-year-old plant.

How big is your crew? How many union members work in the different parts of the Public Works Department in Middlebury?

We have a town-wide bargaining unit of 26. We are part of AFSCME Local 1201, which includes several other smaller towns like us, but primarily covers the city of Rutland Public Works staff.

You mentioned storm water. Vermont has had some pretty major rain events—in 2011 and 2023—with big storms, serious flooding. How do these crisis situations impact the work of the members of your local crew?

The storms are getting worse every year. Last August we had a storm that dumped between six and eight inches of rain in two hours. And everybody who works for the town of Middlebury was up all night to work on that crisis. Driving through town, it was like what you see in the movies where the manholes just blew right off into the streets because there was so much water coming through the system. It destroyed our main pumping station. Fortunately, we were able to get a diesel standby pump. We worked 22 hours straight to get that installed, and we were on the diesel backup pump from that first weekend in August until October when we were able to get an electrician to rebuild the main pumping station.

That’s just one of many issues we’ve had. We have had culverts that are not even five years old, designed to all the proper standards, and they still got overwhelmed because the storms are now so much bigger than they were before. And it’s becoming an issue, not only trying to deal with these crises as they occur but working to be able to deal with them in the future.

Are you involved in the union contract negotiations? What’s collective bargaining like at the local level in the public sector?

The current contract expires on the last day of June 2025. Generally, what happens is every department sends a representative to the bargaining table. So, for instance, one person from sewer, one person from water, one person from highway, one person from the library, one person from the recreation department. And then they work with our union rep on the negotiations. Those representatives will then go back to their own units and say, “This is what management wants. What’s your highest priority? What do you want us to focus on?” It’s great because the workers themselves get to offer input about what’s most important to them, which is then taken back and negotiated. It’s a representative and democratic way that allows everybody to get their say.

Another function of a union is legislative political advocacy. The Vermont state legislature recently strengthened workers’ rights by passing a version of what’s called the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act at the state level. What’s it been like to talk with state legislators about labor issues?

New leaders were elected in the State Labor Council back in 2019, which then moved to a more bottom-up organizing structure. One of the big changes was that, rather than spend money on a professional lobbyist, the council had members speak for themselves. So when we want to talk about bills such as S.102, which is the PRO Act, which was a fantastic victory, it was rank-and-file workers who spoke in favor of that.

For example, one of my state senators lives down the road from me. I see her out in a grocery store. In our outreach to legislators like her, we made sure that the workers themselves were calling and writing emails and saying, “This is why this is important to me. Here’s how this is going to benefit my family. Here’s how this is going to help my community.” We found that to be tremendously effective. Much more so than having lobbyists do it for you. We’re building relationships that we can go back to, time and again.

Because of the Vermont Pro Act, public sector workers can now have card check elections. That means if a majority of employees in a proposed bargaining unit say they want to be represented by a union, they just sign authorization cards and they’re good.

The law also bans captive audience meetings. So, if an organization, public sector or not, is in the process of unionizing, the boss can’t hold a meeting to tell everybody why it’s a bad idea and go against the whole unionizing drive. It also extends collective bargaining rights to domestic workers for the first time and creates a study to figure out how we can cover farm workers in the years to come.

In the state of Vermont, a lot of our dairies have transitioned from the smaller family operations like I grew up on—where we didn’t have hired people, we just milked our own cows, and it was small enough to do that—to larger dairies that now have a lot of folks working for them. And some of those folks, many of whom are immigrants,  have expressed a desire to have some kind of organized representation.

The legislature started a study committee to see how that could be done. One of the primary concerns, raised by the industry, is how any kind of a strike would be handled. For instance, if a lactating cow suddenly goes un-milked, it may risk getting mastitis and other health problems. Not only do you have to consider the rights of workers, you also have to consider animal welfare.

Another program that the new leadership of the AFL-CIO in Vermont has promoted is workers’ circles. It’s a form of labor education that’s rank-and-file oriented. What’s your experience been with that?

Absolutely fantastic. I started volunteering for workers’ circles early on. The program right now is operating in three cities, Brattleboro, Burlington and Montpelier. We’re working on expanding it to more places soon. We meet twice monthly with workers, both union or non-union. It’s a free exchange where people can come and ask questions.

For instance, maybe a shop steward is having trouble resolving disagreements among co-workers or with management. They can come and present that issue to the group, and hopefully somebody there has experienced something similar before and can offer advice. Maybe workers are interested in starting a union and they have no idea how to begin the process. They can come and ask questions. People can give them contact information for organizers.

Workers’ circles are like a mutual assistance network. I’ve met a ton of people through them that I would never know otherwise. The benefits are phenomenal.

As a shop steward, when you try to get members together around common workplace concerns, they often have very different views on politics, religion, social issues, etc. What are some of the challenges of getting people to set differences aside and come together to work within the union?

In Middlebury we do have more conservative members. So we focus on what unifies us. What brings us together is so much greater than what divides us.

Regardless of whether or not you share the beliefs of the guy next to you in the shop, an injury to one is an injury to all. We have to stick to that. We can sit around and debate politics, but on a shop level we focus on those core bread and butter issues we have in common. We can all have different views, but still work together on a bigger goal.

One distinctive feature of local government in Vermont is the annual town meeting. For an entire day every year in March, community members get together and make decisions about public policy directly, not just through elected representatives. Has the town meeting forum ever been useful in terms of getting fellow citizens to understand the importance of the work that public service workers do?

It has. But it’s not only that. We try to get AFSCME members to volunteer in their local towns. We have a guy in our union who serves on Middlebury’s Policy Review Committee. And I serve on the Development Review Board, which deals with zoning.

By serving on that board, I can bring my knowledge both as an engineer and as somebody who works for the town utilities and is familiar with what the public works department has to deal with when property is re-zoned and new developments approved. So it helps build strong relationships with the town leadership and other townspeople.

Another positive result of your efforts to revitalize the Vermont AFL-CIO is younger, more diverse leaders. You now serve as district vice-president of the state council. Your president is Katie Maurice, a 33-year-old AFSCME member from Burlington. And the two other top offices are also held by women, which is unusual.

Absolutely. Having someone like Katie in the leadership gives me a much different perspective than I would have if she were not there.

There’s this tremendous upsurge of folks in their 20s and 30s nowadays who are coming out of college and are saddled with student debt. They’re figuring out ways to improve their lives and improve society through labor activism. This younger generation is not timid in any way about having more militant unionism.

For them to be able to see a young woman leading the state labor council, with another tremendous woman as vice president, is wonderful. But there is no single person who is going to come along, get elected to some office, and magically make everything better. We need to fix things ourselves. And we need younger folks, who have even more of a stake in the future, to be involved.

There’s an old saying: “The rules are made by the people in the room.” That’s why we’ve got to get more of the working-class in those rooms to really start making our communities what they need to be.

This interview first appeared in BarnRaiser.