How an MSEA-SEIU Member Lead the Campaign to Keep the Wilton Call Center Open

Maine Service Employees Association (SEIU 1989) member Tina Driscoll was devastated when she received a notice from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services in January that the call center where she worked in Wilton would be moved to Lewiston. The commute from her home in Chesterville to Lewiston was far too long and although Maine DHHS offered to allow staff to telecommute, she has a very poor Internet connection, which makes it impossible to do her work from home. And at 62 years old, she didn’t want to have to start all over again and she knew many employers wouldn’t want to hire someone so close to retirement.

“I love what I do. We all love what we do,” said Driscoll. “I knew I only had two options — try to look for other work or fight to keep the Wilton Call Center open. I chose to fight.”

It’s said that Franklin County has the highest concentration of call center professionals in the state. That’s because for many years, Barclays' credit card division operated a call center in Wilton until 2019, when the bank shuttered the facility and laid off 250 employees. Maine DHHS helped save some of those jobs by opening a temporary call center there to help people enroll in MaineCare after the Mills administration accepted federal funds to expand the program. In addition to helping Mainers access state health care and other state programs, Driscoll and her coworkers also worked with the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on COVID contact tracing earlier in the pandemic.

After receiving the closure notice, Driscoll sent a letter to the Governor urging the administration to reconsider its decision, but she didn’t get the response she was looking for. Disappointed, but not ready to give up, she next went to her union and the campaign quickly turned into a “crusade.” She worked with MSEA to contact her state legislators and soon Senator Russell Black (R-Franklin Cty.), Rep. Scott Landry (D-Farmington) and former Sen. Tom Saviello formed a bipartisan coalition to keep the call center open. Driscoll also coached her coworkers to write letters to the Mills administration.

Some of her colleagues were apprehensive at first because they didn’t want to blow their chance to work from home when the call center moved operations even though they preferred keeping the facility open. Driscoll herself also had nagging doubts about whether she was doing the right thing.

“I had a lot of mixed emotions about getting involved because I didn’t know if I would lose my job and never be able to get another job because I went against the state," she said. "I had never done anything like that and it was really nerve racking. But my husband kept encouraging me. He said, ‘you’ve gone this far. You can’t give up now!’”

The workers persisted and soon the media was covering the fight to keep the call center open and calling Driscoll for interviews. Then a few weeks ago an email arrived from Maine DHHS Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew announcing that it would continuing leasing the building for another year while it considered options for how to keep the call center in the Wilton area.

“When that notice arrived, people at work started starting jumping out of their seats and shouting “yahoo!” Driscoll said. “I started crying I was so overjoyed. There were a lot of emotions there that day.”

After displaying such strong leadership skills during the campaign, Driscoll has since been asked to become a shop steward in her union and has started her training.

“I love my job. I love my state. I love working six miles from home. I didn’t want to lose any of that,” she said. “We are just really thankful for all of the help we got from our state legislators and our union. This whole experience has really encouraged us not to take things for granted. It’s ok to question why we’re doing what we’re doing. I had never been a union member before and I can tell you, it is definitely worth it.”