Let the
Sunshine In!
A Request
for Transparency in
Public
Sector Union Contract Negotiations
By Flo Stahl, President of the
Avon Taxpayers Association, and Board Member of The
Federation of Connecticut
Taxpayer Organizations, March, 2012
Flo Stahl
is recognized for being an effective spokesperson for her Taxpayer Group while
garnering the necessary information to provide Avon
taxpayers with the tools they need to determine how and where their tax dollars
are being spent. Taxpayers in the 169
towns throughout Connecticut, who now pay approximately 85% of their property
taxes for personnel related expenses, should be approaching their local elected
officials and making a Request for Transparency in Public Sector Union Negotiations, similar to that being made by Flo
Stahl as noted within the following…..
By Flo Stahl Every year a municipality somewhere in Connecticut
implores “yes” and a public union somewhere in Connecticut declares “no.” What they are doing is negotiating ground
rules for expiring contracts and addressing the prickly question of whether
these negotiations should be open or closed. By “open” we mean allowing passive
observation by community members.
It is an
intractable stalemate of their own making, since there is no legislation, no
understanding, no policy whatsoever that prohibits the public from witnessing
these negotiations. All it takes is agreement between the parties.
At a recent
negotiation session in Avon, a union lawyer
rejected the town’s request, saying “It would be a circus.” If open
negotiations are a circus, then the union would be its ring master. With its
overwhelming power, any union could extract the most stringent control in
exchange for merely allowing people in the room. Yet his statement went
unchallenged because no municipality has ever gone to the mat for open
negotiations. Unlike the occasional
binding arbitration cases regarding compensation and work rules, there is not
one instance of municipal pushback on the issue of open negotiations. And who
could blame them? It would require protracted litigation involving the State
Labor Relations Board, a dreaded binding arbitration procedure, and advocacy
for an intangible called “transparency.”
What makes the
practice of closed negotiations insidious is that it perpetuates a culture of
mystery and opaqueness. This is the same culture that is charged with producing
the equivalent of a financial hammer because we live or die by these contract
decisions for years. When the secretly negotiated contract finally does become
public, its opaqueness continues with language that almost always requires
knowledge of prior provisions and terms to make any sense of it.
The International
Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Auto Workers of America, or the United Farm Workers,
to name a few, are all free-market labor organizations
not reliant on local property taxes for their lifeblood. These fundamentally
different, private sector unions exist in a climate of competition-driven
consumer choice, global labor variables, and even world monetary policy. It is
not a moral imperative that their negotiations be held in the open. Municipal
unions, however, are shielded from all these pressures. They are in a special –
one might say – honored, relationship with the public they serve.
So,
why the secrecy? Why the license to repeatedly
reject open sessions? One partner in this dialog must acknowledge that closed
negotiations are indefensible. It raises profound questions about the
union-community relationship and, most damaging, it reveals a cynical mindset
toward the public it serves. Let the sunshine in. It’s the right thing to do.