Under Article 1, Section 29 of the Missouri constitution, "...employees shall have the right to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing." How can Columbia city officials "advise against" honoring the constitutional rights of employees. Do city official want to be sued?
Columbia Missourian
By ANDREW DENNEY
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
At a Columbia City Council work session last night in which labor unions for city employees outlined grievances, city staffers advised the council against authorizing the city to enter collective bargaining agreements with the unions.
Currently, city administrators talk with public employee labor unions through the meet-and-confer process, in which unions can bring forward issues but the city is under no obligation to agree to a union’s demands. It has generally been the city’s practice to avoid entering collective bargaining agreements.
Union representatives last night made the case for binding agreements between city workers and their employers. But city staffers countered that entering into contracts with unions could compromise the city’s flexibility to contain costs — such as through wage freezes — during hard fiscal times.
Paul Prendergast, a representative of the Laborers International Union of North America Local 773, which represents employees from the city’s Public Works Department, said entering into binding contracts with labor unions would assure city employees that their bosses would hold up their end of the bargain.
“It gives the union and it gives the workers the respect and the dignity that they deserve,” Prendergast said. Among several demands, Local 773 has said the city should pay two hours’ time for a union steward to investigate complaints.
Local 773, which has changed names several times over the past few decades, had entered an agreement with the city in 1982, but a provision allows the council to alter the agreement at any time. Prendergast said the union began representing Public Works employees in 1978 during a strike of Solid Waste Division workers. He said the city had asked the union to help broker a deal and that the union has been representing Public Works employees ever since. The union also represents Boone County and University of Missouri employees.
Rick Weirich, a representative from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2, which represents employees from the city’s Water and Light Department, said the union has entered agreements with similar departments in smaller cities, such as Kirkwood and Hannibal, and that an agreement between the city and Local 2 on employee pay could help bridge a wage gap between Columbia workers and workers in those cities.
Local 2 has represented Water and Light employees since late 2010. The union has said an across-the-board 25-cent-per-hour pay raise for city employees is too small.
City Manager Mike Matthes said binding agreements can lead to hard decisions when municipal budgets go south. He said while he was an assistant city manager in Des Moines, Iowa, binding agreements between the city government and labor unions were “how we did business.” But he said because of the agreements, the Des Moines city government was forced to lay off workers in tight budget years, rather than take less-drastic measures.
City Attorney Fred Boeckmann told the labor representatives that even one-year agreements, which Local 773 has asked for, could lead the unions to ask for longer agreements in the future.
“You want one year now,” Boeckmann said. “That’s the camel’s nose in the tent.”
Matthes advised that no changes to city labor policies be made in fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1.
Reach Andrew Denney at 573-815-1719 or e-mail akdenney@columbiatribune.com.
This article was published on page A2 of the Tuesday, September 13, 2011 edition of The Columbia Daily Tribune. Click here to Subscribe.
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