Yellowstone Times

MONTANA WRITERS FOR PUBLIC LANDS issued the following announcement on June 16.

Eric Feaver’s retirement this week as president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees marks the end of a nearly four-decade career during which Feaver became the most powerful labor organizer in Montana. His tenure oversaw the consolidation of rival teacher’s and public-sector-worker’s unions into the largest union in Montana, a new-model labor movement built on the ruins of the state’s formerly powerhouse craft unions.

As one of the most influential political actors in the state, elected by and beholden only to his union’s members, Feaver helped shepherd the transformation of Montana’s labor movement through dozens of legislative sessions, the faltering of the movement’s traditional Democratic allies and the rise of anti-union animus in the Republican Party.

According to retired Montana AFL-CIO leader Jim Murry, another top union leader named by Lee newspapers in 1982 as the second-most-powerful man in the state, Feaver has been the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the labor movement.”

“With Eric’s retirement, it’s really an end of an era,” Murry said.

Raised in Oklahoma, Feaver was an international studies graduate student at Johns Hopkins University when he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a conscientious objector in 1968 at age 24 and sent to Vietnam as a combat medic. 

He returned to D.C. after the war and headed west in 1974 when his wife got a job with the state auditor’s office in Helena. He had never been in a union before, but within a decade he was president of what under his watch became the state’s largest union.

Feaver’s introduction to the labor movement came quickly when he was hired to teach at Helena Junior High School (now Helena Middle School).

“A guy comes in and he lays a membership card in front of me and said, ‘folks around here join the Helena Education Association.’ And I said, well I want to do what folks do. So I joined.”

The Montana Legislature had just passed the 1973 Collective Bargaining Act for Public Employees, which was expanded the following session to include teachers. The National Labor Relations Act did not cover teachers, and full unionization for public-sector employees in Montana had not been allowed before the 1973 state law.

A wave of strikes in Montana school districts big and small followed as teachers established unions. Feaver had arrived in Montana just as public employees were beginning to collectively assert power.

“It was like I just fell into this position” as the movement took off, Feaver said.

Feaver rose through the ranks of the Helena Education Association, itself a member of the Montana Education Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association. By 1978 he was president of the Helena chapter. He joined the MEA board of directors in 1980,  and in 1984 was elected president, his first paying union job.

The other big teachers union was the Montana Federation of Teachers, the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.

The two unions, which grew to encompass public employees in many sectors, constantly raided each other for members, which Feaver saw as fruitless, since it didn’t grow the larger labor movement.

Feaver’s union counterpart, MFT President Jim McGarvey, agreed the rivalry was counterproductive. Beginning in 1994 the two unions began working together in partnership, culminating in the landmark merger into MEA-MFT in 2000. It was not easy.

“Merging with MFT was the most excruciating thing of all time,” Feaver said.

It started small, with the consolidation of some staff and communications work, as well as of local and state political agendas. In 1994 the two unions’ affiliates in Missoula successfully merged in a trial run for later statewide integration, forming the Merged Missoula Classified Employees Organization.

Affiliates in other states were attempting similar mergers, and union leadership began pushing for a merger on a national scale.

In 1998, NEA and AFT leadership agreed to a merger, but when the proposal was put before the 10,000 members of the NEA National Assembly, the deal failed to win a two-thirds majority, and died. Efforts to restart negotiations for a national merger have since failed to get off the ground.While dissenting NEA members prevailed on the national level, that wasn’t the case in Montana, and when the national affiliates agreed to allow state-level mergers,  MEA-MFT was formed in 2000.

Original source here.