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Union Volunteers Aid Disabled IBEW Member, Activist

July 29, 2011

Retired Middleton, Mass., Local 2321 member Lorraine Jasukonis with part of the team that built a new wheelchair-accessible ramp outside her home.

Any shop steward will tell you that protecting workers’ rights on the job is both a mental and physical endeavor.

But those challenges were gradually magnified over the past decade for Middleton, Mass., Local 2321 member and former steward Lorraine Jasukonis, when a still-undiagnosed impairment began impeding her ability to walk. During that time, she became less able to perform operator services and dispatch duties at Verizon shops in the Bay State until her retirement in June 2009.

“I didn’t want to retire,” said Jasukonis, a 21-year Verizon employee:

It wasn’t on my agenda at all. I’d still be working if I wasn’t dealing with the disability. But getting where I needed to be was becoming just too difficult.

Since the onset of her condition, Jasukonis had gone from using a cane, then a walker and finally a motorized chair. Then, the harsh bite of the New England winter and its extreme snowfalls blocked steps leading from her front door to the driveway, making her only route out dangerously impassable. She became virtually housebound from last November to April.

Jasukonis knew that installing a ramp outside the front door would make a monumental difference. But it was also prohibitively expensive.

“She contacted various state and municipal agencies to assist her, but to no avail,” said Paul Ward, International Representative for the Second District:

When it appeared that there was little the state could do, she did what many IBEW members do: she contacted her union for help.

That started the gears moving early this year on a project that would eventually involve union members from throughout the county to build a sturdy, reliable ramp outside Jasukonis’ home.

IBEW leaders networked with various agencies, eventually connecting with some Worcester International Firefighters Association Local 1009 members who were part of a United Way community service initiative. The “Ramp Gang,” as the firefighters are commonly called, installs ramps for individuals within the purview Central Massachusetts Labor Council area. The team built 15 last year and six so far this year.

Though she lived outside of the council’s area, the volunteers were willing to travel beyond their territory because of Jasukonis’ IBEW membership, the union’s close ties within the CLC and the continued activism and reputation of three area IBEW locals – Worcester Locals 96 and 2325 and Waltham Local 1505.

On July 6, about 20 firefighters from Worcester and Templeton arrived at Jasukonis’ home in trucks full of lumber, handsaws and other power tools.

After about four hours of measuring, cutting, nailing and sanding, the project was complete. Jasukonis piloted her chair down the ramp and into the morning air for the first time. She left her porch and got her own mail from the mailbox for the first time in three years:

I hadn’t been able to safely go outside in so long. It felt like I was being released.

Jasukonis praised the effort of various union leaders who provided support to get the project from dream to reality, including Ward; Second District International Vice President Frank Carroll; Telecommunications Department Director Martha Pultar; former Local 1505 Business Manager George Noel; and Bob Bower, political director for the state AFL-CIO and an officer for the Central Massachusetts Labor Council. Said Jasukonis:

I am so grateful and happy that these wonderful people could help me. They’ll never know how thankful I am.