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A few Sundays back, Charlie Bakst wrote a great column about Mike Downey, the president of RI Council 94 AFSCME. Say hello to Downey, who followed his father and grandfather into a career as a plumber. You’ll be hearing from him and seeing him. He’s aggressive, though perhaps with less edge than some other labor leaders. He has a shock of gray hair. And, in a sea of union folks at the State House, he’s apt to be the only man without a tie, a legacy of his economic background and student days at La Salle Academy. “I felt a little poor…. We wore ties and stuff, and I always had one tie. I didn’t have lots of ties, and I think it turned me off from ties, having to wear it every day, so I’m not much for wearing them anymore.” After La Salle, he went to plumbing school, a five-year program of work and classes. Downey, of Irish heritage, lives now in Charlestown but grew up in Providence and Narragansett. One of his eighth-grade classmates at Msgr. Matthew F. Clarke Catholic School was Claudette Passeroni, whom he later married. Her father came from France, her mother from Colombia. The Downeys have three children: Corey, 30, and Faith, 28, who are schoolteachers, and Michael, 21, a URI junior. Mrs. Downey is a clerk at URI, in a slot covered by the National Education Association. She used to be a URI cook’s helper, in her husband’s local, and, during a wave of layoffs and bumps years ago, found herself out of work for 18 months. “It was,” he says, “bad.” Council 94, whose presidency Downey assumed in 2005, has about 8,500 members, of whom 5,000 work for the state. The state employees include secretaries, clerks, accountants, maintenance workers, environmental scientists, campus police, data entry operators, licensed practical nurses and others, and they are spread among several departments and many locations....He says people in management are not his chums. “I don’t have any friends that are management and I don’t want to. I’m just a rank-and-file kind of person. I’m not out trying to hurt anybody. It’s very difficult, actually, for me to talk about the governor because I have a great deal of respect for him, and even my own members tell me, ‘Oh, you should say more, you should do this.’ I say: He’s the governor in the end. I disagree with a lot of his things and I have been outspoken, but I won’t be rude.” Downey says he did not know Carcieri, from corporate America, before the Republican became governor. “He strikes me as not wanting to be around workers…. I think he feels uncomfortable around someone like me.”...Downey won a contentious battle for the presidency of his union in 2005 after the tragic death of longtime Council 94 president Tom Chellel. Downey's victory was important because he staked his campaign on investing in new union organizing to build his union and the entire labor movement. Others wanted to use union money on servicing current members and forget about organizing. However, Downey had the courage and the vision to see that the Rhode Island labor movement needs to grow if it will survive. Because of this, he is truly an impressive new leader in the labor movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
