More than 90 percent of the 23,000 workers at 23 CSU campuses represented by the California Faculty Association campuses have voted in favor of striking unless they receive three years of annual pay raises of 5 percent, not the 2 percent annual raises offered by the state. A rally last week in Long Beach called by the CFA was attended by more than 1,000 people, Reuters reported. The wire service’s story illustrated a seemingly united CSU faculty:

“People are suffering and hurting financially,” said Theresa Montaño, a vice president of the California Teachers Association. “Faculty members can’t pay off their debt, raise a family or buy a home.”

 

During the march, many protesters said that if faculty members don’t get the salary increase, they are ready to walk off the job. …

 

Jennifer Eagan, a president for CFA, said it’s “unfair to ask professors keep sacrificing year after year without a significant pay increase.”

Faculty seek help from union-friendly state agency

The CFA further escalated its fight with the state government on Thursday by filing an unfair labor practices allegation with the state Public Employment Relations Board. This description is from the CFA’s website:

The charge is based on language in HEERA [the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act] which requires that the CSU and CFA reach an agreement on salary before the university sends a budget request to the Legislature and governor.

 

In fact, in both 2015-16 and 2016-17 the CSU made Support Budget requests that included their plan to implement a 2 percent faculty salary increase for each year. By making a budget request prior to reaching agreement with CFA on what would be needed to offer an adequate salary pool and by arguing that they have “allocated $65.5 million for a 2 percent compensation pool for all employees,” and limiting discussion of salary to that predetermined pool, the CSU has “violated its duty to meet and confer with CFA in good faith.”

 

In his remarks to the Board of Trustees on Wednesday November 18 Kevin Wehr highlighted the problem. “What you fail to understand is that deciding what you think is fair compensation for your employees before the bargaining process even begins is not bargaining in good faith,” Wehr said. “Indeed Section 3572b HEERA of recognizes that fact and says that once we reach an agreement ‘an appropriate request for financing or budgetary funding for all state-funded employees … shall be forwarded … to the Legislature and the Governor.’ You have put the cart before the horse.”

PERB has consistently ruled in favor of local government unions challenging “bad faith” decisions by governments on changes in compensation. This time, however, the ultimate target isn’t the cities of San Jose or San Diego or the Los Angeles Unified School District — it’s Gov. Jerry Brown, who cleaned house at PERB in 2011 and removed leaders chosen by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had fought with the California Nurses Association for years.

The truth? It’s an assault on the middle class

Allowing BART employees higher salaries and benefits on their already-high compensation will only result in increasing costs and increased fares for the riders.

It’s too easy to negotiate with other people’s money, and even easier to end up giving it away.

“SACRAMENTO — The head of the Senate Transportation Committee praised Gov. Jerry Brown for preventing Bay Area transit workers from walking off the job Monday and said he is still considering legislation that would permanently take away their right to strike.

“Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) said in an interview that workers in the Bay Area have rights that few of their colleagues around the state share.

“’Of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and the Bay Area are the exception,’ he said. ‘All of the other large systems do not allow transit workers to strike.’

“DeSaulnier, who called himself ‘pro-labor and pro-transit,’ said neither labor nor management seems to want to change the current law, but the frequency of labor strife in the Bay Area Rapid Transit district has led him to look at the issue. The former Contra Costa County supervisor says that in the 22 years he’s been in elected office, workers have walked off the job or come close four times.”

Now when will minority lawmakers wake up?

The fact that affluent white Democratic lawmakers are beginning to internalize that union power isn’t always benign raises hope that California will finally have the much bigger political catharsis that it deserves: the eruption over the fact that the teachers unions which run Sacramento don’t care about struggling Latino and African-American students who make up a majority of kids at public schools.

I wrote about this last year for City Journal:

“[The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers] enforce a Sacramento status quo that holds minorities in contempt and elevates teachers’ and unions’ interests above all others.

“Consider the modus operandi of nearly every California school district. Where are the best teachers most needed? In struggling schools with impoverished, mostly black and Latino students. But thanks to union power, where are those teachers concentrated? In affluent, safe schools. The struggling schools wind up with newly hired teachers and, often, bad or troubled teachers who couldn’t make the grade at better schools but who, thanks to union rules, can’t be fired. The problem is even worse than it appears, because revenue-deprived school districts often lay off the most junior teachers to ease budget woes. Some schools lose most of their teaching corps, destroying any continuity or momentum a school in a poor neighborhood may have managed to build. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the practice led to a successful ACLU lawsuit to end the ‘last hired, first fired’ policy in poor neighborhoods.”

Speaker Perez: Is this really ‘social justice’?

Attention, John Perez: When are you going to stop siding with the CTA and the CFT over the kids in your district?

Gloria Romero — like Perez, a Los Angeles Democrat — is right: The California public schools system’s practice of giving more weight to the interests of adult employees than of students deserves to be seen as a civil-rights issue, not a political scrap. If the BART dust-up makes even a few more elected Democrats think about this bigger picture, it will be for the good of nearly all Californians. The K-12 status quo has got to go.

By Chris Reed

When San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi took on the enormous pensions that were hollowing out the city’s budget in 2011, nearly all the big name Democrats in the Bay Area wouldn’t back him up. Led by Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, they instead supported a much more modest reform that had been crafted with public employee unions’ input.

But have times changed in the most liberal chunk of California? Maybe. As John Wildermuth pointed out on Fox & Hounds Daily, the BART strike triggered fury in the Bay Area — with strikers, not management.

“Instead of local politicians joining union workers on the picket line, civic and political leaders pushing behind the scenes to have BART settle and little kids handing out cookies to the strikers, there was plenty of anger and it was all aimed at the union.

“Union leaders failed to recognize that it’s a new day in California. In the past few years, retirees have seen their nest eggs evaporate, people have been forced from their homes and workers who have been employed their entire adult lives suddenly found themselves with no job and no prospects.

“Sure, BART workers have gone four years without a raise, but that average annual salary of $50,000, $60,000 or $70,000, plus healthy benefits, sounds pretty good to people trying to raise a family on part time work or unemployment payments.

“To show just how strong the anti-union sentiment was, the day after the strike ended BART officials were forced to warn commuters not to berate, harass or threaten the workers who were back on the job.”

No longer partisan to question union members’ extreme pay, benefits and clout

That actually lowballs what BART workers make, according to the San Jose Mercury-News:

Katy Grimes: The Nov. 6 election has clearly emboldened blockheaded union leaders into thinking that they drive business. But the smarter leaders know that they are merely putting off the inevitable with their election wins, and across the board tax increases.

The inevitable insolvency facing California, and even the federal government, doesn’t make union attacks any less painful.

Keep your hands off my Twinkies

Two weeks ago Hostess Brands, the maker of Twinkies, Wonder Bread and Ding Dongs, announced that the entire company would liquidate if its striking employees don’t return to work. This would result in the loss of nearly 18,500 jobs in 33 facilities.

Thousands of Hostess employees went on strike after voting to reject a contract offer that cut wages and some benefits.

Hostess is currently already in Chapter 11, it’s second bankruptcy reorganization in 10 years. According to news reports, Hostess reports that increasing pension costs, and health care cost increases necessitate more employee contributions toward their benefits.

When the union and employees refused to return to work, Hostess permanently closed three plants as a result of the work stoppage. The company has filed a motion with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court seeking permission to close its business and sell its assets, including its iconic brands and facilities. Bakery operations have been suspended at all plants.

Supermarket not feeling so super

Raley’s Supermarkets, in Sacramento, CA, is a privately held, family-owned supermarket chain that operates all of the Raley’s, Bel Air Markets, Nob Hill Foods, and Food Source stores in Northern California and Nevada.

Raley’s is the classic American dream story. Founded in 1935 by Tom Raley in Placerville, CA, which Raley called “Raley’s Drive-In Market,” Tom Raley grew his company over the years to 85 stores, and more than 13,000 employees.

But Raley’s has been locked in a nasty battle with the United Food and Commercial Workers union over health care costs and wages. Negotiations between the company and union went on for 15 months before employees went on strike – the first strike ever in Raley’s 77 years in business.

Raley’s asked for a two-year wage freeze and the elimination of the premiums paid for employees working Sundays, nights and holidays, KGO News reported.

Raley’s spokesman John Segale said at the time that Raley’s urgently needed to cut costs in a “fiercely competitive” market. He said the Sacramento-based chain, which includes Raley’s, Nob Hill Foods and Bel Air stores, has closed five stores in the past year and seen the opening or expansion of 240 non-union stores in its markets since 2008. Perhaps that is really the crux of the issue.

While it was recently announced that the strike is over, this is not over.

Union strike, union intimidation

Union intimidation is real. Union thugs accosted store employees and shoppers. Striking employees screamed at coworkers, and even threatened their fellow Raley’s employees who dared to work throughout the strike. Shoppers were accosted for crossing the picket line.

I know. I witnessed it first hand. I shop at a Raley’s in Sacramento.  I’ve gone shopping several times since the employees went on strike. While I was appalled at seeing Raley’s clerks picketing, it was not all Raley’s employees doing the striking.

Last week, I got into a hassle with a picketer as I tried to enter the store. “Support store employees, support the strike,” she yelled in my face as I walked by. I told her that she should be happy she had a job with benefits in this economy.

That did not go over well.

“Unions are our defense against the rich,” one woman yelled, holding a picket sign.

“It’s our hard work that makes the company profitable,” another striking employee said.

A friend who crossed the picket line to grocery shop at a Sacramento Raley’s got into a tangle with a mouthy picketer. When she returned to her car, one headlight had been smashed, and was hanging by electrical wires.

On November 7, during the strike, United Food and Commercial Workers Local  5 Communications Director Mike Hennebery was arrested for battery on a Nob Hill Foods store director. Raley’s reported that Hennebery connected one punch to Store Director John Morin’s face, grabbed his phone and threw it to the ground.

The Director tried asking Hennebery to leave, as Henneberry was illegally trying to collect employee checks. Several employees reportedly told Morin that Henneberry’s presence within the store made them uncomfortable.

Henneberry was arrested using a a citizen’s arrest, and was booked into Alameda city jail. A police report was filed with Alameda Police Department, case number 12-6218.

Many of the picketers were actually non-union temps, as well as Safeway and SaveMart employees, according to one source close to the fracas.

Unrealistic demands

Northern California grocery workers are the best paid in the nation. But more is never enough for a demanding union.

Most of the striking workers that I encountered did not understand what they were talking about. They used a few sound bites in their repertoire, but seemed to have no concept of the big picture of running a business. They had been told that Raley’s wanted to cut their wages and benefits, and that was what they were fixated on. They seemed more like zombies going along with the agenda, unable and unwilling to understand the serious difficulties the company has faced.

Union leadership ignored the financial and competitive challenges that Raley’s is up against, and made too many ridiculous demands the company simply could not afford.

Raley’s must reduce its operating costs or risk going out of business.  40 of the company’s stores are losing money, some as much as $2 million a year, according to Raley’s President, Michael Teel, grandson of Tom Raley.

By striking, the union put its strikers on the picket line rather than encouraging them to earn their paychecks. The union is now feeding on it’s own. If Raley’s closes more stores, jobs will disappear.  The union leadership has put Raleys in a position of having to close stores, and union employees in danger of losing their jobs.

Raley’s offer was far more generous than what the union got from recent negotiations with other local grocery stores. Perhaps that is also part of the problem – give an inch, and the opposition will want a mile.

During negotiations the Union leadership made demands that were simply outrageous. They wanted Raley’s to grant “amnesty” to those union members who assaulted customers who crossed the picket line, and to hire back strikers who vandalized store property.

Another union demand included “signing bonuses” for all employees to end the strike. Whether emboldened or just stupid, the demands were ridiculous.

The agreement, which will not be made public until it is ratified by the Union members, ends 15 months of negotiations between the union and the store.