LaborPains.org

Linden, New Jersey finds itself on the stinky side of the budget shortfall.  Like many cities around the country, Linden was unable to make up a budget deficit of four million dollars–so the city decided to furlough city employees. The city had negotiated with unions to give everyone other than firefighters a three day unpaid furlough.  This gave employees three three day weekends this fall, but the problems started when the city made logistical decisions about when it is best to pick up trash–and changed the city’s Teamsters trash collectors furlough day.

The New Jersey Local News Service reports:

A turf war over city services in Linden turned into a labor dispute last week when the Teamsters filed a grievance on behalf of workers in the sanitation department. The workers are angry that the city rescheduled a furlough, robbing them of a three-day weekend, and are threatening to call in sick en masse, according to one city official.

“We’re very unhappy. We’re not switching.  We had an agreement on days, and we’re not switching,” said Joseph Caplette, president of the Linden Public Employees Association. [...]

The city public works department planned to cut trash days on Aug. 12, Oct. 16 and Nov. 27–days that would affect the 8th Ward in each case. [...]

But after protests from 8th Ward residents led by Councilwoman Michele Yamakaitis, the city changed the October furlough day from a Friday to Thursday, Oct. 15. It was a compromise that didn’t satisfy residents of other wards, politicians or trash collectors, who had lost their long weekend.

It is now likely there will be no one to pick up trash on Thursday or Friday.

Image courtesy of daquella manera.

The tax on so-called gold plated insurance policies, which are understood to be held by the wealthiest among us, is designed to help pay the cost of the health care bill.  Senators and Congressman perhaps feel a sense of pride including said tax in the bill, because many of them also hold these gold-plated policies. But the finer points of the tax, introduced by Senator Max Baucus last Wednesday have unions spooked.  It would apply to them as well.  The New York Times reports:

As it turns out, though, many smaller fish would get caught in Mr. Baucus’s tax net. The supposedly Cadillac insurance policies include ones that cover many of the nation’s firefighters and coal miners, older employees at small businesses — a whole gamut that runs from union shops to Main Street entrepreneurs. Under the Baucus plan, insurers selling a plan costing more than $8,000 for an individual and $21,000 for a family would have to pay a 35 percent excise tax on the excess amount. [...]

Bruce Hodson is a state employee in Maine and the president of Local 1989 of the Service Employees International Union, where the cost of a family plan is now running at about $20,500 a year. At the typical pace of health premium inflation, his policy could very likely set off the tax if it goes into effect in 2013, as the Baucus plan proposes.

Of unions getting stuck paying the tax, President Obama had the following to say:

On Sunday, President Obama said he saw the need to protect union members, but he also defended the tax. “I do think that giving a disincentive to insurance companies to offer Cadillac plans that don’t make people healthier is part of the way that we’re going to bring down health care costs for everybody over the long term.”

Image courtesy of Voxphoto.

I had this moment of hope.

The Sacremento Bee reported that the SEIU is displaying its “softer side” by encouraging state workers of California to display lawn signs stating they were members of the SEIU.  This was in order that Californians would realize that people in the union are their friends, neighbors, and colleagues.  Warm feelings for securing the future of union member’s pension funds and affection for bankrupting the state were supposed to follow.  The Sacremento Bee reports:

The campaign is a courteous counterpoint to the angry rallies, aggressive ad campaigns and strike threats the union has employed in the last few months as it unsuccessfully pushed Republican legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ratify the local’s stalled labor contract.

Could yard signs be the breadth of fresh air needed to clear the air between the Gubernator and the unions–specifically the SEIU?  Could it be that the SEIU in California has decided to play nice?

Apparantly not.  To stymie  cuts in home care programs, Governor Schwarzenegger’s mother-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver was the union punching bag. In an SEIU press release:

“Your mother-in-law did fight so that people could live independently,” said Lillibeth Navarro, Executive Director of Communities Actively Living Independent and Free.  “So how would she feel about you honoring her fight in one breath and at the same time cutting the vital services that allow seniors and people with disabilities to live independently?”

Isn’t there a rule about leaving people’s family out of it?

Perhaps the California union contingency is taking its cues from SEIU President Andy Stern who on Friday called those is opposition to health care “loud and venomous” and “attack dogs,” full of lies, stunts, and smears.

Remember the talk your parents gave you about the “popular kids” in school? (I do.) It went something like: “Don’t worry about them. Popularity isn’t everything.”

While that might have been true for many a teenagers’ angst-filled years, it’s not the case for labor unions, who are at an all-time low in popularity.

According to a recent Gallup poll, a majority of Americans disapprove of labor unions and think they “hurt” the economy. Amazingly, union’s popularity is 6% lower than the movement’s previous low in 1981 following the Air Traffic Controllers strike.

Unfortunately, labor leaders are in denial. Last week, the AFL-CIO’s newly elected President Richard Trumka told the Investor’s Business Daily that he doesn’t “live by polls.” To put more of a point on it, he explained to the Wall Street Journal that the poll was a “bad poll”:

Sometime over the last few decades, the union movement has drifted from the mainstream. The AFL-CIO in the 1980s backed Poland’s Solidarity and stood with Ronald Reagan against the Soviets. Such a position seems impossible in today’s political climate. Detroit’s collapse created an additional image problem for the unions, whose deals over the decades helped make the Big Three uncompetitive. A shift in public opinion can be seen in a new Gallup poll. Less than half of Americans—48%—approve of labor unions, compared with 59% a year before.

Mr. Trumka doesn’t buy it. “It’s probably a statistical error, a bad poll,” he says.

I’m beginning to lose track of how many employees ACORN has fired since news broke that the embattled community organizing group was willing to offer advice on running an underage prostitution ring.

The questions in my mind are: What about their union? Where is the SEIU? Shouldn’t SEIU’s lawyers be burning the midnight oil writing Unfair Labor Practices for such capricious firings? Where was the hearing? What about the grievance procedure? Was their shop steward notified?

Oh, wait, that’s right. ACORN busted the last union that tried to organize its employees.

Our friends at the Employment Policies Institute have a handy website called “Rotten Acorn,” which details, among other things, ACORN’s history of union busting:

When employees of Rathke’s SEIU Local 100 wanted to organize themselves into a union, Rathke relied on his wife and brother to plot out an aggressive (and hypocritical) union-avoidance strategy. One former employee reported that after employees provided Rathke with a petition demanding union recognition:

Rathke quickly called a meeting of ACORN’s inner circle, which included his wife, Beth Butler, head organizer of Louisiana ACORN, and Rathke’s brother Dale, who is the financial guru of the outfit. The troika devised a variety of tactics, such as can be expected from any union-busting corporation, to divide and destroy our solidarity.

In 2003, the National Labor Relations Board would find that ACORN management was guilty of using union-busting tactics against its employees.

Unions in California have a very, very short memory.  Just last week, Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed California’s card check bill because he was upset by the union’s dismissal of his number one legislative priority.

The unions have forgotten that when SEIU gave United Farm Workers one million dollars to manhandle him into signing the state-wide card check bill, the Governor promptly pulled the bill out from the stack on his desk and vetoed it before UFW could even spend the money.

So when AB 88, the new deal for the 95,000 state workers represented by the SEIU Local 1000 (a deal which typically serves as the model for other state contracts) was stalling in the legislature this week, SEIU Local 1000 spokesman decided to insult the man holding the keys to the kingdom—-a strategy that clearly failed last week.

From Capitol Weekly:

“The idea is to get it on the governor’s desk and then either force him or shame him into signing it,” said SEIU 1000 spokesman Jim Zamora, before the Senate vote. He added, “If he refuses to sign it, he should explain why he is breaking a promise, why he is going back on an agreement that his representatives signed with us back in February. We realize economic conditions have changed since then, but we have also come forward with ways to make up the difference.”

And the real tragedy about the failed contract?  In it, unions were willing to give up Columbus Day AND Lincoln’s Birthday for the benefit of the good people of California. Never mind that four days later is President’s Day—when pretty much everyone else in the country celebrates Lincoln’s birthday. But have no fear, state workers in California get that day off too.

Image courtesy of This Year’s Love.

San Diego has quickly become the poster child of union pension fund mismanagement. The city, which famously mismanaged its pension fund, was force to nearly declare bankruptcy. Thankfully things are looking better now.  In fact, this morning the city’s independent pension board will vote to inject a little more security into the system.

But then there’s the story of Judie Italiano. She led the city’s largest union, the Municipal Employees Association, for 24 years, until an internal investigation last May determined that she was using the union’s credit card for personal items “despite promising not to do so in 2006.”

Italiano is now suing the city for $1.8 million. Italiano, who retired from the union making $114,000, wants the city to pay her $86,000 a year in retirement benefits. The trouble is that she wasn’t a city employee, and under IRS regulations, she’s not eligible to receive benefits from the plan. In fact, her last city job was as a typist making $17,000 a year, which would entitle her to $7,700 per year.

Sen. Arlen Specter (PA-D) claimed on Tuesday at the AFL-CIO’s conference in Pittsburgh to have “pounded out an Employees Choice bill which will meet labor’s objectives.”  Apparently, someone forgot to tell the Senate.

Democratic Senators spent an awkward day Wednesday walking back from Specter’s statements. One senator stated that there have been no formal talks since July. Several claimed it was the first they’d heard of it, but they reassured reporters they wanted to “finish what [they've] started.” It was clear that Specter spoke out of turn on a bill for which he himself has been a controversy. And even if a compromise is reached, there are only 59 Democratics in the Senate — not enough to break a filibuster.

Specter may have spoke too soon, and his checkered past on EFCA may come back to haunt him.

Read more in The Hill, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.