Unions left out of discussion as Detroit files bankruptcy
DETROIT — Before Michigan
Gov. Rick Snyder and his hand-picked
emergency manager Kevyn D. Orr
rushed the city’s bankruptcy filing to
federal court last month, they refused to
sit down and discuss the future of the
city’s workers and retirees, AFSCME
President Lee Saunders said on “The
Bill Press Show.”
“They have not sat down and talked
with the union at all in Detroit,” Saun-
ders told the radio talk show host.
“They have refused to do so ... to talk
about how these issues can be resolved.
They have said they’ve attempted to
have these kinds of discussions. That is
a bold-faced lie.”
Orr has called for “significant cuts”
to pensions for some 21,000 retired
public employees and cuts in benefits
and likely wages for current city work-
ers. AFSCME and others have taken
state court action against the bankruptcy
filing, and Saunders says they will press
for talks. In the meantime:
“We will continue to take court ac-
tion and we will continue to try to mo-
bilize and organize our communities
and members in the city of Detroit. We
cannot run away from the fact there is a
problem there. The question is how do
you deal with this issue? How do you
fix the problem?”
Saunders also says he believes there
is a role for the federal government to
play.
“Now I’m not suggesting there be a
huge bailout, though the federal gov-
ernment did bail out Wall Street, and
they’re one of the reasons we’re in this
problem,” Saunders said.
And though a Ingham County judge
said the bankruptcy violates the state’s
constitution, once a bankruptcy filing is
made in federal court, legal experts say
it generally trumps other litigation in
state courts.
Gov. Snyder, a Republican and for-
mer corporate executive, and the Re-
publican-run Michigan Legislature
rammed through an emergency man-
ager law in the final hours of the 2012
legislative session. The law is similar to
one voters struck down a month earlier
in the November general election.
The emergency manager law re-
quires financially troubled governments
to choose from four mandatory options:
Accept an emergency manager, un-
dergo bankruptcy, enter into mediation
or join the state in a partnership known
as a consent agreement.
In March 2013, Snyder appointed
Orr as Detroit’s emergency manager,
along with a salary is $275,000 a year.
Orr is a bankruptcy attorney.
Arlene Holt-Baker leaves AFL-CIO
WASHINGTON, D.C. (PAI) —
California labor official Tefere Gebre, a
teenaged political refugee from
Ethiopia, a former member of Laborers
Local 270, and a politically savvy op-
erative from the nation’s largest state,
will succeed Arlene Holt-Baker as ex-
ecutive vice president of the national
AFL-CIO, at the federation’s conven-
tion in Los Angeles in September.
Holt-Baker announced at the AFL-
CIO Executive Council meeting on July
24 that she would step down from her
post, effective then, “because I have two
granddaughters and I want to spend
more time with them.”
Gebre is executive director of the Or-
ange County, Calif., Labor Federation.
After his immigration to the U.S. in
1987, he graduated from high school in
Los Angeles, and from college at Cal
Poly Pomona, paying
his way through a
combination of a track
scholarship and part-
time work, as a mem-
ber of Teamsters Local
396, for UPS.
Gebre is also
known for his political
savvy. Before joining the Laborers,
where he rose to be political director, he
was an aide to longtime State Assembly
Speaker Willie Brown (D).
If AFL-CIO convention delegates
ratify his selection to succeed Holt-
Baker, Gebre would be the first political
refugee from Africa to hold the execu-
tive vice president’s post.
Holt-Baker, a Texas native and
longtime Californian, came to the fed-
eration post from a long career at AF-
SCME. A veteran of the civil rights
movement, she has been heavily in-
volved in campaigning among women
and minorities to join unions — and
among unions to promote and speak for
those groups.
Symbolic of her role was the latest
event she helped chair — a July 22 Eco-
nomic Policy Institute symposium at
the AFL-CIO on the “unfinished busi-
ness” of Dr. Martin Luther King’s his-
toric 1963 March on Washington.
As Holt-Baker reminded the packed
audience, the march was for jobs and
freedom — and the jobs part gets left
out, even if it was first on the marchers’
signs.”
Orr filed for bankruptcy for the city
on July 18, citing a multi-billion-dollar
debt and a declining tax base. He said
creditors refused to accept lower pay-
ments on their notes.
The emergency manager statute
gives Orr the ability to break union con-
tracts and sell assets. Workers at the
City of Detroit are represented by AF-
SCME District 25, Fire Fighters Local
344, a police local, a Utility Workers lo-
cal, and other unions.
Bankruptcy also will allow Orr to
trash pensions for current and future
workers, as well as current retirees,
along with health insurance negotiated
in union contracts.
Emergency managers currently run
six cities and three local school districts
in Michigan.
American Federation of Teachers
President Randi Weingarten, whose
union represents the city’s teachers, ac-
cused Gov. Snyder of setting up the
bankruptcy.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “You have a
city starting to see some roots and
seedlings grow again” in economic de-
velopment and an increased tax base af-
ter decades of decay and loss “and here
you have a governor more bent on its
demise.
“As someone who grew up in New
York City in the 1970s (when the Big
Apple went broke), I put all this at the
feet of Snyder,” she said. A federal loan
guarantee, deep pay and pension cuts
New York unions agreed to and other
changes — such as the end of free tu-
ition at the City College of New York
— pulled New York out of the hole.
“The moment a governor puts a city
into bankruptcy, what does it say? That
has to be the last, last, last thing you do.
If you think I’m passionate about this,
you’re right,” Weingarten, a New York
City teacher, declared.
Off-duty firefighters hit the streets
with informational picket lines July 24,
where they talked about the impact
bankruptcy will have on their pensions,
and on response times to emergencies.
Fire Fighters Union member Dennis
Hunter, a 14-year-veteran, told the De-
troit Free Press he thought of the infor-
mational picket line after listening to
what he called “hyperbole on the
evening news” from Orr, Detroit Mayor
Dave Bing, and other politicians.
Over the last 30 years, Hunter told
the paper, the Detroit fire department
has gone from 1,800 firefighters to 830
and from 77 fire companies to 42. Fire-
related deaths rose from 30 in 1983 to
79 last year.
Orr blames mismanagement for the
city’s financial ills, but independent an-
alysts trace another, larger cause: De-
troit has been “hollowed out” for the
last 60 years, and even more so when its
economic mainstay — the car compa-
nies — fell victim to foreign competi-
tion. Its 1950 population was 1.8 mil-
lion, while its 2010 count was 750,000,
after a quarter-million-person exodus in
just the prior 10 years.
Businesses also left in droves. Resi-
dents who remained were dispropor-
tionately poor, compared to other cities.
And since Detroit depends on income
taxes instead of property taxes for rev-
enue, one analyst said at an AFL-CIO
session about civil rights, the city’s tax
receipts crashed even faster.
(Editor’s Note:Press Associates Inc.
and the AFL-CIO Now blog contributed
to this report.)
U.S. Senate expected to confirm full
slate of Obama nominees to NLRB
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions Committee voted 13 to 9 July
24 to send the nominations of Nancy
Schiffer and Kent Hirozawa for the Na-
tional Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
to the full Senate for a confirmation
vote.
The vote is expected to take place
the week of July 29-Aug. 2 (after this
issue went to press) on all five of Presi-
dent Barack Obama’s nominees to the
board. In addition to Schiffer, a former
AFL-CIO associate general counsel
who also served as an attorney in the
NLRB’s regional office in Detroit, and
Hirozawa, Obama has re-nominated
Chair Mark Pearce and two Republican
management-side labor lawyers —
Harry Johnson and Phillip Miscimarra
for NLRB seats.
The NLRB has been operating with
only three members because Republi-
PAGE 4
can senators have refused to confirm
Obama’s nominees. Two of the three
board members — Richard Griffin and
Sharon Block — are recess appoint-
ments. Their legality to serve on the
board has been challenged in federal
court by Republican senators and the
Chamber of Commerce. They claim the
Senate wasn’t in recess when Obama
named them to the board.
Obama’s efforts to appoint Griffin
and Block to full terms on the NLRB
were blocked by GOP silent filibusters.
The president finally withdrew their
nominations and replaced them with
Schiffer and Hirozawa.
The NLRB requires three members
to have a quorum. Without it, the board
cannot function. Board decisions set the
standards of labor-management rela-
tions for 85 million U.S. workers, union
and non-union, most of them in the pri-
vate sector.
Workers hurt on the job
have a right to pursue a
“third party case” in court
against a responsible party
other than their employer,
for damages not available
in workers’ compensation.
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
AUGUST 2, 2013