Last week, the SEIU claimed victory in its organizing drive, saying that it now has obtained a majority of the city employees’ signatures and is ready to begin representing them through the collective bargaining process. This is only possible because, prior to the last legislature changing the law, city employee unions (other than police and fire) were not allowed to represent the employees collectively. They could assist with individual cases, such as appeals and legal challenges, but AFSCME (the long-time employee union) couldn’t bargain collectively, no matter how many employees joined it. And needless to say, they didn’t, since it was useless.

Two things changed that: the legislature, and the SEIU breaking with the AFL-CIO over its lack of organizing activity. AFSCME found itself being displaced before they could do more than think about challenging the status quo. Now the SEIU claims it has met the threshhold (a majority of employees) and is ready to represent them at the bargaining table. “Not so fast,” say several other parties. First, AFSCME contends that the SEIU doesn’t qualify to represent anyone yet, because they only have signatures. The law requires that they actually have the employees as dues-paying members; said dues being paid through payroll deductions coming out of the employee’s paychecks. And that cannot happen until after there is a citywide election in which the employees vote whether or not they want to be represented by the SEIU.

Representative Kevin Bailey, D-Houston, long a good friend of the AFL-CIO, agrees that was the intent of the legislature. I find that logical (and unsurprising, considering the link), but I find it odd that the law does not make it clear. The city claims it is neutral in this legal dispute. And I have this bridge for sale.

Of course, such an arrangement gives the city the ability to stall for quite some time; essentially, it can hide behind a certain legal challenge from the AFSCME and then, once that’s settled, stall further claiming techincal problems or other legal issues. I predict that this will happen, and that the issue will only be settled in White’s last term of office; the delay will allow any grief caused by the union to affect the city after Mayor White has run for his last term. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it delayed until after he leaves office, but I think four years may be too much to obtain. If there is an election to determine which union represents the employees, and it is then voided by a court challenge from AFSCME or the city (which is almost certain, IMHO–strictly in the interests of following the law, of course!), organizing a new election will burn four to eight months. So it’s not impossible, just unlikely, that the situation will be unresovled during the campaign to succeed Mayor White.

And if you think the SEIU won’t pull out all the stops to elect a union-friendly mayor under those circumstances, I’ll throw in a used car with that bridge. . . .

What I find most interesting are the disputed claims over how many city employees there are and whether or not the union has obtained signatures of a majority of them. The SEIU mounted a very aggressive campaign to obtain the signatures; every week there was someone in the break room or just outside the gates waiting to discuss joining the union and getting their signatures. I got two mailers (in one day) last week, and several others over the course of the prior weeks. They claim to have obtained 5,000 signatures, delivered 11 boxes’ worth to city hall, and state this is a majority. (Oddly, AFSCME claim to have obtained 4,000 themselves, but I didn’t see their reps at any time — unless one of the people I didn’t speak to was actually theirs, not the SEIU’s.)

Both the city and AFSCME dispute that the SEIU has a majority. The city is saying it has 14,000 employees; AFSCME claims the city has 12,000. SEIU says well no, and (paraphrased) “4,000 is a majority after you subtract department heads and other high-ranking officials.” Presumeably this puts the city at around 8,500 — 9,000 employees. The fact that their numeric claims don’t match does not surprise me. The fact that the SEIU is trying to improve their numbers by selectively not counting some employees as such doesn’t surprise me. In fact, the only thing that does surpise me is that the claims are that the city has somewhere between ~9,000 and 14,000 employees.

You see, in the middle of Lanier’s term of office, we had 20,000, maybe 22,000 employees.

The city has always played cagey with this number, never releasing an exact count, and the press has been complicit (or lazy) in this game because it hasn’t requested the information under the Texas Public Information Act. Or if it has, it hasn’t bothered to inform the public. When asked, HR officials would just say “about 20,000” and leave it at that. This means that by the most optomistic numbers, the city workforce has decreased by about 30% in ten years.

No wonder you can’t get any service, crime is spiraling, and four firemen to a firetruck was a problem.

Personally, I believe the city’s numbers; 14,000 is about right. It matches our division’s drop almost perfectly; we once had over 500 employees; we now have about 350. About 30-50 of those are temps. Some are temp-to-hire, which is actually a good way to screen out the total wastes of space. But we’re barely keeping up with attrition. (In fact, the city has quietly put a “soft hiring freeze” into place–no expansion of staff allowed for the FY 2007 budget.) If how badly our work is backed up is any indication, then the rest of the city is in bad, bad shape. Outta-Town-Brown kept saying the city was going to have to tighten it’s belt and reduce services. While that effort actually started during Lanier’s last term, and sped up a lot under Brown, it has obviously continued under Mayor White. While he complained about employee disloyalty during the mass retirements, he hasn’t moved quickly (if at all) to replace their numbers. And he can’t replace their expertiese; once it’s gone, it’s gone. The new ones coming up won’t have time to learn their jobs right the way they should; they are being half-trained and thrown into the breach. I underwent six weeks of training and another two months with a mentor assigned to monitor me closely after I started work. New employees are getting about two or three weeks, tossed into the fray for a few days, then pulled back for another two weeks of training. It varies from position to position, but the average seems to be about 30 days at most; some positions get just the two weeks.

In a previous article, I said our pension is nice, but it (and the health insurance costs) are strangling the city. We can’t offer the pay, and we can’t hire the help, because every dollar we spend now means more dollars into the pension fund in the future. If anything, Mayor White has been too timid in challenging the status quo. His best bet may be to lay all the facts and numbers on the table, and use his popularity as a weapon in a go-for-broke solution; increasing the front end pay, while decreasing the long-term pension obligations.

Of course, I have this stupid blind spot; I think that well-meaning people will pick the the best solution for everyone in the long run, rather than pick a “good for me now, but bad for everyone including me in the future” solution. I have this nasty suspicion that if he tries it, both unions will fight tooth and nail (even if it means higher current pay), just because they’ll both want to look good “protecting what is due to us” just to win their battle with each other. Neither will want to be seen as cooperating with the evil Grinch stealing Christmas, even though the AFSCME will be a tacit ally of the city if things play out as I expect.

Now what could really throw a spanner in the works is something I’ll get around to covering in a future article — the unspoken elephant-in-the-room is that the city’s generosity this last summer has just added roughly 75,000 Democratic voters to the city’s mix. Voters, who judging by the government they elected back home, are not interested in what they can do for their city, but in what their city can do for them.

–Ubu Roi