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Wis. GOP strips public workers’ bargaining rights
By SCOTT BAUER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 9, 2011; 7:45 PM
MADISON, Wis. — Republicans in the Wisconsin Senate voted Wednesday night to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers after discovering a way to bypass the chamber’s missing Democrats.
All 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois nearly three weeks ago, preventing the chamber from having enough members present to consider Gov. Scott Walker’s so-called “budget repair bill” – a proposal introduced to plug a $137 million budget shortfall.
The Senate requires a quorum to take up any measures that spend money. But Republicans on Wednesday split from the legislation the proposal to curtail union rights, which spends no money, and a special conference committee of state lawmakers approved the bill a short time later.
The lone Democrat present on the conference committee, Rep. Tony Barca, shouted that the surprise meeting was a violation of the state’s open meetings law but Republicans voted over his objections. The Senate then convened within minutes and passed it without discussion or debate.
Spectators in the gallery screamed “You are cowards.”
Before the sudden votes, Democratic Sens. Bob Jauch said if Republicans “chose to ram this bill through in this fashion, it will be to their political peril. They’re changing the rules. They will inflame a very frustrated public.”
© 2011 The Associated Press
Didn’t know 860 could help arrest airplanes.
They are sincerly interested in workers rights!
The Choice is yours.
Ellen Belcher: Voters may have to pick management or labor
By the Dayton Daily News | Sunday, March 6, 2011, 06:01 AM
Some thoughts about where things stand now on Ohio’s pending collective bargaining bill:
— Republicans backed down on important points. Initially the bill would have allowed only for one-year contracts with teachers. That was a rejection of tenure in the extreme.
If that provision had stayed in, Ohio would have had a devil of a time recruiting teachers. It especially would have sent young teachers fleeing elsewhere.
In addition, there is no prohibition against requiring workers to join a union. Some conservatives wanted that.
— Many of the county and city officials who detest “binding arbitration” for police and firefighters are not happy with the alternative in the Senate-passed bill (which is now in the House).
Rather than having an outsider pick either labor’s or management’s last offer as the contract settlement, that ultimate responsibility would fall to elected officials.
In really heated labor negotiations with employees who wear uniforms, elected officials would be in the thick of the controversy. They wouldn’t be able to point to someone else as being the bad guy.
Labor, meanwhile, argues that the bill gives management all the leverage — that it can put forward a proposal and then insist on having its way.
The import could be that public safety unions would become even more motivated to elect their supporters to public office than before. The irony is that one goal of the legislation is to tamp down unions’ influence.
— If the legislation passes and labor’s supporters succeed in getting a referendum on the ballot, political consultants will have a financial field day. Voters, on the other hand, will get a taste of what binding arbitration feels like.
They’ll be forced to pick one: either the new law — with its drawbacks and its bias toward management — or the current law — with its drawbacks and its bias toward workers.
In theory, the legislature could come back and make changes to the new law (or if the referendum turns out to be successful, make fixes to the existing law). But the politicians won’t touch this issue again, not after an almost yearlong, politically bloody campaign. They will say the people have spoken.
There probably was no way to avoid this. Things are so polarized in Columbus that the chance of Republicans and Democrats being reasonable with each other was non-existent.
The upside to one-party control — in this case, Republican control — is that decisions can get made; the downside is that there doesn’t have to be give-and-take.
— One message that got through to Republicans is that collective bargaining isn’t all bad. It has, for instance, allowed public administrators to negotiate grievance procedures that they like better than state civil service rules.
In some cases, contracts also allow for more sensible layoff rules.
Montgomery County has collective bargaining agreements that require layoffs be imposed within specified groups of employees. Under state civil service rules — which would be in play if there were no contracts — administrative workers, for example, could “bump” less senior workers from almost anywhere in county government, even if they didn’t know anything about that work.
— Initially there was a divide-and-conquer approach in the legislation about who would be allowed to collectively bargain. Local governments — with their vocal police and fire unions — had that right, but state workers didn’t. All workers do under the latest proposal, with specified limitations.
— Gov. John Kasich, according to Sen. Shannon Jones, who sponsored the bill, was adamant about outlawing strikes. That only means something if there’s a threat of fines or jail, which were part of the initial package.
Under the latest iteration, though, strikers would have to be found in contempt by a judge, who could fine and jail them for refusing a court order to go back to work. Jail, in other words, is still an option, but a judge would be specifically responsible for bringing the hammer down.
— Because raises for time on the job — known as “step increases” — wouldn’t be allowed, all governments and school districts would have to quickly get serious about establishing evaluation systems that would hold up in public and in court.
Heretofore, evaluations counted if you were trying to make a case to fire someone, but not so much if a person was doing an excellent job or doing enough to get by.
Necessary as it is, this is a seismic change. Human resources people are going to have plenty of work in Ohio.