All: The article by Charles Stile is good analysis. I know it’s how I feel. Gerard

Stile: Past errors no reason to ditch talks with unions Tuesday, June 21, 2011

By CHARLES STILE COLUMNIST

The barking of the bullhorn on the sidewalk outside was a faint, tinny cry by the time it penetrated the marble walls of the Senate chamber. It was no match for the soaring rhetoric on the Senate floor, where “history” was being made. It was the day that the tradition of collective bargaining between public unions and the governor in New Jersey was replaced by collaborationist bargaining, deal-making between political leaders and without the involvement of union negotiators.

“Collective bargaining is basically a civil right,” said Sen. Bob Gordon, the Fair Lawn Democrat who voted against the landmark bill that forces workers to pay a larger share of their health care and pension costs. The bill legislates the changes, which means the collective bargaining process has been reduced to a discussion over salary or small-bore items, like clothing allowances. It’s the Jersey version of the Wisconsin union-busting bill. Gordon, the normally low-key legislator, momentarily galvanized the chamber by framing Monday’s vote as a sad coda of the labor movement, where union-busting goons “cracked the skulls” of the 1913 “Silk City” strike in Paterson, or the 1894 Pullman railway strikes and others. “These are rights that are written in blood,” Gordon said.

The defense was strong, vigorous, and frankly, too late and irrelevant. The truth is that Governor Christie and the Democratic Senate President — and very proud “union guy” – Stephen Sweeney never had any intention of bargaining over the table, unlike Connecticut Gov. David Malloy, who negotiated $1.6 billion to $2 billion in health care and retirement savings with his state’s unions earlier this year.

But diplomacy doesn’t capture headlines — confrontation and union-bashing does. Demonizing middle-class public workers as overpaid and over-pampered, and then standing down their threats and protests, is the stuff of mythology, the kind that’s manufactured on a daily news-cycle basis on Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere. It’s also a great story line for Sweeney, the Union Guy. He is portrayed as a lead-with-his-ironworker-chin tough guy, willing to put the needs of taxpayers ahead of his union brethren. What a great story line to sell in a Democratic primary for governor in 2013. He stands tall, defiant. Negotiators don’t stand tall, they stand in the background. And smearing the unions — which inevitably leads to the smearing of teachers, cops, hospital orderlies, social workers and senior clerks toiling in drab cubicles for decades — also deflects attention from a major cause of the state’s ominous $55 billion shortfall in assets: the reckless, almost criminal refusal to pump money into the pension system in 11 out of the last 15 years.

“We are asking public employees to bear the full brunt of correcting a problem that they were not responsible for,” said Sen. Shirley Turner, a Mercer County Democrat whose district is home to thousands of state workers. No one is the clear villain or the pure-as-snow innocent lamb in this crisis leading up to Monday’s vote, and a likely final vote in the Assembly on Thursday. For all their moral championing over the sanctity of collective bargaining, union leaders often bypassed the bargaining table when the prize was too tempting to ignore.

They used their clout to win a 9 percent increase in their retirement payouts from an eager-to-pander Republican candidate for governor, acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco. Republican Sen. Jennifer Beck of Monmouth ticked off a litany of other goodies that union leaders won in the legislative caucus room, not at the bargaining table. She went as far back as the 1980s, when the teachers union successfully lobbied legislation creating an $18,500 minimum salary for teachers. “Today’s action is not new,” she said. But the checkered past was no excuse for ditching conventional collective bargaining. Unions and governors have successfully negotiated givebacks in the past, such as a premium-sharing plan in the 1990s hammered out with Gov. Christie Whitman, or the agreement struck in 2007 with Gov. Jon Corzine, requiring workers for the first time to pay 1.5 percent of the cost of their insurance. Christie and Sweeney could have just as easily used their considerable power to win major savings at the bargaining table, and do it with less acrimony.

After all, the public strongly supports givebacks. And even unions and their supporters concede that workers will have to pay more for benefits. But bargaining means compromise, or offering concessions to unions in return. Christie and Sweeney are not about to do that. And there is another reason why Sweeney prefers legislating rather than negotiating. It allows him to slip into the bill a reward to his political benefactor, the South Jersey leader George Norcross, who also is chairman of the board of trustees of Cooper University Hospital in Camden. One provision would limit public employees to in-state health care unless there was no other option.

Sweeney defends it as a needed form of protectionism for Jersey hospitals, but no matter what he says, or what steps he takes to mollify critics — like stripping that provision out and putting it in a separate bill — the “landmark” agreement will carry the whiff of Jersey Machine Politics as Usual. Now, New Jersey has moved a step further from its organized labor roots and one closer to the “right-to-work” heritage of Georgia or North Carolina. Some of the protesters looked angry and weary as they marched in a circle outside the Senate and then past a stage on West State Street where rock anthems blared from the arena-stage speakers. “Glory days, they’ll pass you by, glory days,” Bruce Springsteen’s voice bellowed.

Another, low-key, old Bob Dylan song might have added another dose of irony: “Only a Pawn in Their Game.”