By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com
A long time ago I served as a negotiator for a union that had a no-strike clause and no binding arbitration. Here’s how much power we had:
None.
Predictions of greater labor muscle based on Gov. Bill Ritter’s recent executive order allowing state workers to join no-strike, no-arbitration unions strikes me as a joke.
The people invoking images of “labor bosses” peddle paranoia. But union officials who think they will suddenly be able to sign up tens of thousands of new dues-paying members may be equally deluded.
A week has passed since the Democratic governor issued his order. Charges have flown from Republican rivals. No one has yet signed up for a union, said Ritter’s press secretary Evan Dreyer.
Sure, it’s early in the process. But this process will always have more to do with politics than economics.
Unions depend on two things to succeed, said
Having read Ritter’s executive order, Zax is betting no on both counts.
The “duty to bargain” on the part of management is unclear, Zax said. The state may have to talk to workers’ representatives. But that’s about all. Whatever management agrees to “can’t interfere with budgeting procedures,” said Zax. Meanwhile, the governor can nix any agreement negotiators make.
“There is,” said Zax, “no recourse to court and no binding arbitration.”
Add to that no way to compel workers to pay union dues and what you have is “nearly as bad as a right to work law,” according to Zax.
That means plenty of “free riders” taking advantage of collective bargaining without paying for it. “There is a very meager opportunity for unions to get paid for what they’re doing,” Zax explained.
Even guys like Metro State College Business School Dean John Cochran, who thinks the union order is bad for business, predict very little short-term financial fallout.
“The overall impact is relatively limited for both sides,” Cochran explained. “It was as easy a move as (Ritter) could make to provide a dog biscuit to labor, not a whole meal.”
The fact that Ritter’s business supporters felt like they got a “bite in the back” is more symbolic than economic, Cochran added.
The short term damage to Ritter will not come from taxpayers picking up the tab for higher wages and better benefits for state workers based on union negotiations. The damage comes from splintering the business-labor coalition that got the governor elected in the first place. He will need that coalition to push through a 2008 ballot measure to pay for such things as health care reform, higher education and transportation.
“He promised everything to everybody,” Cochran said.
Not quite.
What Ritter didn’t promise to employees who choose to pay dues for union representation is a way to compel any action on the part of the government. Without the right to strike or to have binding arbitration of disagreements, the state continues to call the shots. The bottom line in any impasse is take it or leave it.
Sure, the union can throw up informational picket lines. I did that. We demonstrated every day at lunch for weeks. We held neat signs and chanted cool slogans. Nothing happened.
Eventually, after I left, management unilaterally refused to renew the union contract.
That gets us back to politics.
The union question may not play as prominently in any new revenue initiative as Ritter’s opponents hope.
Republican oil man Bruce Benson is mad with Ritter for badmouthing Benson’s pal and Ritter’s predecessor, Bill Owens, in explaining why the union order was needed. Benson is nobody’s idea of a “toady” for union leaders, as the Denver Post described the governor in a front-page editorial. Benson almost certainly won’t be voting for Democrats in 2008 or for Ritter if Ritter stands for reelection in 2010.
But Benson, who teamed with Owens and Democrats to pass a temporary suspension of tax restrictions in 2005, is pragmatic and possibly representative of the business community when he talks about new money measures. He just helped
Benson doesn’t care about unions as much as he cares about finding workable solutions for
That’s how he will look at whatever revenue initiative the governor puts on the 2008 ballot.
“It’s going to depend on what (Ritter) comes up with,” Benson said. “It’s not going to have to do with what he does with labor. If I think it is good public policy, I’ll support it. If not, I’ll walk away.”
The Republicans think Ritter has delivered them an issue that, along with a freeze on lowering property tax rates in certain school districts, gives them a tax-and-spend liberal label for the Democratic governor.
The governor relies on his overwhelming popularity and his reputation as a moderate consensus builder to convince folks that in recognizing unions and proposing a new revenue source he’s doing what must be done to build a better state.
That, said Cochran, is why you hear Ritter talk about a “moral budget.”
The framing of both arguments will determine Ritter’s success in the balance of his first term.
Meanwhile, Cochran noted a principle of politics that could rule even though the union recognition piece has about as much bite as a paper tiger.
“Change is OK with people,” the professor said, “as long as the tax burden goes on someone else.”
On the other hand, countered Zax, this “brouhaha is stupid.”
“All I’ve heard on both sides are expression of faith, rather than reason.”
Copyright 2007 by Jim Spencer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
2 users commented in " Governor’s Union Order Produces More Politics Than Power "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIt is nice to have faith in a governor. Ritter is a wonderful, moderate, governor.If Beaucamp runs again against Ritter in the next election, Ritter has a lock on it. Ritter’s predecessor ran a bare-bones government and axed way too many important things.(Remember when Owens emptied out (into the street)a treatment center in the Springs for severely emotionally disturbed young people?)But Owens gave his departing appointees big bucks out of our pockets.
So Benson’s bucks were behind the barrage of literature we got re the mayor’s new taxes, and nothing from the “con” side!
(Does he even live in Denver?)
I felt our neighbors to the south should ante up for the cultural facility, I imagine they use it them more than I do.
But, to borrow one of Dennis’ words, the “idiots” voted for everything, no matter how vaguely worded.One sentence had 13 lines…
Add that tax to the $38 that was already to be added and we get to cough another $100 next spring. All at once for seniors without mortgages.
Sigh.
Having just returned from St. Louis, which is hardly a bastion of left-wing radicalism, and with a son who lives in Minneapolis, a thriving city where a union endorsement at election time is widely regarded as an advantage, the Post’s hysterical (in several senses of the word) front-page editorial and the continuing fallout from a very timid executive order on the part of the Governor continues to have me shaking my head.
Like Jim Spencer, I was also part of a “union” that had no power, no ability to enforce its decisions, and no real to-the-wall bargaining influence. We had a lot of free-riders, most of them Republicans, who were happy to take the pay and professional provisions we negotiated for them, mistakenly thinking that they’d have been able to get them for themselves individually if they’d bothered to bargain with the bosses.
They were wrong then, just as Colorado’s right-of-center drum-beaters are wrong now.
It’s sad to see the pitiful state of unions in both Colorado and the country. Even sadder is that so many believe unions to be somehow responsible for immense greed on the part of corporate America. Capitalism is the best wealth-generating system humans have been able to devise so far, but its benefits are not distributed equitably, and all unions do is try to tilt that imbalance a little bit toward the people who make the prosperity possible. That the reaction here to Ritter’s order is so over-the-top says a lot about the anti-worker prejudices too often prevalent in this state.
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