Don Roach

UPDATE: Tonight the city council voted and approved this resolution. The only council members voting against the resolution were Councilmen Navarro and Lupino. I spoke with Councilman Livingston prior to the meeting and he expressed concern at that time and during the session. However, he voted in favor of the resolution ultimately. Score one for the taxpayer.

Cranston Mayor, Allan Fung, will be introducing a resolution against a proposal to utilize binding arbitration during negotiation with teacher’s unions. Before I get to the text of the Mayor’s resolution, can I just say that it is incredulous to think the General Assembly would pass such legislation and I would think that this Council, given their penchant to want to be intimately involved with the contract negotiation process, would never consider such a proposal. It makes no sense whatsoever to utilize an arbitrator when the city is paying people to fill such roles. This past August, however,  House Majority Leader Gordon Fox gave a strong endorsement for binding arbitration when he said:

Any version of the bill that I would support … Would have a binding arbitration process that would save communities from spending money on attorney fees while eliminating the threat of teacher strikes or work-to-rule situations, which harm students

This just doesn’t make sense. Let’s say for sake of argument that binding arbitration does save taxpayers money what’s the point of electing officials when unions will have the ability to go to arbitration if they do not agree with the local city or town versus fighting it out through the normal legal process? Many credit card companies decided to go to binding arbitration versus the courts because:

[...] the credit card issuer is giving notice that if the cardholder has a dispute with the company (including identity theft, fines, penalty or late fee disputes, interest rate guarantees, etc.) he or she can’t sue the card issuer in court. Instead, they must take the case to a private arbitrator or judge.

And that makes a lot of sense…for the credit card companies and makes just as much sense for the unions. Unlike what Fox tried to spin, it doesn’t make sense for the taxpayer as you remove the checks and balances within the system and instead give overall authority to non-government people. They’ll decide what happens with your and my tax dollars in union disputes. At least with the current system if you do not like how a contract was resolved and you thought your local councilman had done the wrong thing, you could vote him or her out (same goes for the school board) but in this scenario it won’t matter who’s in office, it just matters who the arbitrator is. Ultimately, the Rhode Island taxpayer won’t control that process.

That, again, just does not make sense for the Rhode Island Taxpayer and has led Mayor Fung to present the resolution below at next Monday’s City Council meeting:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED the Cranston City Council respectfully requests the Rhode Island General Assembly to reject any and all binding arbitration legislation currently being considered for teacher contracts.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the City is hereby instructed to submit a copy of this resolution to the City of Cranston’s State Senators and State Representatives in the Rhode Island General Assembly seeking their consideration and support of.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE BELOW

I’ve created an online petition as I plan to attend next Monday’s Council meeting. It would be interesting to get a lot of signatures for this and hopefully present it to the Council. Please sign if you agree with what I’m talking about here and also live in Cranston.

What happens when you don’t have enough money to pay your bills? You stuff gets repoed, your credit gets shot to H-E-double hockey sticks, and things you enjoyed before mostly like get cut. Facing a governor who was (finally) willing to say, “We can’t afford everyone, we either are going to have to ‘cut’ certain employees or you take this deal”, the Council 94 finally blinked and faced reality.

On Wednesday, the presidents of the 23 local unions within Council 94, American Federation of State County & Municipal Employees, rejected Carcieri’s proposal, urging the governor to return to the bargaining table.

But Carcieri refused, saying he had no alternative but to begin wide-scale layoffs. And on Thursday, the leaders of the state’s second-largest union — the Rhode Island Alliance of Social Service Employees [Local 580] — agreed to allow their members to vote on the proposal, putting pressure on Council 94 to reconsider in the face of hundreds of potential layoffs.

On Rhode Island’s best known liberal blog, RI Future, you can probably see the ever ‘interesting’, Pat Crowley, going bananas as Council 94 recognizes that it’s better to have a job than no job at all in a very poor economic climate.

Now the issue goes to the union members whom I hope will chose this plan over not having a job. It’s unfortunate the economy is this way, but it is what it is. The only thing you can do when you don’t have enough money to pay is cut out some of your spending. The union now has the choice of taking some paper cuts or facing the machete called wide-ranging layoffs.

I know what I would choose.