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Negotiations Update

Updated February 7

• The 16 elected members of Local 1989’s Executive Branch negotiating team—representing four bargaining units—have been working long hours both on the clock and on their own time to bring a comprehensive package of proposals to the table.

• Many obstacles could make reaching a settlement difficult:

1. The rapidly deteriorating national economy, a current State deficit of nearly a billion dollars, political attacks on State Employees.
2. The governor’s demands for cuts in employee health care and extensive layoffs, plus cuts in departmental funding.
3. A Governor and Legislature unable to compromise over revenue increases and program cuts.

• This is the storm swirling around your negotiators while they have held worksite meetings, polled members, and held discussions with Local 1989 leaders and activists from all parts of the state. They are using your input and matching it against the darkening picture of the State budget and the governor’s seeming willingness to sacrifice State employees in the name of good publicity and bad fiscal policy. Your negotiators are still developing comprehensive proposals. At this time there is an air of mutual respect at the table and both sides realize the seriousness of the times.
  
• 
  

Will the State propose?

• Furloughs?
• Decreased protections against layoffs?
• A loss of Union Protections?
• Benefit Cuts?
• 
  

We don’t know what they have in mind yet, and I can not publish what strategies or specific proposals your teams have agreed on. You don’t send your playbook to the other team before the game. Your teams are prepared and have read and discussed every single proposal, coalition and team specific. Every idea, every member has been heard, and now is the time when you can help.

Your Health Care, by law, can not be negotiated. Your Health Care is in the hands of the legislature.

Go to the MSEASEIU web site, read this story on the attacks on our healthcare or click on this link to send an email to the appropriations committee, and tell them that attacking State employee Health care is only a political move and breaks the State’s promise to all of it’s employees.

I have included part of my letter to the appropriations committee, possibly the most powerful decision makers in the State.

Dear Senator Diamond, Representative Cain, and members of the Appropriations Committee:

I have appeared before your committee in the past and offered savings to help the State budget. The suggestions have always fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps my ideas did not have merit, but from the ideas of thousands of State Employees there must be many excellent ideas. If you listen, we will “show you the money”.

As legislators you must judge your course by public input but I beg you not to feed the radical pundits who feel that all State problems could be solved by cutting State employee pay and benefits. Considering the committee you are on, you know better.

Please don’t allow a tax on only one small number of Maine citizens. State employees and their families are your constituents, not a handy distraction to throw the press. The last thing we need is higher health care costs. I am respectfully urging you to oppose the Governor's proposal to shift more health insurance costs onto state workers.

There should be only one health plan for all state workers. That's the Maine way. (If you would tax me, I ask you to share the pain and

We know that savings must be found wherever they are, but the State Employee Health Commission is the best body to decide how to cut if cuts are needed. Please have the State Employee Health Commission decide not the press.

Thank you for your time and consideration on this important matter.

Thomas Maher

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Wall street wants your $$ and wants to break your Unions.

During most of the Bush regime, Social Security "reform" was the star of the Bush administration’s agenda. The idea was to give over $1 trillion from our Social Security payments to create personal investment accounts for employees under 55 years old. Those retirement funds would have been handled by being invested in the stock market.


Our accounts would have magically multiplied in value, giving us a comfortable retirement. You would have taken the risk but not the brokers; no matter how poorly they performed they would have "earned" a percentage of your money to reward their "investment skills".
No matter what happened, the brokers would have been guaranteed huge profits regardless of performance.

A fee of only two percent would have given a return on $1 trillion of $20 billion win, lose or draw.

Well, we all know how that would have worked out.

This situation has been a long time coming. Wall Street thinks that they should have your paycheck whether is called a bailout or "reform". Union pension funds have always been seen as a pot of money workers don’t deserve.

Now, as Wall Street failures get free handouts from the taxpayer. Secretary of the Treasury Paulson sings "I’ll spend it my way" to the tune of Sinatra's I did it my way.
While the banks and Paulson refuse to say where the money is going, the right wing is tries to make sure that the big three don’t get any help.

Sure the CEOs of the big three were idiots for flying private jets to Washington, but this is a smokescreen for the ongoing campaign against Unions. "They make $70.00 an hour!" is the war cry. The $70.00 figure is only true if you include all retirees and all current workers at the present pay scale and don’t look to 2009 where the new UAW pay scale is nearly half of what today’s workers can earn.

Wall Street and the Government use a two prong attack to break Unions

The recent near collapse of the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund is frightening to all workers planning on a pension. The fund covered about 460,000 until UPS was allowed to pull out 44,000 workers. The CSPF even during the Mob years was famous for being able to provide benefits for all of its members until the funds were made a piggy bank for the only group greedier than the mob, Wall Street.

Did the Teamsters lose the money?

The federal government started attacking pensions and Union power under the Kennedy administration and continued under both Democrats and Republicans under the disguise of a campaign against organized crime.

Starting with attacks on the Teamsters, the reason given for the anti-Union campaign was a fight against crooked Unions and Mafia involvement. The links to the mob were real and many Teamster leaders were involved, and convicted of crimes. While ridding the Unions of corruption is a great goal and makes good headlines, there was always a dual agenda, and this was the first step in a long campaign against organized labor in the modern age.

While U.S. corporations and their paid for politicians were claiming to punish corruption, the real target was Jimmy Hoffa's attempt to unite workers in all transport industries into a single Union. The second motive was to gain control of Union pension funds. The control of the Union pension funds would allow the corporations to loot the funds and destroy one of the great drivers of Unionization, security in retirement.

The Teamsters - mainly due to real connections with organized crime were forced in 1982 to turn over control of the Union to the the government. The prizes for the Corporations were two, huge funds and ongoing income of the Central States Fund and the removal of the Union power provided by a fund this size.

The pension fund was turned over to the control of Morgan Stanley, and the cash and half a million employees future became toys for Morgan Stanley. They didn't care if they broke the toys. When the Unions lost control of their investments, they also lost the political power that went with the choice of where to invest.

Morgan Stanley immediately started shifting pension funds into high-risk investments. Buying and selling investments repeatedly to earn fees with no regard for the investor is called churning, an old reliable income generator for brokers. The old method of long term stable investments did not generate enough fees. When successful, the investments earned fat bonuses for the brokers. When risky investments failed the brokers fees never stopped. Only the employees depending on the funds for a secure retirement took any risk. The bankers couldn't lose.

By 2003, after years of the greatest stock market gains in history the pension fund could only find 60 cents for every dollar owed to retired members, and for the first time cut benefits. While cutting pensions, a new rule cut off benefits for employees if the employees returned to work. They were not to be allowed to make up what Wall Street had lost.

Little mentioned is that while the Teamsters’ Fund lent nearly half a billion dollars to Las Vegas’ casinos and hotels during the 1960’s and 70’s, the loans were repaid and the CSPF had always paid benefits owed to its members.

Pension looting as a Union busting tool

The Teamsters retirement funds collapse is not a unique incident. At the top of the list of "under funded" defined benefit pension plans are the "big oil" companies like Exxon which is now crying that they may be forced to spend money if forced to fund pensions to the letter of the law. In 2002 the list included General Motors, Ford, IBM, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, DuPont, Verizon, Lucent and Delphi Automotive. Airlines have been allowed to file bankruptcy, break Union contracts, leave pensions unpaid, and return to profitability with no obligation to restore the pensions of the employees that built the companies.

Many major corporations have followed the models set by the airline and steel industries by defaulting on their pension plans. The pattern has been clear, first the pension funds are used to pay gross executive salaries, provide golden parachutes. The next step is bankruptcy and a release from Union contracts and pension plans. This model of looting and Union breaking became commonplace during the Bush years.

"Under funding" should called what it is, theft. Pensions are a part of workers’ wages. To earn a secure retirement workers delay part of their pay to provide retirement income.

You pay, you lose, you still pay

When the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation was created it was sold as a back up in case an employer pension fund collapsed. At the same time regulations that had long protected employee retirement funds were deregulated, with the claim that freeing the funds from government oversight would allow them to invest freely and grow.

The PBGC is funded by premiums paid by corporations.Premiums that are much less than the amount needed to provide promised benefits if the employer collapses or files for bankruptcy. in a move to escape pension obligations while breaking Unions. At the same time the Corporations were looting their employees pension funds they were lobbying to keep down the payments that would have provided a secure fall back.

In 2005 the PBGC announced a loss of $12.1 billion. The losses increased the PBGC’s deficit to over $23 billion. At that time the PBGC had $39 billion to cover $62 billion owed to retirees. At the same time the government consistently refused to enforce even the lax standards for premium payments that were in place, allowing the gap of assests to grow. The PBGC solution was to cut benefits to employees further rather than collect what was owed.

In 2005 it became clear the PBGC would go fail unless it received billions from the government. When the PBGC takes over pensions it receives the funds of the pensions it controls. Union pension funds make a highly visible target to help bail out years of government mismanagement.

In the years after WWII while the U.S. was becoming a better and better place for the worker, corporations paid about 48 percent of the Federal taxes collected. In 2005 that percentage had fallen to seven percent. This means that workers must pick up the tab first paying for their pensions and then paying the taxes for the PBGC to pick up after the companies go bankrupt.

If pensions were still paid at the agreed upon rate we could make an argument that the government was doing its job, but when companies default on a pension plan, the PBGC, slashes pension benefits by as much as sixty percent. The right is looking for a triple dip. They lost your original pension funds through greed. You are paying the taxes for the PBGC, and they want your pensions to fund the PBGC.

The current bail out is providing "pension" plans for millionaires and billionaires while the right wing foams at the mouth at the suggestion that any Union pension plan be helped in any way. The solution for the right is now to have the big three file bankruptcy, smash the Unions, and drop their pension obligations. Maybe if we called a pension a golden parachute they might let it slide..

Should we let the big three collapse? Do they deserve to fail for bad judgement? We need to look at recent history to judge Wall Streets motives and the possible results. If the deregulating, private account crowd had gotten their way, Social Security would now be bankrupt.

Until Wall Street wanted your money Government intervention was evil. Now government intervention is only evil if it might continue to provide jobs for Union workers. The Bush administration was preparing toloot Social Security in the same way they allowed the Teamsters and other pension funds and the stock market. Unions built strong funds that can recover, but not if they are forced under Wall Street management schemes.

Social Security must be kept strong as an example of the meaning of Security. Pension funds must be kept strong for the workers who trusted their security to these funds. We can not allow the economic crisis to be used as an excuse to break Unions.

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Outsourcing Pros and Cons

We don’t need people, technology can answer our questions.

While e-mail and the Web have made strides, the phone remains the primary channel consumers use to interact with customer care. In a 2007 Harris Interactive Research study sponsored by our company, 97% of respondents reported that they most often use the telephone to contact customer service. Today, more than 79.8 billion calls are made to call centers annually, and that is only expected to rise as use of the mobile phone for customer care increases. However, providing one-to-one call center interaction is not always economically feasible.

On the surface, overseas outsourcing—with live human operators—might appear to be a good means to save operational costs. However, research shows that the American consumer sees those that outsourced customer services as providing less satisfaction and lower resolution levels.

Customers are willing to use automated systems for a number of reasons, such as the convenience of ATMs that are convenient, fast and under customer is in control.

Technology will win out in the end because

• It is available 24 x 7.

• It can answer questions without a language barrier.

•Customers can do it for themselves

• Technology is the perfect answer to “I want it NOW”

• Consistent answers every time.

The warm bodies on phones aren’t going away but as technology changes faster than the number of trained support staff the opportunities to implement technology to reduce costs and increase revenue will continue to grow.

Outsourcing and technology don’t add Quality or Value

Cost savings, efficiency, no internal human relations issues, there are a number of reasons to outsource or automate consumer contact centers or help desks. Outsourcing and technology have a proven record of delivering benefits. There are several factors companies should consider before outsourcing vital customer service applications. First the quality of the service should be given priority over cost effectiveness if you want to have long term stability and growth.

Consumers know that support calls are likely to be answered Dallas to India or Viet Nam. For the most customers this has not been a problem but a growing concern is whether their questions are answered quickly, competently, and courteously.

“A sampling of consumer complaints about outsourcing contains comments such as “The worst customer experience I ever had was placing a support desk call that terminated in India for a product purchased in the U.S.”

“If you expect to provide customer satisfaction by providing outsourced help, your long-term success is at risk”

“Outsourced customer service is cost effective for some, but at what cost to the consumer?”

Providing support by outsourcing allows companies immediate savings through virtual operations that need no physical space. They don’t hire, train, or retain employees. Staff can be used and dropped at a moments notice to handle call volumes. On the other hand they lose skilled help every time they reduce call volume, they build no employee loyalty or long term product knowledge.

Outsourcing saves money, but only to the short term bottom end. The customer gets excessive wait times, lowered quality, and on many calls the issue doesn't get resolved in a single session. An American customer reaching many call centers feels disrespected and unvalued. Ultimately, outsourcing removes consumer loyalty and trust.

In my opinion, one of the worst examples of not respecting the consumer is a famous maker of scanning software, also a maker of IVR software. They are in favor of automated response systems. You need to check some of the software they sell in the U.S... No tech support whatsoever with the exception of one free call for installation issue. No bug reporting unless you pay them. The only support a regular user of their software gets is an online forum with FAQs, which was off line for months at a time.

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Do you hear something?

You know what it is like when you are driving towards a busy intersection and you can hear sirens? Something big and fast is heading your way and you need to know what is coming in order not to get smashed out of the road.

I am not going to comment on these stories. These snippets are the result of putting three words into a Google search, SEIU, furlough, and 2008. Take a look and make up your own mind if they mean anything.

fur·lough

1.

a. A leave of absence or vacation, especially one granted to a member of the armed forces.

b. A usually temporary layoff from work.

c. A leave of absence from prison granted to a prisoner.

2. The papers or documents authorizing a leave: The soldiers had their furloughs in their breast pockets.

tr.v. fur·loughed, fur·lough·ing, fur·loughs

1. To grant a leave to.

2. To lay off (workers).

Monday, September 8, 2008

California

Mandatory Furlough/Temporary Layoffs BACK at SEIU 721

SEIU Local 721 represents 85,000 public service workers across Southern California including county, city and non-profit employees.

“check out the latest Civil Service Commission Agenda
(available at lacity.org) it looks like the civil service rule
to permit "mandatory furlough/temporary layoffs" is back again.

“the Coalition of City Unions made a deal to give back $18.25 million to the general
fund (that was savings from the various health plans, which is
part of the contracts with the health plans), and to pursue a
program of $3 million in voluntary furlough days. that means!

On Thursday, November 6, state workers received a letter from Gov. Schwarzenegger outlining his plans to cut state services, increase sales taxes, impose a one day per month furlough on all state workers, and take away two paid holidays.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose one-day-a-month unpaid furloughs for state workers for the next 17 months, as well as rescinding two of the workers' 13 paid holidays.

DA offices in Georgia to have furloughs

District attorney Offices across the state will take across the board furloughs, starting this month.

State-employees of district attorney offices and the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council staff will be given one unpaid day off per month.

State Employees Brace For Furloughs

Maryland
State employees are waiting for a decision on mandatory leave without pay.
It was one of recommendation to fill the $432 million budget deficit. .
In 1991 state workers demonstrated were furloughed by Governor William Schaefer.
The state may save $48 million by enforcing six days unpaid leave on State employees.

And way back in 2006

Rhode Island 2006

GOVERNOR SIGNS ORDER CREATING FURLOUGH DAYS FOR

STATE EMPLOYEES

Faced with a severe budget deficit Governor Donald L. Carcieri issued an Executive Order creating four furlough days for state employees for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2007.

Three additional furlough days for Fiscal Year 2008 are being planned.

Governor Carcieri said. “While I understand that this decision is not a popular one with many state employees, these furlough days are an alternative to deeper personnel cuts,”

To select the furlough days the Department of Administration determined the days traditionally taken off by employees. Those are days that typically precede or follow holidays or holiday weekends.

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that furlough days be enforced and no employee is allowed to work on the day of the furlough.

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