DELAWARE WATCH
Bad bill. Bad, bad bill.
Welcome to New New Jersey.
Maybe now the state employees can automatically double their pay every 10 years, too, like their brethren in New Castle County.
Yea, maybe, we should save our tax dollars to give them to corporations like Playtex which went ahead and laid off employees anyhow or give more free land worth $10.7 million, $8 million in cash, and $70 million in road improvements like we did for Astra Zeneca.
After all, we all know that the state treasury should exist for the benefit of fattening already fat corporate elites and not making the lives of the middle class and the working poor better.
http://delawarewatch.blogspot.co...earch?
q=Playtex
So two wrongs make a right?
"So two wrongs make a right?"
If it is a wrong to give underpaid state workers a place at the bargaining table in determining their wages (which it isn't), then let's allow the state workers enjoy the wrong for the next 20 plus years just like the big corps in DE have enjoyed their wrong for the last 20 plus years. Lets correct the corporate welfare wrong first.
That sounds fair to me.
Collective Bargaining is a double edge sword at times.
Bad bill. Bad, bad bill.
Comment rescue from FSP:
Here’s what one labor lawyer told me:
I have just read the proposed Legislation as it would amend Title 19. I think procedurally this will be a disaster for the State. As I read the Legislation, Section 1311(a) will create collective bargaining in the State service and it will obliterate existing bargaining units which basically are bargaining units which are defined within the agency in which the employees work. For example, the Department of Transportation may have bargaining agreements with AFSCME covering its blue collar employees as well as a bargaining agreement covering its white collar employees. Now, there will be one statewide employee group which will recognize blue collar and service classes such as mechanics, highway, building and natural resource maintenance, skilled craft, equipment operators, toll collectors, food service, custodial, laundry, laborers, security officers, and similar classes. Consequently, you will have food service employees, which are basically unskilled employees, in the same unit as skilled craft operators notwithstanding that they don’t even work within the same cabinet departments. This goes on for 12 different bargaining units.
Secondly, instead of negotiating with one union, the State may be negotiating with multiple unions covering the same bargaining unit. Since the Legislature apparently did not want to disenfranchise any particular union, existing unions that represent different groups of employees that are being put into the same bargaining unit would now represent that bargaining unit proportional to the number of members that they have in a unit. Legislation requires the State bargain with the Coalition representing the employees. To bargain language issues, let alone compensation issues, with respect to groups that are in different State agencies represented by different Locals and to formulate a collective bargaining agreement that is reasonable for the State that applies across such differences is sheer madness.
This is one of the worst State bargaining bills that I have ever reviewed. The Legislature would have been far better off merely granting to the unions within existing bargaining units the ability to bargain compensation subject to the monies being appropriated by this Legislature after agreement was reached by the agency and the Union. The Governor could have retained overall control by requiring that any compensation agreements must first be approved by the Governor’s Office before they could be submitted for ratification to the rank and file. This hodgepodge legislation that has been created will not serve the interests of the Government, or its citizens and ultimately may not even serve the interests of the Union since it is likely to put employees in different agencies at odds with each other over language determination.
Commenting by HaloScan
