LaborPains.org

Local 983 of District Council 37, American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) AFL-CIO, pays its president, Mark Rosenthal, over $156,000 per year, according to the New York Post. It seems like members might not receive much work for all that dues money. The Post alleges:

The 400-pound president of Local 983 of District Council 37 — the city’s largest blue-collar municipal-workers union — often downs a huge meal, then drops into dreamland in the early afternoon, members of the union’s executive board told The Post.

That’s him snoozing in the accompanying picture, and the Post has several more candid photos of Rosenthal’s cat-naps. (He called them “Power Naps.”) The big boss is so obese that he reportedly broke a chair at McDonald’s by sitting down.

That hasn’t stopped him from racking up $1400 per month in food bills on the union’s treasury, according to other union officials. Union officials have also alleged that he overpaid the union’s attorney. Now Rosenthal is suing the union’s board to reinstate the now-fired attorney he allegedly overpaid.

The irony in this titanic showdown over potential self-dealing and cronyism? When Rosenthal was elected in 1998, he ran as a reformer. Without real structural reform to union governance, the trappings of power and forced dues money may continue to corrupt absolutely.

Huffington Post: Armored Car Drivers Try To Unionize In New York City
Labor wants to make greater inroads into security, a field with traditionally low unionization rates.

Bloomberg: N.Y. MTA Labor Talks Drag as Union Fights Part-Time Bus Drivers
Union officials of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 continue to urge ignorance of reality as unionized drivers continue to raise costs with unnecessary overtime pay.

The Indypendent: Christine Quinn & Labor
Progressives take shots at labor and at New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the current frontrunner to be the next mayor.

Although plenty of politicians are effectively on labor’s payroll thanks to the massive amount of money that unions funnel into political campaigns, two Rhode Island state senators have taken things to a whole new level. Senate Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio and Senator Frank Ciccone both pulled in six figures from the Laborer’s union, with Ruggerio taking home almost $233,000 and Ciccone’s salary and benefits totaling roughly $197,000. As New Jersey union members know, it helps to have organized labor controlling the state house.

Wisconsin’s Collective Bargaining Law Survives Seventh Circuit

A three-judge panel sitting in Chicago has ruled that Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reform in Wisconsin, Act 10, is constitutional. The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) had sued the state to stop enforcement of the law that limits public sector employee collective bargaining. WEAC argued that the exemption for public safety unions was unconstitutional. If the WEAC’s appeal is not heard by the entire panel, then the current injunction will be lifted and Wisconsin’s labor reforms can finally take full effect.

NY1 is reporting that New York City bus company owners have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to stop its drivers and matrons from continuing the strike that began on Wednesday. Until then, the companies were responsible for getting 152,000 kids to school—at the cost of almost $7,000 per student. The city’s Department of Education wants to open up competitive bids for the routes to save taxpayer money, but the union is insisting that the city impose job protections that New York courts have declared illegal. John Podhoretz of the New York Post says that we shouldn’t be surprised by this strike and that unions will only intensify their strikes over the next decade as old deals collapse under their own financial burden.

New York City’s yellow school bus drivers are taking the concept of wanting what they can’t have to a whole new level.

The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 has authorized a strike that it says will begin on Wednesday morning. The ATU is demanding that the city include special employee protections in the competitive bidding that it recently opened up for 1,100 of the 7,700 school bus routes. These 1,100 routes serve 22,500 special needs children that attend the city’s public schools.

There’s just one problem: The city isn’t legally allowed to grant those employee protections. The New York Court of Appeals (the highest level court in the state) in 2011 said that the rules, known as Employee Protection Provisions (EPPs) are not permissible because they can harm the public when they are a required part of a competitive bidding process.

Despite the impossibility of meeting their demands, Local 1181 will be stranding most of the 152,000 New York City students that take the bus to school each morning. (Ironically, NY1 reports that buses for special needs students will still run during the strike.)

The NYC Department of Education (DOE) is legally barred from appeasing Local 1181. The battle over EPPs is an old one — one that was at the heart of the last school bus strike in 1979. As the Court of Appeals’ June 2011 decision explains, the city’s DOE moved to eliminate seniority practices in its bid solicitations, prompting the ATU to walk off the job for three months. In the wake of the strike, the DOE accepted EPPs. As the Court said, “the EPPs established a master seniority list, requiring contractors with the Board to give priority in hiring to employees on the list when such employees become unemployed because of reassignment of busing contracts.” When the DOE wanted to include EPPs in the competitive bidding for new Pre-K busing contracts, transportation vendors sued the DOE, saying that EPPs were anticompetitive and harmed the public.

The Court agreed, siding with the vendors over the DOE and Local 1181, which intervened in the case. Rejecting the claims that EPPs were similar to the permissible Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), the Court stated that the two were only comparable “in their status as atypical, patently restrictive, comprehensive pre-bid specifications and in their potential for anticompetitive consequences.”  The Court even noted that the DOE provided no examples of any other school districts in the country that included provisions akin to the EPPs.

It wouldn’t take a great leap of faith to see how EPPs and ATU Local 1181’s contracts have affected the cost of busing. At $1.1 billion for the entire contract, the cost comes to approximately $6,900 per student. Los Angeles estimates its per pupil cost at $3,100.

Consider that a 2-mile taxi ride from Union Square to Times Square—right through the heart of Midtown Manhattan—would cost roughly $4,600 for an entire school year. And that includes a generous 20 percent tip for the cabbie. If students paid the full fare for a subway or public bus trip each way to school, the cost would be only $810 per year.

Of course, Local 1181 knows all of this, and at the heart of this debate is the union’s distaste that the city dare to consider more cost-effective alternatives. When the city submitted the Pre-K busing contract for competitive bidding, the city saved $95 million over five years.

Instead of facing these realities, the 9,000 drivers and matrons of Local 1181 will likely strike tomorrow morning, all for the sake of preserving seniority rules the city can’t legally give them.

When a Washington D.C. union boss comes to town, take notice. If that boss promises to come back again, take cover.

“This is not my first trip to Colorado, and it won’t be my last,” said Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Coloradoans—you’ve been warned.

Weingarten, the former head of the AFT’s New York City local, isn’t just visiting the Rockies for vacation. New York magazine said that as Gotham’s teachers union president, “Weingarten ha[d] the power to stop education reform in its tracks, or at least slow it to a virtual halt.” And now Weingarten is ready to throw AFT’s weight around in Douglas County, Colorado and block innovative education reform.

The folks in Douglas County, home to one of the top public school systems in the country, are in for a nasty union-money-fueled battle in the weeks and months ahead. And that’s why we want you to join us and Stand With Dougco Kids and support them in improving their education, not dragging it backwards.

Teachers Union Exposed, a project of Center for Union Facts, just released a commercial that alerts county residents to the attempts by the Douglas County Federation of Teachers (DCFT)—an AFT-affiliated union—to block innovative reforms.

AFT’s Weingarten is one of a kind—or at least that’s what she says. She told the New York Sun in 2008, not long before she left for D.C., “Anybody who thinks that they can just walk into New York City and become the next Randi Weingarten is smoking something.” Likewise, if a high paid union boss ($407,323 to be exact) who backed the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike thinks she can just walk into Douglas County and become a credible voice on the school district, she should take note of some of her own wisdom.

That’s right: DCFT and the CTU are all under Weingarten’s AFT umbrella. The CTU is the union that blocked the school house doors when it took a “strike of choice” against Chicago students for seven days.

And now Weingarten is attacking school district leaders in Dougco, as she told Ed News Colorado:

“[A]cross the border [from Denver] is Douglas County, where the school board is only interested in its own power. Douglas County schools used to be on the cutting edge in Colorado. But rather than respect the staff, for political and malevolent reasons the board has undermined the public education system that once was known as the jewel of Colorado.”

[…]

“I’m here to say to Douglas County, ‘What the heck are you doing? And why are you doing this?’ They are attempting to destroy the public education system. It is absolute political machination.”

Dougco School Board President John Carson isn’t shy in exposing  Weingarten’s agenda:

“The Douglas County Federation of Teachers really has its strings pulled by the national union in Washington, D.C., and that’s demonstrated by the fact that that’s where they send the majority of their union dues, to the national union for politics,” Carson said. “The Douglas County Federation of Teachers is really more interested in national politics and is not interested in the educational interests of kids in Douglas County.”

For Weingarten, it has always been about teachers union power. Weingarten even pushed for a 22 percent raise for New York City teachers in November 2001, as the city was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks.

And if Weingarten wants to talk about who is being political, we’ll have that conversation. In its recently-released disclosures, the AFT headquarters in D.C. said it spent over $21 million on political activities and lobbying in the past fiscal year. That’s down from the $31 million it spent the year prior.

If Weingarten and the AFT think Chicago-style politics will work in Dougco, they’re wrong. We hope that you will Stand with Dougco Kids today.

After 20 inches of snow were dumped on New York City last week, the media has been atwitter about allegations made by one city councilman. Dan Halloran claimed he was approached by three Sanitation Department workers who confessed they had been ordered to slow down the snow removal as a protest against recent budget cuts.

The accused unions are the Sanitation Officers Association (which is part of the SEIU) and the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association (which is part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters). Both have claimed that the sluggish plowing was due to budget cutbacks and that no one takes Halloran’s allegations seriously.

But apparently the feds do–at least enough to open an investigation:

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that disgruntled sanitation workers sabotaged the cleanup after the blizzard last week that left some neighborhoods snowbound for days, people who have been briefed on the inquiry said Tuesday.

The investigation is focusing on whether there was a work slowdown and, if so, whether it was an effort to pad overtime. If the actions took place, two of those people said, they could constitute wire fraud or wire fraud conspiracy, both federal crimes. Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

Meanwhile:

Between 660 and 720 Sanitation workers called in sick for the cleanup of last week’s blizzard — more than double the usual rate, The Post has learned.

About 11 to 12 percent of the Sanitation Department’s 6,000-strong force didn’t show up for work on Monday or Tuesday, city officials confirmed, as 20 inches of snow brought the Apple to a near-standstill.

Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether those absent employees were protesting or snowed in. But for what it’s worth, this is far from the first time Teamsters-affiliated sanitation workers have called in sick. The worst incident occurred in nearby Yonkers where garbage festered in some neighborhoods for weeks after a budget battle angered the local sanitation union. On one day, 46 out of 48 sanitation workers scheduled to pick up garbage called in sick. More details will come out in the next few weeks, and in the meantime, we are keeping an eye on this.

Image courtesy of Barbara L. Hanson.