Public Employees: Myths and Realities

Labor Notes

Mark Brenner

|  December 20, 2010

With all the venom directed at public employees these days, it’s hard to separate the facts from the attacks. Here’s a guide to common claims made about government spending, taxes, and public employees.

The Claim: Government employees are overpaid.

The Facts: The Economic Policy Institute measured state and local public workers against their private sector counterparts with the same age, experience, and education. They found that public workers earn about 11 percent less.

Public workers had better benefits on average, but even when health care and retirement were included, public workers were still 4 percent behind private sector counterparts.

Claims that state and local government workers are overpaid often fail to account for their education and experience. Fifty-four percent have at least a four-year college degree, compared to 35 percent in the private sector.

The Claim: The federal deficit is out of control.

The Facts: It’s true that this year’s budget deficit—projected to be 10.3 percent of U.S. economic activity—is the highest since World War II. Whether it’s a problem depends on your time frame and how we address it.

Short-term government spending was the only thing that kept the economy from cratering in 2008. It staved off a second Great Depression.

With no private sector investment in sight, public spending will be the only engine for job creation in the foreseeable future. Aside from the pain created by high unemployment, no jobs means no recovery for tax collections and therefore a widening deficit.

The deficit is a long-term problem if we do nothing, but before doing something we have to look at spending and revenues. The bulk of federal spending is on the military (22 percent) and health care, including Medicare, Medicaid, and children’s health programs (21 percent).

The obvious place to start trimming is today’s military budget, which is two and a half times what it was 10 years ago. Health care costs are also skyrocketing, because they are driven by for-profit health care. A single-payer system like “Medicare for all” would correct that.

The Claim: Taxes are too high.

The Facts: Depends whose taxes you mean. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, overall taxes in the U.S. are the third lowest among industrialized countries (only Turkey and Mexico are lower). Corporate taxes are also lower than in most other industrial nations.

But there are inequities—and they favor the rich. People at the bottom of the income ladder, the lowest 20 percent, pay almost twice as much of their income in state and local taxes as the top 1 percent. The poor pay 11 percent, the rich just 6 percent.

At the end of World War II corporations paid more than a third of all taxes collected by the federal government. Today they pay only 10 percent. The burden was shifted to individuals, and as taxes on the wealthy were cut over the last 30 years, the liability has been transferred to working people.

The Claim: The private sector is more efficient than government.

The Facts: Advocates claim outsourcing will save money. But after more than two decades of experience, reality isn’t so clear-cut.

Cost overruns combined with the cost of contract monitoring and administration often makes privatization more expensive than in-house services. According to a 2007 survey by the International City/County Management Association, more than one in five local governments had brought previously outsourced services back in house.

In most cases insufficient cost savings were cited as a primary reason. And where contracting out does produce savings, they typically come from lower wages and benefits for workers—not some supposed inherent superiority of business.

The Claim: Government waste, fraud and abuse are rampant.

The Facts: Government-bashers love to talk about overpaid, do-nothing bureaucrats, but if you’re looking for misused tax dollars your best bet is to scour the Chamber of Commerce’s membership list. Defense contracts and construction projects like the “Big Dig” in Boston hold taxpayers hostage with wildly inaccurate, often fraudulent cost estimates.

According to the Project on Government Oversight’s database of federal contractor misconduct, the top five defense contractors have racked up 156 instances of misconduct since 1995, totaling $3.57 billion in fraud and waste.

Victory for Express Scripts Workers!

Great news from Jobs with Justice.  Solidarity across state and national borders is the only way to beat multi-national corporations.

Express Scripts, Inc. reverses decision to close plant; 400 family-supporting, union jobs saved

After a months-long struggle with Express Scripts, Inc., SEIU workers, Missouri Jobs with Justice, St. Louis Area Workers' Rights Board and other activists have forced Express Scripts Inc. (ESI) to reverse their decision to shutter all Bensalem, PA operations-- saving 400 family-supporting, union jobs and providing a substantial severance package to 500 workers facing layoffs at another plant in the city.

"This settlement will keep hundreds of good jobs here in Bensalem, and make sure anyone who gets laid off will be able to provide for their families in this harsh economy," said Linda Chan, a Pharmacy Tech at the Marshall Lane facility, and a member of the SEIU Healthcare bargaining committee.

SEIU members had been engaging in a national campaign to put pressure on ESI to maintain quality jobs in Bensalem when the company announced it would close both the Marshall Lane and Bensalem facilities. In August, 50 ESI workers from Bensalem, PA- facing severe pay and benefits cuts- drove to ESI headquarters in St. Louis to meet with CEO George Paz face-to-face and protestthe cuts, meeting with members of the St. Louis Workers' Rights Board while they were here.

In November, three ESI workers were suspended for reaching out to ESI clients, and SEIU workers contacted St. Louis Workers' Rights Board again. St. Louis WRB agreed to hold an Investigative Hearing on ESI's worker abuse. Instead of agreeing to come to the hearing, Paz reopened negotiations- and a settlement was reached in the late hours the day before the Investigative Hearing was to take place. Paz also agreed to reinstate the suspended workers.

"This has been a very difficult challenge...by sticking together we saved 400 good jobs for this community and won an excellent severance package for laid off workers that most non-union workers could only dream about," said Rickie Stemley, a Pharmacy Tech at the Marshall Lane facility.

Read more at the Missouri Jobs with Justice website or SEIU'swebsite.

Project Labor Agreements under Attack as Non-Union Contractors Try to Pick Off Public Jobs

Looks like another national movement that started in California may be headed our way.    If there is a way to pay workers less to increase profits, it seems to be headed our way.  Get ready for another fight.  

From Labor Notes  by Jenny Brown, Dec. 13, 2010

Idled by the housing bust, non-union contractors are attacking agreements that building trades unions have used to defend their work for the last two decades.   

Residential and light industrial construction, dominated by non-union firms, is still flat on its back. Construction employment is at a 14-year low, the Department of Labor reported in October. But some publicly funded work is still going ahead, thanks to federal stimulus funds and to state and local spending.Idled by the housing bust, non-union contractors are attacking agreements that building trades unions have used to defend their work for the last two decades.

Now, non-union construction firms, fighting for market share, want to bring their low wages and bad work rules to those taxpayer-funded jobs.

Associated Builders and Contractors, an employer group, is crowing about its latest victory—a November 2 ballot measure that passed by 75.8 percent in San Diego County, California. ABC is vowing a “50-state strategy” to ban Project Labor Agreements.

The ballot strategy may be dangerous for construction union job standards because PLAs, unlike prevailing wage laws, are confusing and opaque to the general public. Prevailing wage laws can be defended by saying that public dollars shouldn’t encourage low-wage work. PLAs can sound more like a backroom deal.

PLAs are negotiated between the employer and unions to set wages and work rules before a large project is bid. In return, unions promise not to strike or engage in other job actions for the duration of the project.

Non-union contractors may bid on the project, but they must pay the wages and benefits outlined in the agreement.

‘FAIR AND OPEN’

The proposition on the San Diego County ballot claimed it would “ensure fair and open competition for county construction contracts.”

What’s a Project Labor Agreement?

PLAs are agreements struck between funders of a building project—public or private—and the building trades unions that are expected to have members working at the site. They’re used for large, complicated projects. Federal guidelines say they should be considered for projects costing more than $25 million.

PLAs started out as a compromise by building trades unions to secure work. Court decisions in the late 1970s and 1980s allowed construction employers to get out of “pre-hire” agreements to hire union workers, so the unions created these project by project agreements. In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their legality on public projects.

Generally, a Project Labor Agreement will set wages at or slightly below union scale, but far above what non-union companies will pay. In return for promising not to engage in any job actions during the project, unions get a guarantee of particular pay and work rules. If a subcontractor is non-union, his workers will work union during that project, getting the same wages and benefits and paying union dues.

George W. Bush banned PLAs on federally funded jobs, but Barack Obama reinstated them shortly after he took office.

PLAs decrease inter-trade fights over which union gets what part of the work, because jurisdiction is agreed to in advance.

Careful comparison studies confirm that projects using PLAs don’t cost more, because union workers tend to be more efficient.

But PLAs are double-edged swords. Costs may also be comparable to non-PLA jobs because workers are bound not to take “costly” job actions, the kind that get the goods.

—Jenny Brown

It sounds like some kind of civil rights measure, and that’s how ABC portrayed it in the media. San Diego ABC president Scott Crosby argued that the requirement that employers pay a worker union scale is discrimination against that worker, who is “forced to join a union” for the duration of the job. It’s also discriminatory against the non-union contractor, he said, who could win the bid if he didn’t have to provide higher pay and benefits.

The ballot measure prevents the county from requiring contractors to enter into Project Labor Agreements for construction projects it controls.

This is the third win for the employers group, which won ballot measures in two San Diego County municipalities before convincing the Board of Supervisors to put the measure on a county-wide ballot.

The unions struggled to convince voters of their case. After sinking a half-million dollars trying to defeat the measure in Chula Vista in June, the San Diego Labor Council decided not to spend money to fight the county-wide ban, although it raised a lot of media attention and spoke loudly against its passage.

“When workers are protected… when we give health care to workers, all of us are made better,” Council Secretary-Treasurer Lorena Gonzalez said after the vote. “The contractors are going to continue to fight that because it means less profit for them, and that’s all they care about.”

TAXPAYER REVOLT

Although their goal is to get access to public money, anti-union contractors are using the same “taxpayer revolt” arguments against union construction workers that have been used against teachers and other public employees.

The contractors claim they are watching out for taxpayer dollars and that PLAs drive up costs. One study of schools in Massachusetts claimed that projects governed by PLAs cost 14 to 17 percent more. But projects governed by PLAs are likely to be more complicated, and therefore more expensive. A high school science lab costs more to build per square foot than an elementary school classroom, no matter who is building it.

Additional studies which took these factors into account found that PLAs didn’t drive up costs. Experts say the work is more efficient and jurisdictional fights don’t hold up construction.

Still, the claim appears plausible to many since wages are certainly higher than they would be if bottom-feeding non-union contractors got the work.

ABC has also attacked PLAs by creating stories to feed to the press. The AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department alerted local leaders to one such case November 10.

According to the AFL-CIO, the contractors group paid for an audit that found alleged violations of labor law by union contractors involved in a PLA for the Los Angeles school district. Then the group promoted the audit as an impartial revelation of wrongdoing. The department warned union officers to watch out for similar tactics in their areas.

GREATER NEEDS

Anti-PLA efforts are a pain in the side for construction trade unions. But preserving PLAs will not fix the main issues, said David Minasian, a union carpenter in Worcester, Massachusetts.

His local feels most intensely the incredible rate of construction worker unemployment, 17.3 percent nationwide and 25 percent in his local. “We need reauthorization of unemployment benefits and we need a big round of infrastructure spending,” he said.

The Laborers union echoes that sentiment, pointing to the crying need for public construction dollars and pushing for a surface transportation bill that’s been stalled in Congress.

To gin up support, Laborers billboards in Pennsylvania warn drivers about the condition of the bridge they’re about to cross, with alarming pictures of crumbling concrete. According to the union, 5,646 bridges in Pennsylvania are “structurally deficient.”

Under the new Congress, the bill faces an uphill battle.

Non-union construction contractors are joining the taxpayer revolt at their own peril. If the anti-tax furor gains ground and publicly funded projects dry up, there won’t be much work for anyone anytime soon.

In Iowa, Lockout Continues for Roquette America Workers

By Akito Yoshikane 

Working In These Times, Dec. 8, 2010

More than 240 union workers for Roquette America in southeastern Iowa have been locked out of their jobs since September after they rejected a concession-heavy contract that they say undermines their collective bargaining agreement.

The two sides are at a stalemate over wages and benefits at the company’s corn milling facility located in Keokuk, a small city of about 11,000 that borders Illinois and Missouri. The company has since hired replacement workers; some of the long-time union employees are now relying onunemployment benefits as negotiations continue to stall amid accusations ofunion busting.

Roquette America, a subsidiary of Roquette Frères in France, produces corn starches, syrups and starch derivatives. The employees are represented byLocal 48G of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union of America, an AFL-CIO affiliate.

Negotiations for a new contract began in August and formal talks began in mid-September. The union says the conflict arose when Roquette hired outside parties and brought more than 130 proposals that essentially “gutted” the collective bargaining agreement.

The two major points of contention are changes to the health insurance and use of temporary workers. According to the labor group, Roquette wants more management rights, including the ability implement seniority-based layoffs. For the current employees, Roquette wants to freeze wages, change retirement benefits and increase worker contributions to healthcare. The company also wants authority to hire temporary workers without benefits. That suggests a proposal for a two-tier employee model, a trend that is growing across the country

Local 48 G rejected the proposals in late September, leading to the lockout as the company brought in more than 60 replacement workers. The two sides have met 18 times in recent months and a federal mediator has been involved in negotiations.

The company has said that the industry has become more competitive compared to four years ago when the last contract was signed. Roquette America president and CEO Dominique Taret explained the reasons for why the company is asking for concessions.

“Uncertain economic conditions, increasing regional and international competition, changing market demands and more strict governmental regulations require businesses to adapt quickly and perform better in order to be competitive,” he wrote in a statement.

In a second open letter to the community last Friday, Taret focused on six core goals to improve their facilities. He writes:

The Company’s contract proposal focuses on six core goals to improve plant operations; achieve greater workforce stability; improve competency development; enhance job performance and accountability; increase workforce flexibility; and compensation system stability.  These labor proposals attempt to balance the needs of our employees and protect their interests while seeking changes that will allow us to accomplish these six critical goals.

It’s unclear whether Roquette is profiting, but the global company has received local funding. The company announced in June plans to for a $27 million remodeling project, receiving $2.5 million in tax benefits. The union estimates Roquette has received $4.5 million from the city and state.

While the company plans to modernize the facility, the concessions come at a hard time for the local community. Keokuk, located in Lee County, is part of an area that has one the highest unemployment rates in Iowa. Since negotiations began in August, the jobless figure increased from 10.7 percent to 10.9 in October, according to Iowa Workforce Development. Lee County is currently the only county in Iowa with jobless figures in the double digits.

The local mayor has not taken sides but has urged an end to the lockout. Meanwhile the French union representing Roquette employees in France sent a letter of support. And solidarity marches with local labor groups have continued in Keokuk.

Both sides have continued to express a desire to reach an agreement. Three more bargaining sessions are reportedly scheduled in the coming weeks.

Social Security Facts Vs Fog

By Dave Johnson

Campaign for America's Future

November 24, 2010 - 3:47pm ET

ALSO WORTH READING

Two Graphs that Every American Worker Should See

by Daniel Marans | November 23, 2010

Sins of Commissions: What $1 Billion Can't Buy

by OurFuture.org Staff | November 23, 2010

The Shock Doctrine Push To Gut Social Security and Middle Class

by Dave Johnson | November 22, 2010

Conservative just hate Social Security. The Social Security program is an example of government at its best. It demonstrates We, the People taking care of and watching out for each other. It works, it is efficient and effective, and people love it. For their war against government to work conservatives have to find a way to undermine Social Security.

Conservatives have been at war with Social Security since its inception. They call it a "Ponzi scheme." They claim that it is "going broke." They claim that people live longer so we should increase the retirement age... They claim a lot of things. The question is, are any of them true? Or is each just one more area where conservatives are trying to throw up a smokescreen to mask their real intentions? (because it's what they do.)

How much of what we hear about Social Security are facts, and how much is just fog?

One thing that most people do not know is that conservatives have been following an actual plan, a step-by-step strategy to get rid of Social Security, that was laid out a couple of decades a go. A 1983 Cato Institute Journal document, "Achieving a Leninist Strategy" by Stuart Butler of the Cato Institute and Peter Germanis of The Heritage Foundation lays it out for us. The document is still available at Cato, and select quotes are available at Plotting Privatization? from Z Magazine. It is worth reading the entire document (in particular the section "Weakening the Opposition") to understand completely the strategy that has been unfolding in the years since, but the following quotes give you an idea:

"Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent upon ... its success in isolating and weakening its opponents. ... we would do well to draw a few lessons from the Leninist strategy."

" construct ... a coalition that will ... reap benefits from the IRA-based private system ... but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public."

"The first element consists of a campaign to achieve small legislative changes that embellish the present IRA system, making it in practice a small-scale private Social Security system.

"The second main element ... involves what one might crudely call guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it."

"The banking industry and other business groups that can benefit from expanded IRAs ..." "... the strategy must be to propose moving to a private Social Security system in such a way as to ... neutralize ... the coalition that supports the existing system."

"The next Social Security crisis may be further away than many people believe. ... it could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible. But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform."

So there you have it. This shows how many of the arguments are just fog, not fact. And it shows how private interests intend to "reap benefits" from getting rid of Social Security: namely, they get a lot of the money instead of the retirees.

This time the attack is riding piggyback on concerns about budget deficits. First there was a big bruhaha about deficits, then the answer is offered: cut Social Security's benefits. But Social Security is not allowed to borrow by law, so it cannot contribute to deficits. In fact, since the 1983 changes in the program Social Security has run surpluses, not deficits, and has built up a huge trust fund! Social Security won't run short until possibly 2037, and even then can pay most of its benefits with no changes. (Compare that to the military budget, which has to borrow hundreds of billions every single year.)

Last time it was President George W Bush attacking the program. Remember? Social Security was supposed to be "in crisis" and needed to be "privatized." The fog machine was trying to convince us to put the money into the stock market. But progressives rallied, saved the program, and now it is years later and the program is fine. Imagine where we would be if the program had been put into stocks!

Other times the fog machine has told us that Social Security "has a lower return" than putting the money into other investments, even though it is more than just retirement funds and also provides disability payments and other benefits. Or that there aren't as many workers per retiree as there used to be, even though that is not how the program works. Or that people live longer, even though that is mostly because fewer babies die. (The program was designed for increasing longevity and the 1983 changes accounted for any differences.) There is always a new attack.

Whatever the current attack might be, keep in mind that it is just one more attack. Instead of spending all your time trying to refute each lie while they throw up a dozen more, remember that they hate Social Security and they just lie. Of course, there is a risk that each time Social Security is attacked more of the public will get the idea that something must be wrong with the program, when there isn't. Keeping in mind that there is a corporate/conservative strategy at work to undermine the program helps to fight off the fog.

For politicians, Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson of the Strengthen Social Security coalition have a warning. In an LA Times op-ed the other day, Touching the 'third rail', they wrote,

For all the talk of polarization, the American people are clear and united about Social Security. A recent poll of those who voted in the midterm election found that 67% of respondents opposed cuts in benefits; 69% opposed raising the Social Security retirement age to 69. Respondents were also clear about what steps should be taken to address a looming shortfall. Some 66% of those polled favored doing away with the current cap on payroll taxes to fund Social Security. Currently, taxpayers are taxed only on their first $106,800 in income. Simply requiring upper-income taxpayers to pay the tax on all their income would bring in enough revenue to allow benefits to be raised across the board and still have the program in balance for at least the next 75 years.

. . . The message of the midterm election is that the American people are fed up with Washington elites who don't seem to listen. Despite the clear view of the American people, the elites in Washington seem to think it would be better to reduce benefits than to require the wealthy to pay the same percentage of their salaries into Social Security as everyone else does.

If politicians choose to cut Social Security benefits, when they could simply scrap the cap, we predict that this midterm will seem like a walk in the park compared to what awaits them in 2012.

Take Action

Don't mess with Social Security! November 30 is national Call Congress day, to say HANDS OFF SOCIAL SECURITY! Click the link to learn more.

Also, sign this petition from Campaign for America's Future and CREDO Action, Tell Obama: Reject Social Security Cuts

(This post originally appeared at Open Left. Also see Angry Bear: BW on Soc Sec V: What does Lenin have to do with this?)

Scapegoating Federal Workers

Here comes the next right wing attacks on unions. PAUL WALDMAN | November 16, 2010  As conservative deficit hawks go looking for new targets, expect to hear a lot about outsized federal paychecks.

(AP Photo/Keith Srakocic) In late 2008, as the government began debating whether to save General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy, conservatives saw an opportunity to open a new front in their decades-long war on labor unions. So a new talking point emerged, repeated first by representatives of conservative think tanks, then by conservative talk-show hosts and columnists, then by Republican members of Congress. The Big Three auto companies had been crippled, they said, by greedy United Auto Workers members whose absurd union contracts had them making an astonishing $70 per hour on average.You won't be surprised to learn that the figure was utterly bogus -- the average pay of an auto factory worker at the time was actually around $28 an hour, or a decidedly middle-class salary of $58,000 a year. But even as a little-remembered component of a short-lived debate, it is a good case study in why the right is so effective. An idea like the mythical $70-an-hour autoworker can be created out of whole cloth, then quickly move through the conservative media and be adopted by opinion leaders at all levels. The left has neither an equivalent media structure nor the same willingness to grab talking points and stick to them so assiduously. I bring up this story because something similar is beginning to happen -- another assault on unions, presented as something else entirely. Only this time, it isn't about bailouts, and autoworkers aren't the targets. The ostensible subject is the budget deficit, and the target is federal workers. And once again, the right is centering its assault on unionized workers around a tendentious, misleading figure: $120,000 a year. In the next few months, you'll be hearing a lot of conservatives railing against greedy government employees. The key to bringing down the deficit, they'll say, is firing federal workers and slashing the pay of the ones who remain. The unions that represent public employees, they'll say, are what's holding back the American economy. You'll be hearing Republican members of Congress say it, you'll be hearing conservative talk-show hosts say it, and you'll be reading it on the op-ed pages of your newspaper. You're going to hear this a lot: "Federal workers make an average of $120,000 a year, twice as much as workers in the private sector!" Before long, ostensibly neutral journalists will start asking questions like, "Shouldn't we rein in the power of the public-employee unions? Isn't it time to cut the pay of federal workers?" To answer the obvious question: No, people working for the federal government don't make an average of $120,000 a year, and no, they don't make twice as much as private-sector workers. They do make more, however (we'll get to why in a moment). According to recent data, federal workers make an average of $81,258, compared to an average of $50,462 in the private sector. So where does the $120,000 figure come from? It's salary, plus the value of health insurance, plus the value of other benefits like pensions. If asked how much you made last year, would you tell me your salary, or would you total up the value of your salary plus your health-care benefits, plus your employer's 401K contributions? Of course you would do the former -- chances are you don't even know the value of the latter. When conservatives claim that the average government employee "makes" $120,000, they're counting on people hearing that number as salary, the better to convince them that government employees are sucking taxpayers dry. It is true, however, that federal workers make more on average than private-sector workers, even though their salaries are nothing like what conservatives want people to believe. Why might that be? The answer is two-part. First, as a group, federal workers tend to be in higher-paying occupations than private-sector workers. For instance, 10 percent of the private workforceworks in sales, and another 20 percent in service, occupations that make up only a tiny proportion of the federal workforce. On the other side, two-thirds of federal workers are classified as management or professional -- managers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers -- compared to less than a third of the private workforce. Moreover, in recent years, many of the lower-paying jobs government employees used to do, in areas like maintenance and food service, have been farmed out to contractors. The government is still paying for that work, but the people who do it don't show up on the tally of federal salaries. When you compare government workers not to the entire population but those doing similar work, you find that in some occupations, federal workers make slightly more, and in other occupations, they make slightly less. Overall, though, salaries for comparable jobs are very close. Just as important, government workers at all levels -- not just federal but state and local as well -- tend to be better educated, more skilled, and slightly older than private-sector workers. A real disparity, however, exists between federal workers and private-sector workers, and that's in benefits. This brings us to the second part of the answer to the question of why federal workers do better: Many of them are represented by unions, which means they can bargain collectively for things like good wages and health benefits. Conservatives believe that when a group of workers makes reasonable middle-class salaries and has good benefits, something is amiss. The typical private-sector wage/benefit package is assumed to be the right one. But while we can disagree about what government should be doing, we ought to be able to agree that we want government to do the things it does as well as possible. To ensure that, we need to recruit and retain quality workers. We don't have to pay them millions, but we have to pay them enough to make working for the government an attractive option. Finally, a bit of context: The number of government workers is declining. One of the consequences of the recession is that cash-strapped state and local governments have been shedding jobs; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employment in local government, excluding education ... has fallen by 123,000 over the past 12 months." The federal workforce is also much smaller than it once was. When John F. Kennedy was president, there were 13.3 federal workers for every 1,000 Americans. The number today is 8.4 federal workers per 1,000 Americans. In the coming months, when you hear conservatives complaining about inflated salaries among federal employees -- and you will -- remember two important things. First, the numbers they're using are either misleading or outright false. Second, and more important, this isn't about reducing the budget deficit; it's about attacking unions. For the last few decades, conservatives have waged a war on unions, one that has been largely successful. In the 1950s, a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today, only 7.2 percent of the private-sector workforce is unionized. Government is the last substantially unionized sector in the American economy, a place where people who do the public's work can get a good salary, good benefits, and job security. And that's the real reason they've become the right's latest target.

After Loss, Flight Attendants Challenge Delta’s Anti-Union Tactics, Both Old and New

This is a good update on the situation our brothers and sisters at Delta are struggling with as they try to win union representation.

By David Moberg

Nov. 10, 2010

Airline conducted 'largest anti-union campaign the nation has ever seen,' AFA president says

Rebounding from a narrow loss of a vote to represent 20,000 flight attendants at Delta Air Lines, the Association of Flight Attendants/Communications Workers of America (AFA/CWA) is preparing a challenge to the results and requesting that the election be re-run.                                      

In the protest to be filed on Nov. 23, the union accuses the airline of using a mix of old-school intimidation tactics and chilling new information-age surveillance to unlawfully interfere with workers’ decisions about whether to join a union.

The challenge is important in part because it could influence conditions for organizing at a time when many unions think recent rule changes might open up a wave of recruitment. The industry is 40 percent unionized, but offers many opportunities for new organizing. 

Last summer, the National Mediation Board (NMB), which administers the Railway Labor Act that governs airline labor relations, dropped the old union representation election rule that required a majority of all workers at a worksite to vote for a union for it to be recognized. They changed it to follow the standard set by the National Labor Relations Act, which grants recognition to a union when a majority of ballots are cast for a union.

In many cases, an overwhelming majority of airline workers have voted for a union, but because non-voters were counted as “no” votes, workers ended up with less than half of all employees and no union. That happened in 2008, when AFA won a hefty majority of the votes cast at Delta, just before it merged with Northwest Airlines to form the nation’s second largest airline (just behind United, following its acquisition of Continental).

But it got votes from only about 40 percent of all workers, partly because Delta–whose pilots are the only organized part of the workforce–ran a strong anti-union campaign, including discouraging voting. AFA also lost a drive at Delta in 2002.

Flight attendants at Delta were the first to vote under the new rules, but the union still lost when ballots were counted on Nov. 4, with 9,216 workers favoring a union (8,778 picking AFA) and 9,544 voting for no union.  “In the face of the largest anti-union campaign the nation has ever seen, Delta flight attendants came within 328 votes of getting a union,” AFA president Pat Friend said. Increasing the heartbreak, the vote also effectively eliminated the union former Northwest workers had formed decades ago.

Why defeat?

The union blamed an intimidating, overwhelming barrage of anti-union messages–starting with billboards in employee parking lots, continuing with aggressively anti-union supervisors, one-on-one meeting with managers, forced anti-union meetings, weekly robo-calls from CEO Richard Anderson (who said the union’s actions were “not Christian”), pop-up messages on  corporate computers, multiple slick mailings to homes, and much more. 

Unlike past elections, Delta harangued workers that “you must vote.” And managers made it clear the vote should be “no” to preserve Delta’s “direct” relationship between management–which permitted direct cuts in jobs, hours, pay and benefits when times were especially bad for airlines in the ‘90s–without bargaining by a “third party,” the union.

The turnout was an amazing 94 percent. AFA general counsel Ed Gilmartin says the union would have won with a 90 percent turnout. AFA already represented more than 7,000 Northwest flight attendants, 80 per cent of whom voted for a union, but its support among Delta flight attendants–who typically had little contact with more pro-union Northwest attendants–dropped slightly from two years ago. One startling coincidence–or indicator of either rigorous organizer diligence or some deeper problem with the voting: AFA’s vote tracking had identified 8,778 pro-AFA votes–precisely the number the NMB counted.

Did Delta simply out-organize the AFA? “I’d agree if you believe Delta followed the rules,” Gilmartin says, “but they didn’t.”

In its challenge to the election, AFA targets in particular the company’s encouragement of voting on Delta’s own computers, where employees sign on with special passwords. That made it possible for Delta to track who went to the NMB website to vote and to monitor how people voted, the union says.

Gilmartin says that without a full investigation the union has no evidence of how far surveillance might have gone, but employees’ recognition that managers might be able to see whether or how they voted is overwhelming in its own right. “At a minimum it was intimidation,” he says, “and at most they were tracking and conducting surveillance.”

Oddly enough, back when the old election rules were in place and Delta was trying to discourage voting, the company and its expert witness argued against the NMB allowing voting on its website or the union e-mailing a link to that website (both very unlikely to be open to surveillance, compared to company computers with unique employee passwords linked to comprehensive files).

Delta and its expert testified in 2009 about precisely the threat the union now identifies, according to an NMB summary:

Delta urges the Board to deny AFA's request to permit hyperlinks because of the “unacceptable risks that a hyperlink would pose to the security, integrity, and privacy of the balloting process in representation elections under the Railway Labor Act.” ....

Delta provided a declaration from an expert in computer technology and security, Christopher Racich. Racich identifies a number of security issues with allowing participants to post a hyperlink. “If a visitor to a website were to type in a password, or otherwise provide identifiable information, and then thereafter click on a hyperlink to the Board‟s website, it would be possible for the website operator to determine who had done so – matching the password to the activity.”

The union still supports Internet voting, but not through employer computers, especially when employees use distinct passwords.

Machinists union pushes to unionize another Delta force

It is not unusual for the NMB to call for new elections, for example, in the case of FedEx pilots, when there is evidence of employers “overwhelming” the election process and failing to provide the “laboratory conditions” the NMB requires. And now, despite heavy right-wing Republican pressure, the NMB with Obama appointments tilts more toward supporting worker rights than it did in the Bush years. But a test similar to the AFA challenge at Delta may occur before the Board even begins reviewing the flight attendants’ case.

Voting has just begun among three units of Delta workers: 14,000 ramp, baggage and other fleet service workers; 16,000 ticketing, gate, reservation and other public contact workers; and about 700 “stores” workers. The International Association of Machinists represents all three groups from Northwest. They make up slightly less than half the merged workforce, but historically unionized workers are largely separate from nonunion workers who had been at Delta.

In these elections, the NMB sends instructions by mail to each worker, who can use her two identification numbers to vote by telephone or the Internet. Delta once again is encouraging voting from company computer terminals, but the impact on the results may be less than with flight attendants, who are more likely to log on to company terminals at the start of each work day. But the security and surveillance issues remain.

Together, the Delta elections constitute one of the biggest private sector union representation votes in decades. It’s a challenge for the Machinists, who have not been an organizing powerhouse recently, but the union has campaigned from the bottom (face-to-face meetings of organizers and workers, workplace committees and social network mobilization) to the top (radio and TV advertising and union leader fly-arounds to key hub cities).

Delta is mounting the same kind of “aggressive anti-union campaign” against these workers as it did against pro-union flight attendants, says Machinist spokesperson Rick Sloan.”We’re seeing standard anti-union campaigning,” supplemented by Delta computer terminals where workers log on for their work.

Within the next year or so, the merger of United and Continental will lead to new elections involving the Machinists for ramp workers, public contact workers and flight attendants. But for ramp workers and attendants, different unions from the pre-merger airlines will square off. Organizing is also underway at other airlines, including American.

Despite the loss at Delta, the new NMB election rules are clearly more fair and provide an opening for more union successes (such as recently at Piedmont).  But as long as management has such a free hand, from disseminating an overwhelming message to creating the specter–perhaps the reality–of surveillance, union representation elections will be at best an uphill battle for workers and at worst a fraud distorted by economic coercion.

Flight Attendants Lose at Delta

More bad news.  Let's hope they get a re-vote.  Also, be sure to read to the end - there is good news here also.

Labor Notes by Jenny Brown, 11/4/10

Delta flight attendants in New York gathered in disbelief yesterday to hear the bad news about their month-long union election.

“Don’t slit your wrists, but we lost,” announced flight attendant Matthew Brown, reading from his phone as the returns were released by the National Mediation Board in Washington, D.C.

The vote was 9,216 for representation to 9,544 against, a 328-vote margin.

Slightly fewer than 20,000 flight attendants were eligible to vote. Of those, about 7,000 were members of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) at Northwest Airlines before the airline was merged into Delta in 2008. They had retained their previous contract after the merger took effect but stood to lose it if the union was voted down.

“As of midnight, our contract is null and void,” said a New York-based flight attendant who’d worked for Northwest. Northwest attendants worried aloud that their new status as at-will employees will mean firings of the most outspoken workers. “They’ll pick us off one by one,” said an angry activist. Managers at the former Northwest hub in Minneapolis told flight attendants to take off their AFA pins.

Brian Terrell, who worked for Northwest for 30 years, described the results as “frightening—this is the end of an era of job protections for us.” Northwest flight attendants have been unionized for 63 years.

But others who’d always worked for Delta also felt the loss sharply.

“I’ve been losing—I’ve experienced a 50 percent loss in compensation,” said Andrea Taylor, referring to the decline in pay and benefits at Delta over the last 15 years. She said the company won’t even tell her what her retirement benefit will be.

AFA activist Danny Valdez said a 5 percent raise this year brought him back to the pay scale of a five-year flight attendant—in 2002. He’s worked at Delta for 30 years.

Airline workers across the industry have faced concessions and employer bankruptcies over the last 15 years, intensifying after 9/11. Unions have been hard pressed to protect workers from longer hours, lower pay, and stingier benefits.

INTERFERENCE, BRIBES, INTIMIDATION

Union supporters expressed disbelief at the reported election turnout, which seemed high by any standard. Of 19,887 flight attendants eligible to vote, 18,760 did so, a turnout of 94 percent.

AFA charges that Delta managers urged flight attendants to vote from work computers in their staff rooms, meaning that votes could be tracked by the employer. The union also charged that its supporters were intimidated.

Valdez thought the high voter turnout was a product of management’s fear-based campaign. The union estimates Delta spent $40 million to fend off AFA.

Delta managers put forth a wall-to-wall anti-union message, Valdez said, “calling you at home, pulling you aside at work.” Piles of glossy mailers with misquotes and misinformation filled up mailboxes.

Delta CEO Richard Anderson played up a culture clash between Northwest’s Northern base and Delta’s Southern workforce, attacking AFA in one company-called meeting for being “un-Christian” and “immoral.” A DVD of the meeting was sent to every flight attendant, Valdez said.

Patricia Friend, AFA’s president, said the union will submit interference charges against Delta management for its “illegal and unfair methods to sway the vote.” The National Mediation Board can order a re-vote if it finds there was interference.

The NMB did order a re-vote in August for a small Delta unit, 91 flight simulator technicians. The board found that management had unduly influenced the election by promising raises.

According to the Machinists (IAM), the NMB described the timing of Delta’s raise announcement as “troubling” because it was made just as technicians started their union vote. The NMB also found that Delta tried to influence the technicians’ votes in one-on-one meetings with managers.

Delta also promised pay raises to flight attendants that coincided with the start of their vote.

In happier news, gate and ramp workers at Piedmont Airlines voted in the CWA today. According to the union, the margin of victory was nearly two to one, despite a high-pressure campaign run by a notorious union-busting firm. The union will represent 2,900 workers at Piedmont, a subsidiary of U.S. Airways.

In New York, pro-union flight attendants at Delta vowed to fight on, anticipating that the union will agitate for a re-vote. It would be the fourth since 2002, although only this month’s election was decided by a simple majority of votes cast.

Previous NMB rules, thrown out earlier this year after President Obama made a new appointment to the board, said a majority of all employees must vote in favor of the union—and that every abstainer is counted as a “no.”

While the union waits for the NMB to rule on management’s interference at Delta, those who had a contract will lose its protection.

“Unfortunately, now you’re going to find out what it’s like to work for Delta,” a pre-merger Delta flight attendant told a co-worker who had come from Northwest.

Following closely on the AFA vote, more than 30,000 ramp and cargo workers and customer service agents are voting on representation with the IAM. Results will be reported by early December.