California public transit unions seem to have found a
new, powerful bargaining tactic: If you don’t get your way in the legislature,
threaten your state’s transportation funding. And it helps to have the
administration in Washington on your side. California’s government and unions
representing the state’s public transit workers are still
negotiating, past the August 16 deadline imposed by the U.S. Department of
Labor (DOL) for the state to give in to the unions’ demand to exempt transit
workers from the state’s 2012
pension reform law or lose up to $1.6 billion in federal transportation
funding.
After Governor Jerry Brown signed the pension reform into
law last fall, the Teamsters and Amalgamated Transit Union filed complaints
with the Labor Department, citing a provision in the Federal
Transit Act that allows DOL to hold up
federal transportation funds if states interfere with public transit workers’
ability to bargain collectively with their employers (transit authorities).
California Labor Secretary Marty Morgenstern defended
the state’s pension reform law in February, saying that it doesn’t weaken
collective bargaining and “merely modifies” the retirement plans that public
employers can offer.
The Labor Department is clearly out of line in trying to
impose its own interpretation of the law by threatening California’s
transportation funding, especially in determining something as fuzzy as when
collective bargaining is “impeded.” ……To Read More, it gets better.
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