Chattanooga union leader elected to a top International post – Yahoo News
Aug. 21—The president of an employees union in Chattanooga who helped convince former President Trump to get the Tennessee Valley Authority to reverse its outsourcing of information technology jobs last year has been elected to the No. 2 position in the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.
Gay Henson, a health physicist at the Tennessee Valley Authority who is president of the Engineering Association/IFPTE Local 193, was recently elected as secretary-treasurer of the International union during the IFPTE annual convention. Henson, who joined the union in 1985 when she began her career and has served in union leadership posts since 2005, will remain as president of the IFPTE Local through February, in addition to her new job in Washington D.C.
“Having an up-from-the-ranks leader like Gay Henson, who has organized and rallied workers in the deep South and proven that she can take on the big bosses and win, adds great strength to the leadership team,” said Paul Shearon, who is retiring as IFPTE president.
Shearon is being succeeded by Matt Biggs, the union’s legislative director for the past 20 years who has also served as secretary-treasurer since 2018.
The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, sometimes referred to as the home of “the geeks of the labor movement,” counts engineers at Boeing and rocket scientists at NASA among its members. It is also one of the largest unions representing workers at the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Henson led protests against TVA last year when the TVA began outsourcing IT jobs to try to save money. Henson’s protests got the attention of the Trump White House which invited Henson and local IT workers who were losing their jobs to meet with President Trump to air his concerns. Trump later fired both of TVA’s former chairmen — James “Skip” Thompson of Alabama and Richard Howorth of Mississippi — and threatened to fire other TVA directors if they continued to outsource jobs.
IFPTE represents about 90,00 employees in public and pivate-sector jobs and in recent years, hundreds of workers employed at think-tanks and non-profits such as the Economic Policy Institute, The Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, have also joined the engineers union.
“A common perception is that highly educated workers at non-profits, government agencies and tech companies have it easier than workers in industries and services where unions have a long history,” Biggs said. “The fact is, workers with advanced degrees and those in offices, hearing rooms and labs have issues and need representation. IFPTE is here for them.”
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.