I’m writing in response to Jack Spillane’s unfortunate piece regarding city workers’ unions, “Have city government unions turned their backs on low income taxpayers” from June 28, 2023.
I have long respected Jack Spillane and I certainly don’t recall reading anything that would indicate that he is a “conservative ideologue.” I haven’t always agreed with him but completely respect him as a journalist. However, his recent piece regarding city workers’ unions appears uninformed, in some cases misrepresentative of the facts and would certainly win praise from true conservative ideologues. Accompanied by graphics primarily provided by the mayor’s office, the column could easily be part of the city’s bargaining strategy.
Spillane starts by revisiting the difficult crisis in 2009. I’ll ignore for a moment the noxious acceptance by the author of the unsubstantiated assertion that the less senior (“younger”) workers were more energetic or carried a heavier load then senior workers who had committed much of their working lives to the city. By his telling, Mayor Scott Lang was the protector of the city’s workers and his proposal for a pay cut was a missed opportunity. Such a position shows an unfortunate, but not uncommon lack of understanding of union contracts. The workers would have seen their earnings drop (including any retirement earnings impacted by a reduction in wages), had no guarantee that those earnings would be recouped and would have no guarantee that jobs wouldn’t be lost in the future.
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Now I’m not familiar with the specific union contracts, but most provide for layoff language that is far better then the rights of non-union workers and include a smooth fair process, often recall rights requiring the laid off worker is brought back when there are openings. In other words much more protection than the offer made. The only sure thing city workers (many of whom, by the way, are the working-class taxpayers that the writer appears concerned about) had from Mayor Lang’s proposal was a pay cut.
In the end, Mr. Spillane’s premise is undermined by what he reveals. It was the unions and the contracts that they stood by, not Mayor Lang’s proposal, that protected these folks. Public safety workers were not furloughed and the other workers were paid back after the city was found to have violated the contract. I stress this point because the author appears to dismissively chalk the win by 212 workers as some problem with “Massachusetts labor law.” The city violated the agreement that it had reached with its workers. That was proven. The same management team that pretended it wanted “teamwork” went ahead and broke a binding agreement that it had signed off on. So much for “we’re all in this together.”
Fast forward to the current situation.
Mayor Mitchell’s effort is clearly not an effort “to get the unions to work as a team.” Such teamwork is well documented by the Public Employees Committee letter and it appears as though that forum is where the administration should spend its efforts rather than trying to neutralize the voice of the city’s workers by going to a truly uninterested party — an arbitrator.
Overall, my greatest disappointment with this article is that it is filled with unsubstantiated claims and tropes about unions. I’ve addressed a couple (about “younger” workers and that the findings of the State Labor Board and courts against the city are somehow due to a deficit in the law and not about law breaking by management), but there are worse; that senior union leaders (presumably the same underperforming lazy ones who don’t carry their weight) don’t care about their coworkers or community and that I should take a course in human psychology if I think perhaps they do; that management is always offering “protection” while the union is always selfish; and finally that good benefits and wages are things to be undermined. This approach is disastrous for working people everywhere and was most visibly brought to us by true conservative ideologues like Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Finally, and as I’ve suggested before, the only way to understand this unfortunate article is as a piece of a management bargaining campaign. Hopefully the City Councilors see it as such and resist the attempt to undermine the voices of the city’s workforce.
Jerry Fishbein, a Dartmouth resident, is a long-time union activist and retired area vice president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. The views expressed are his alone.
I’ve spent the first half of my adult life working for companies who had a labor union, and the second half of working years with a very good company who is an industry leader that cares for their associates health & safety, provides competitive wages & benefits, and in many ways, they’re much better than any union without the adversarial attitudes of the “us versus them” seen and heard in just about all companies with a union.
My main point is that if you’re fortunate enough to work for a great company that realizes the people who work at every level are equally valuable to the overall success of the company, and there isn’t a union in the nation who can replace that.