Monday, June 27, 2011

Milwaukee County Should Be Exempt From Budget Disrepair Bill

As reported in the local paper, Milwaukee County unionized employees voted on an eleventh hour Tentative Agreement.  The paper reports it passed with 89% approval, which, to be perfectly honest, surprises me, since the contract is just a hair's width wide short of the damage Scott Walker's budget balancing gimmick would do.

The current Tentative Agreement could save the county as much as $20 million if the Board accepts it. But it has many hurdles to cover in just two days to get it done.

Chairman Lee Holloway would have to refer it to Finance and Audit and to the Personnel Committees. then there would have to be a specially called meeting of the Board on the whole. But Holloway has been miffed with the unions, blaming them for the state's take over of the Income Maintenance Program, even though it was Walker who shorted the department staff and the Board that turned a blind eye when it happened.

The Finance and Audit Committee is headed by Supervisor Johnny Thomas who has shown a history of dragging his feet.  And the Personnel Committee is headed by rabidly anti-union Joe Sanfelippo, who is hell bent on preserving the bad faith bargaining the county has been found guilty of for the last three years.

Then it would have to get to Abele's desk and be signed. All of that has to be done before the end of the day Tuesday.

It seems like a long shot to me that this will get done.

If the Board fails to act in a timely fashion, or if they reject it outright, then the County falls prey to Walker's economy-destroying bill.  This will actually save the county about $6 millions less than the proposed contract would save the tax payers.

But if I was in charge of AFSCME, I would have a labor attorney looking into whether Milwaukee County's unions should be exempt from the union-busting law.

The reason for that is that Milwaukee County's unions, most notably AFSCME, never had a chance that every other county and municipality had at gaining a contract to protect them from Walker's ideological attack on them.  After all, it was Walker, along with his allies on the County Board that has sabotaged every attempt at setting a contract.  AFSCME has the ruling from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Committee clearing stating that the County was blatantly committing bad faith bargaining. And as noted earlier, it seems that the current heads of the pertinent committees are following the same course of folly.

If AFSCME never had the same chance to successfully negotiate a contract due directly to the actions or non-actions of the county's part, it shouldn't fall on the unions (and the tax payers, but I repeat myself) to be doubly damned for the failure of a few county supervisors or the former county executive. Until the matter of bad faith bargaining is cleared up, then the old laws should remain in effect.

2 comments:

  1. Whine, whine, whine.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe MilCo should use the same exemption rules Obamacare uses...

    ReplyDelete