Posted on 09/21/2011 1:13:25 PM PDT by UB355
Largest state unions won't seek recertification by Thursday deadline
Madison - By the end of Thursday, the major state employee unions covering tens of thousands of workers will have effectively lost their official status.
Top leaders for those unions say they won't seek to meet the high hurdle for keeping that current status laid out in Gov. Scott Walker's union bargaining law. With a deadline set for the close of business Thursday, so far only four smaller state unions have said they'll seek to keep their status by winning a difficult recertification election.
Marty Beil, executive director of the 23,000-member Wisconsin State Employees Union representing largely blue-collar workers, said none of the units in his union will seek a vote on recertifying.
"We looked at the law and we find the law at best an exercise in wasted resources," Beil said. "We've chosen to use our resources to organize our members and advocate for our members."
So only, only three smaller unions representing building trades workers, prosecutors and other attorneys have filed with the state seeking to keep their official status. A fourth union representing a small number of state research employees is also expected to file.
In March, Walker signed legislation ending all union bargaining for public employees except for bargaining over wages. But union employees still can't bargain for raises larger than the rate of inflation unless approved by voters in a referendum.
The legislation also requires that unions go through yearly recertification votes to keep their official status rather than keep that status indefinitely after an initial vote as unions had done in the past. Unions can still exist without that official status, but government employers, such as schools and the state, don't have to recognize them or bargain with them.
To win the recertification election, unions must get 51% of the vote of all the members of their bargaining unit, not just the ones who take the time to cast ballots - a much higher bar than state elected officials have to clear to win their offices.
A spokesman for Walker had no immediate comment.
Bryan Kennedy, president of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin, said so far only a small local state union within his larger umbrella group is seeking a recertification election. AFT-Wisconsin and its member unions as of June represented about 17,500 largely white-collar government workers.
Kennedy said that one of his member unions has workers in 700 locations around the state and would need to spend large amounts of time and money to win a recertification vote.
"You go through all that and all you get to do is bargain (for limited raises)," Kennedy said.
State unions have to file a petition seeking a recertification election and pay a fee to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission by 4:30 p.m. Thursday or they will be decertified, agency chairman James Scott said.
The actual decertification won't happen, however, until it's requested by either the employer or a citizen, Scott said. That's in part because the agency doesn't have a master list of all the public employee unions in the state, he said.
"We're not going to know if they don't file unless somebody tells us," Scott said.
Awesome and sad.
Sure wish my state (Illinois) would wake up from it's liberal slumber.
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