Right to Work Blog

Despite bipartisan abandonment of taxpayers and workers by members of Congress from both parties who are trying to curry favor with police and fireman unions, the Winston-Salem Journal understands what the real issues are:

The U.S. Congress shouldn’t be meddling with the decisions that city and town leaders must make regarding local government salaries.

Yet that is exactly what Congress is trying to do with legislation that would require all cities and towns of more than 5,000 population to bargain collectively with the leading union that represents public-safety officers — police, firefighters and emergency-service workers.

The bill was moving toward Senate approval last week when Republicans suddenly stopped supporting it. Senate leaders now say they will try to work out a compromise and bring the bill back to the floor.

Although President Bush has promised to veto the bill, it’s entirely possible that there is enough support in Congress to override that veto.

At the very least, an override vote will be close because, for a pro-union measure, the bill has had a good deal of Republican support. (North Carolina’s two senators, Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr, and 5th District Rep. Virginia Foxx have opposed the bill as it has moved through Congress.)

Even if a Bush veto is upheld in Congress, this is not likely to be an issue that will go away. But it should.

The bill is offensive for a number of reasons.

The first and foremost is that it is probably unconstitutional. That annoying 10th Amendment, the one that reserves for the states all powers not explicitly enumerated for the federal government, is still on the books. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the authority to mandate collective bargaining.

In the past, the amendment has been used as the constitutional basis for a lot of bogus arguments — mostly to oppose the civil-rights movement — but this is not such a case. Setting salaries for government workers is a state and local matter.

In North Carolina, public employees do not have the right to bargain collectively. The N.C. State Employees Association has just affiliated itself with a union, but that doesn’t mean it has the right to hold negotiations with the governor and legislators over salaries and benefits. Congress should not come along and decide that it will change the labor structure in this state.

With HR 980, the Congress is also passing a huge unfunded mandate for cities and towns. Collective bargaining would put upward pressure on salaries, and the federal government would not help with them at all. If Congress wants to do something to raise safety officers’ salaries, it should send some money to cities and towns for that purpose.

Congress is meddling here, involving itself in an issue that is best handled by towns, cities and states.

Let’s hope there are enough votes to sustain a Bush veto if the bill passes the Senate. This is an idea best forgotten.

The union power grab of local school boards is hitting a snag. Editorial boards, educators and now, perhaps, even the Democrat governor is saying the unions and their cronies in the legislature are going too far, too fast.

The Quad-City Times editorial page writes:

Call it a warning ticket. Gov. Chet Culver admonished Iowa’s Democratic legislative leaders to put the brakes on a bill rushed through before most folks knew what it was about.

Eight days ago, we hadn’t heard a peep of concern about the limits on public employee collective bargaining in Iowa. It didn’t come up in the governor’s condition of the state address. Democratic leaders Sen. Mike Gronstal and Rep. Pat Murphy didn’t mention it in their 90-minute meeting with the Times [italics added] Editorial Board.

It hadn’t come up with our discussions with Iowa mayors, school board superintendents or even public union leaders. None of the state legislative candidates mentioned it in their editorial board interviews.

We received zero letters to the editor on the subject. In fact, until last week, no one had ever dialed a phone or dropped a single e-mail line suggesting that collective bargaining should be significantly expanded for organized employees who work for the government.

On the afternoon of March 18, a Democratic house majority approved an amendment that added a laundry list of topics to public employee negotiations. Some of the additions seem warranted. Many, many others do not.

The newly expanded list of topics takes many policy issues — public school class size, health and safety matters, even staffing levels — out of the hands of elected aldermen, supervisors and school board members and puts them on a private negotiating table. Though the final contracts are public, elements of pending labor negotiations are not.

Worse, the impasses in these private negotiations are resolved by binding arbitration, giving the public little recourse for these critical policy decisions negotiated behind closed doors.

These important public employee negotiations require good faith from all participants. The heart of this bill began in bad faith. Democrats appear to have muscled it through simply because they could, driving a deeper wedge not only among partisans in the statehouse, but labor and management in the schoolhouse and city hall.

On Tuesday, Culver’s admonition prompted Gronstal to file a motion to reconsider, a legislative tactic that could lead to more debate. But we’re not sure Gronstal gets it. He said his motion will give the “governor and his staff additional time to read the legislation.” Good for the governor and his staff. How about taxpayers? Town councils? School board members? Republican lawmakers? Gronstal’s retort seems to discount any discussion, alternatives or compromise.

We commend Culver for issuing the warning ticket by threatening a veto. We hope he’s prepared with stiffer measures should Gronstal and Murphy fail to heed the warning.

The Illinois lesson

Iowa State Education Association lobbyist Brad Hudson defended the expansion of collective bargaining rights with this novel comparison. “It hasn’t bankrupted Illinois or Wisconsin or the 25 other states,” with the law. We’d encourage the teachers’ union to school their lobbyist before using Illinois as an example for anything about government budgeting.

David Elbert of the Des Moines Register says all the pro-Big Labor lifting Iowa Democrats have done for the union bosses is a gift to the Republican Party. First they tried to repeal the Hawkeye State Right to Work Law, and now Democrats want Gov. Chet Culver to sign a bill giving state employee unions monopoly bargaining rights for taxpayers’ money.

Democratic leaders rammed the legislation through while Culver was on spring break with his family in Florida on the presumption that he would quietly sign it. Instead, he’s turned a spotlight on the somewhat shady process and handed Republicans a campaign issue that might help them regain control of the Iowa House in November.

The issue is House File 2645, which would strengthen the hand of public employee unions at the bargaining table by widening the scope of issues that are likely to go to arbitration to include work rules, disciplinary actions and other issues that previously received little consideration at bargaining sessions.

It would be the first significant change to Iowa’s public employee bargaining law since it was passed in 1974 by a bipartisan Legislature and approved by Republican Gov. Robert Ray. That law allows public employees to join unions and bargain for wages and benefits, but they cannot strike. Impasses are resolved through binding arbitration. . . .

. . . The Iowa House is the key chamber for this or any other piece of labor legislation, because Democrats hold a slimmer 53-47 lead there, while in the Senate they have a 10-vote edge.

Last year, the House killed the so-called “fair share” labor bill that would have let unions collect money from the paychecks of nonunion members to cover certain union expenses.

Like the measures contained in House File 2645, fair share was barely mentioned during the 2006 campaign. Nonetheless, fair share was on track early in last year’s session to pass both houses with the expectation that Culver would sign it, until the heat became too much and a handful of House Democrats bailed out. Leaders knew they couldn’t get the 51 votes they needed, so they never brought it to the House floor.

After fair share, Democratic leaders apparently decided to wait this year until the end of the session to push through the public employees work-rules bill.

It passed the House with one vote to spare, 52-47. It passed the Senate on a vote of 27-23 a few days later.

Culver wants the bill to go back for reconsideration because there was no public input. That’s a highly unusual move for a bill that’s already passed both houses.

If that happens, though, officials say the bill would probably get fewer than 51 votes and fail.

Today, Culver is the only thing keeping the bill from becoming law.

He’s between a rock and a hard place, and Republicans love it.

If you’re a GOP strategist, it probably doesn’t matter what Culver does, because once the law passes even one house, it’s fair game for the fall campaign.

Now that the governor has stood up against the bill, Republicans can use his words against his party’s candidates in the fall election.

If he signs it, so much the better. Republicans would call him a hypocrite.

The thing that has a lot of people scratching their heads is why Democrats in the Legislature went ahead and passed the bill without getting a sign-off from their own governor.

There’s two ways to look at that. Either they got a sign-off and Culver reneged, or they didn’t tell him what they were up to and just assumed he’d go along. After all, he was on board last year for fair share.

Judging by Culver’s reaction, they didn’t tell him.

That was clearly a strategic mistake.

Iowa’s most influential political observer, David Yepsen, has some advice for Iowa’s Democrat Gov. Chet Culver — veto the union power grab and get yourself reelected.

By standing up to some of the labor unions, Gov. Chet Culver may have reassured his 2010 re-election - and beyond.

He’s threatening to veto a labor-backed, hurry-up rewrite of the state’s public-employee collective-bargaining laws. . . .

Yepsen remembers Iowa’s history when Democrats went too far for voters’ tastes:

Maybe Democrats are getting cocky. Maybe they are so sure they’ll win control again in 2008 that they think they can afford to roll over for the unions. Voters may think otherwise. Don’t be surprised if Republicans win the Iowa House because Iowans feel they need to check the abuse of power created by one-party rule.

It’s happened before in Iowa, in 1966, when voters decided Statehouse Democrats went too far after their 1964 landslide.

The ball is now in Culver’s court.

In early January, Governor Jim Gibbons signed an executive order repealing former Governor Bob Miller’s 1994 executive order mandating project labor agreements on Nevada public works construction projects. As reported in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Governor Gibbons’ new executive order:

. . . could save taxpayers millions of dollars . . . .

Under a PLA, the project owner is required to use only contractors that adhere to the rules set forth in the agreement, which includes wages, hours, benefits and other labor terms. In exchange, union workers pledge not to strike or pursue any other job actions.

Nonunion contractors have long contended that PLAs drive up the cost of construction on public projects such as schools and roads.

According to representatives of Nevada’s Associated Builders and Contractors:

In the executive order, Gibbons stressed that the state has “an obligation to all Nevadans to ensure that tax dollars are used economically, efficiently and in a non-discriminatory manner,” noting that this goal is met “through a process that ensures open and fair competition for state construction projects.”

The executive order noted that “promoting open and fair competition on the bidding and awarding of state construction projects will: allow the state to utilize the best contractor for the job at hand; expand job opportunities, particularly for small and disadvantaged businesses; advance free competition as a way of doing business in Nevada; and reduce construction costs and therefore save taxpayer dollars.”

Gov. Gibbon’s new executive order is a step in the right direction.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, construction contractors and employees have the right to choose to unionize or not to unionize. The vast majority of contractors and their employees - more than 80 percent - have voluntarily opted against unionization.

Because most contractors and employees choose to refrain from unionization when they have the free choice, Big Labor turned to politicians to remove that choice and impose union representation on employees from the top down. The method by which this is done is a project labor agreement, which is also frequently referred to as a “PLA.”

A project labor agreement requires all contractors, whether they are unionized or not, to subject themselves and their employees to unionization in order to work on a government-funded construction project. This is done by including a union collective bargaining agreement in a public construction project’s bid specifications. In order to receive a contract, a contractor must sign the agreement and subject its employees to union control.

Project labor agreements usually require contractors to grant union officials monopoly bargaining privileges over all workers; use exclusive union hiring halls; force workers to pay dues to keep their jobs; and pay above-market prices resulting from wasteful work rules and featherbedding.

The use of a project labor agreement usually results in cost overruns and higher construction costs for taxpayers. Qualified non-union contractors who wish to make lower-cost bids, and employees who wish to work non-union, are locked out of the project. However, politicians and government officials continue to impose project labor agreements to reward the union officials that fund their political campaigns and keep them in power.