The Rhode Island Statehouse has been consumed of late by a dispute between management and labor. Despite the overheated rhetoric, The Public’s Radio political analyst Scott MacKay says this battle may be much ado about not all that much.
The Rhode Island House and Senate last week easily approved legislation that would keep public employee union contracts in place while a new contract is under negotiation. Lawmakers also passed a measure that would require that firefighters receive overtime for hours worked above 42 in an average week.
The legislation was strenuously opposed by the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, which represents mayors and town and city governments. Statehouse Republicans and some elements of the business community also skewered the measures that won approval from a General Assembly dominated by Democrats.
Led by the teachers unions, public employee union leaders say the continuing contract measure is needed to restore bargaining rights to what they were before 2009, when a court decision in an East Providence case scuttled the practice of keeping the status quo during contract negotiations.
Opponents of continuing contracts say it leads to higher taxes, particularly during a recession. The city and town leaders also claim the contract and firefighters overtime measures hamper attempts to deal with bloated retiree pension and health care costs.
Fighting fires is a dangerous job. As is the case with airline pilots and anesthesiologists, it’s work that carries long periods of routine, even boring, tasks interrupted by emergencies when lives are at stake. It doesn’t seem unfair to require cities and towns to keep shifts reasonable so firefighters can spend time with their families.
On the continuing contracts legislation, it doesn’t appear to be a big burden on management. It could easily be dubbed the “keep talking” bill. In labor matters, negotiation is preferable to confrontation and litigation. All this does is force both management and labor to live –while they are talking—with the terms of the deal that both sides agreed to three years earlier.
Gov. Gina Raimondo vetoed continuing contract legislation two years ago, but the indication this year is that she will allow the measure to become law. The new legislation has some minor changes from the one she vetoed, but the city and town leaders say that’s not enough.
Unless you want to bust the union, why is there a need to give management the power to stall negotiations so they can impose a one-sided deal that cuts pay and benefits for teachers and other municipal workers?
Teachers in Rhode Island aren’t allowed to strike. They also aren’t eligible for binding arbitration, which covers police and firefighter unions. Yet Rhode Islanders of a certain age will recall when teachers were as militant as Teamsters. Teacher walkouts were once an autumn ritual, as predictable as the return of football season. That doesn’t happen anymore, although teachers sometimes “work to rule” by declining to take on extra activities until they get a new contract.
Unions have been under siege for years across the nation. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it more difficult for public employees to bargain collectively in its recent Janus decision. In the private sector, years of corporate moves to the cheap labor Third World have diluted union workers clout. The result has been deep income inequality as wages have not kept pace with productivity.
In Rhode Island, teachers have decent wages and benefits, but their unions no longer have the influence they once did. In 2011, a Raimondo-led state pension changes cut benefits for teachers and other state employees.
Still, Republicans and some in the business community grouse that the public employee unions have too much Statehouse juice. It’s no secret why. Union members are active in politics in ways business leaders are not these days. Union employees knock on doors and plant lawn signs in the August heat. Few business owners get involved in politics nowadays. You are more likely to see a Republican bigwig running to the state Ethics Commission than walking a legislative district.
Republicans can do better by recruiting Assembly candidates and winning some elections. And the League of cities and towns should spend its lobbying time more productively, starting with generating support on Smith Hill for dealing with the billion-dollar legacy health and pension costs that threaten the solvency of Rhode Island communities.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon. You can also follow his political analysis at our web site at Thepublicsradio.org
