So we’re negotiating our Collective Bargaining Agreement with the agency.
The rhythm is Tuesdays we flip a coin to decide which party’s team leads, submitting contract articles and explaining, and the other party’s team responds with our articles and explanation. Then we question each other, and then begin to build an article both sides can agree to.
On Thursdays, the lead is reversed.
It’s about as fun as it sounds.
Some articles are boilerplate. This is the Bargaining Unit. This is the management. This is the union. These are the rights and responsibilities of all the parties.
Those things are restatements of statutory language and prior practices. They gotta be in there, and for the most part everyone on both sides agrees to the substance.
Now we’re into the nitty gritty this week.
How is the contract enforced, how does the union operate within the context of the agency’s mission? Who is responsible for what things, and why?
We spent all day Tuesday this week arguing about the meaning of the word “shall” and where it belonged in one particular sentence. Today we covered a lot of ground until we got to the article the agency submitted that would render the union impotent with the stroke of a pen.
Yeah. Not adopting that one. We’re going to be arguing that one again on Tuesday next. We submitted our proposal, which doesn’t read anything like their proposal and we’ll see what they say.
The agency reps, from the Labor Relations team, are not bad or evil people. They’re trying to get the best deal they can for the agency and protect the agency’s perogatives. I try very hard for myself and my team to not let this become personal, while we are trying very hard to secure our Employees’ rights.
Please also consider this an open thread.
War for Ukraine Day 1,016: A Brief Thursday Night Update
VeniceRiley
Are the employees white male trump voters? I ask, in case I should gaf.
cmorenc
The incoming Trump Administration and R-majority congress is likely to be the most union-hostile in the last century, parading lots of propaganda about how unions subvert the freedom of individuals and employers to negotiate contracts with each other. Expect a push to enact federal “right to work” type laws, buttressed by the image of somewhat country-outlaw types of men standing next to their F150 pickup trucks on their way home from work, happy to be free from the burden of involuntary union dues.
Melancholy Jaques
@cmorenc:
I thought the goal was to have the Wagner Act declared unconstitutional.
frog
@cmorenc:
That is going to be as viable as negotiating a clause out of a click through EULA.
cmorenc
@Melancholy Jaques: Even the current SCOTUS RW 6 may find it challenging to undo the entire accumulated constitutional jurisprudence of commerce and labor law going all the way back to the late 1930s. IMO they are more likely to go about it by upholding legislative efforts to dismantle or neuter the body of law built over it.
trollhattan
Senseless shootings shall remain senseless. This shooter was neither related to the victims nor the school. He was a serial criminal who nevertheless got himself a gun because America.
“But, felons can’t have guns!”
Says who? Not the NRA. Not the RNC. Not the president-elect. There’s a pesky state law but California does not count.
This is all on brand.
Martin
I never participated in these processes, despite my employer having dozens of unions. I had at one point 2 in a clerical union who fought tooth and nail against reclassification of those employees into non-clerical positions that paid like, twice as much. It took about 2 years to get those reclassifications through, and after that I had no more involvement.
I think my son was very wise to hold out for his first career job at an employee owned company. He’s pretty happy about that decision.
Martin
@cmorenc: I think the plan is just nuke the NLRB from orbit and regardless of whether unions are constitutionally recognized, with no enforcement mechanisms they might as well not exist from federal perspective.
WTFGhost
‘scooza frien’, your t’read is open – zip zip!
VeniceRiley
Spouse is in a union. Local management does love to cozy up to the union rep on site. Golf time! Bros.
Melancholy Jaques
@cmorenc:
Right. Do it like they did the 15th Amendment. Still on the books, but they removed the means of enforcing it
ETA – What Martin said.
Fair Economist
Great to see unions in action.
Parfigliano
@cmorenc: Kavanaugh says…hold my beer.
trollhattan
Anyone have insights on why Nevada went for Trump. Biden won it four years ago and the unions supporting the hospitality industry were a part. This was from September.
It’s like one step forward, two steps back. On continual repeat.
Martin
In case people were wondering how the economy is going – Hawk Tuah girl/team launched a crypto memecoin and then rug pulled and scammed a bunch of people out of a few million bucks.
This economy is just becoming scams all the way down.
Michael Bersin
Bills are being prefiled for the 2025 session of the Missouri General Assembly.
After Missourians for Constitutional Freedom spent $30 million and a lot of effort to get an initiative restoring women’s reproductive health and abortion rights on the ballot and passed, the right wingnut super majority is now filling bills to overturn the will of Missouri voters.
SB 119: right wingnut lunacy
“…This act creates the offense of possession of an abortifacient drug with the intent to induce an abortion on oneself or another person and the offense of delivery of an abortifacient drug with the intent to induce, or otherwise assist in, an abortion on another person…”
It never ends, they never stop. Neither should we.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
I wish such heinous people would just off themselves and be done with it. Who shoots kindergarten kids?
I worked with Sheriff Honea 20+ years ago. He was a pretty good guy. Did not ooze toxic masculinity and was intelligent but humble.
Soonergrunt
@VeniceRiley: We are Federal Government IT workers. While I’m sure there are some Trump supporters amongst our numbers, I doubt there are that many.
As far as race/gender, we have people from across the spectrums (spectra?)
VeniceRiley
@Soonergrunt: Go IT! They know you know how to lock them out of their credentials.
WaterGirl
@Soonergrunt: I am not one of the BJ pedants, so I may be wrong, but I think it’s spectrum. Singular. The word itself encompasses a range.
Go you! I was a union steward when I worked at a grocery store while I put myself through college.
Martin
@trollhattan: I think Nevada reflects the broader trend. Just to take the focus off of the campaign – Democrats had been losing voter registration pretty much everywhere since 2020. That points to a larger systemic problem than just running a bad campaign, because that represents a structural debt that you now need to overcome.
So this problem started a lot earlier than theories of racism, sexism, ageism explain. This is a broader policy/messaging issue by the party.
I’ll again note, an awful lot of people seem to be celebrating (or at least playing off) the assassination of a CEO. That strikes me as an indication that the preexisting expectations of what people are angry about are pretty wrong and not being satisfied. We’re at a point that policy has failed badly enough that we’re more or less fine with murdering our way to the outcomes we want.
Melancholy Jaques
@trollhattan:
My take is that it was because our candidate is a woman. I will back off of that when I see data, but I doubt that people are going to say “because I don’t want to vote for a woman for president” in response to a pollster.
Martin
@WaterGirl: Yep. It’s ‘spectrum’ singular because everyone is encompassed in a single distribution. If they were encompassed in multiple distributions, then ‘spectra’ would be warranted – ‘differences between the spectra of workers and management.’ Each group has its own distribution, therefore plural.
Quinerly
I’ve been on the road all day. Has this been posted?
“Democratic Sen. John Fetterman said Thursday that the federal cases against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the New York hush money case against President-elect Donald Trump were both “politically motivated” and deserving of pardons.”
nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/john-fetterman-says-hunter-biden-trump-both-deserve-pardons-politi…
Martin
@Melancholy Jaques: How does that square with the large loss of voter registration by Dems since 2020? That all happened before Harris was named as nominee – and Dem registration started to go back up again after she was named – 20% higher than the GOP new voter registration in the period between Harris being named and the election.
Melancholy Jaques
@Martin:
Old guy rant warning.
It seems to me that there was a time that we had issues during campaigns. And different policy responses to those issues. Now, all we seem to have are grievances. People are angry turns out to be white people are angry. And what they are angry about nearly every time is a perception that their status is being reduced in favor non-whites. This and only this has been at the core of every presidential campaign since Reagan
This is not something we Democrats can change with better messaging, better organization, or policies. We are the party that cares about non-white people and the white people who hate us are never never never going to come over to our side.
WaterGirl
@Quinerly: Fetterman has been covering himself with something lately, but it certainly isn’t glory.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Personally, I think it’s the ramping up of disinformation and social media, and disinformation ON social media.
Plus it seems to me that the mainstream media has chosen a team more than ever before and they aren’t even trying to paper over it anymore.
WaterGirl
@Melancholy Jaques: Trump built the grievance mentality.
“If you build it, they will come.” That’s not just a line from Field of Dreams anymore.
Trump built the grievance mentality, encouraged people be as ugly as they wanted, and boy did they respond in droves.
I am tired of having to downgrade my opinion of the intelligence and character of the average person.
Josie (also)
Great to hear an inner discussion of how things work. It is important.
Ben Cisco
Good to see you SG!!
Also, another one of the IT crowd!
Martin
@Melancholy Jaques: You don’t think black people are angry? You don’t think women are angry? Buddy… come on.
I think you have a good argument that Donald Trump only speaks to the anger and grievances of white men. I think that’s valid. Are Democrats doing that? They are speaking to the anger of women around reproductive rights, but I don’t think they are speaking to the anger around costs, income inequality, labor, etc. They are supportive of the right things but very gently but mostly telling people to not be angry.
I don’t know why we keep whistling past these things.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Sure, Black people are angry. They are also pragmatic. Women? POC or white women? Because one group was pragmatic. One wasn’t.
frosty
@Quinerly: WTF???? I’d better call Fetterman. That’s a fucking stupid thing to say.
Trivia Man
@cmorenc: Hold his beer, just watch! “Labor decisions were decided wrongly, we go back to the state of affairs in 1910. If Congress wants those laws back, it is easy for them to pass them again, correcting the errors we found.”
eta: Parfigliano got there first
Melancholy Jaques
@Martin:
Yes, yes, everyone is angry, everyone has been “left behind,” and everyone hates Democrats. It’s all we hear every campaign season.
But when it comes to campaigns, only the anger of white people and more particularly white men is considered politically important.
Trivia Man
In Wisconsin union news, Act 10 is back on the table. Partially blocked, I am looking for more details. Seems awfully late to try and reverse it, we will see. When our new judge ran, she campaigned that it was wrongly decided, of course there are howls she MUST MUST MUST recuse herself. Pretty sure one of the other judges WROTE THE DAMN BILL but not a peep about him recusing.
Martin
@WaterGirl: I don’t think any of those things weren’t contributing factors. However, I keep offering up anti-corporate sentiment, which has enormous polling evidence – 74% of all voters in that Pew study, including 65% of Trump voters – as a reasonable explanation that not only applies to all states, also applies to all other losing incumbent fights around the world as governments struggle to address inflation and other economic problems. Neoliberalism is blowing up left-of-center and right of center parties everywhere, either because it leaves government unable to respond to economic crises, or because it drives wealth inequality, or both.
What’s left is either far left parties that seek to blow up neoliberalism and bring back more state-control, or authoritarianism which for all of its faults is at least very good at getting shit done. It’s terrible for people, but it’s effective. There is no small contingent of people here that won’t lose sleep if Trump blows up the NYT, despite them being strong advocates for the free press and all that, mainly because the existing levers to right the system either don’t work, or our leader refuse to use them effectively. Yes, Garland and Jack Smith brought cases against Trump – what good did it do? The system was too ineffective <insert 1000 valid reasons why> to bring justice. Maybe if Garland hadn’t waited 2 years. But really, it still shouldn’t take 2 years, let alone 4.
I keep offering this up as an explanation and nobody engages with it, instead pivoting to racism, disinformation, the media, sexism. All valid things. All certainly components to the the turkey dinner which was our election, but I think anti-corporate sentiment is the turkey. I think that’s the main course and everything else is sides. And I don’t think most of the sides are things we can do shit about unless we commit to never nominating a woman or person of color or I don’t know – cranking up our own disinformation system? How do you even avoid that problem? But here’s a thing that Americans pretty universally hate. Maybe we could try that? Why is that so hard to engage with? That’s Bernies thing, and he got pretty close in 2016, and got a lot of attention from Trump voters. We just had a thread today about how great AOC is, and that’s her thing. The media keep telling us the problem is the economy and we have easy answers around employment and inflation, but maybe that’s not the dimension of the economy people are upset about? Maybe the quiet cheers for a healthcare CEO getting merc’d is a big clue?
Doesn’t that answer check every single box?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
I’m sorry, but, as I’ve said before, it wouldn’t have mattered how soon those cases would’ve been brought by Garland. This is wishful thinking. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision from the summer proves this. They were in the tank for him and would’ve covered for him, just as they did in the immunity case
Also, it seemed like in an earlier thread, perhaps from a day or so ago, you were arguing that Biden should’ve implemented price controls (I might be misremembering) on things like eggs. Didn’t Nixon try that and it was a miserable failure for him? Corporations were able to get around them and it resulted in shortages
Martin
Here’s someone else, in the UK, saying the exact thing I’ve been saying for a while. 6 minute video.
My attitude is the same. It’s not an enthusiastic argument, it’s one of resignation.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The immunity decision didn’t seal the argument. It required Smith to remove some aspects of the case but the case is still solid – he just ran out of time.
Nixon was 50 fucking years ago, man. The economy was radically different. And Nixon froze ALL prices and ALL wages. Like, do you not get that tariffs on a particular good are a useful tool but tariffs on everything is not?
There is this temptation in politics to brand a word as good or evil (and you tend to fall into this trap more than most, IMO) and it just ruins any hope of discourse because taxes aren’t good or evil and tariffs aren’t good or evil and price controls aren’t good or evil. In the post I wrote about price control on eggs you seem to be overlooking that idea was an extension of the fact that price controls for milk have been in place my entire goddamn life! How did you skip right over that and jump to Nixon other than to make a wildly disingenuous argument that voters love the free market or whatever argument you are trying to make.
Gloria DryGarden
Here’s an insta/ Facebook link for those who can watch it. The main point is that “curiosity alleviates fear” and then a list of 5+ recommended books on this long term move toward Authoritarianism, using racism, misogyny etc, as tools, to make the rich get richer.
facebook.com/reel/1075410660731296?mibextid=LHkPGVQP5RamZ00d
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Of course I understand the basic concept. I was simply posing a question about some factoid I’d read awhile back, I wasn’t trying to seriously put forward an argument in favor of free markets or anything. I was hoping you’d answer it
When have I ever done this? Because I called the people who voted for Trump evil? I won’t apologize for saying that because it’s true. I wasn’t wrong. There was literally no excuse for it. I don’t love corporations or the rich either but I knew better than to fucking vote for somebody like Donald Fucking Trump, a man who has fucked over workers and the poor his entire life. I knew what he was and what he’d actually do if given power. I hadn’t forgotten. What’s their excuse? And now they will all have blood on their collective hands. They willingly and knowingly (at least they should have, the information was out there) voted for fascism.
Easy, I skimmed and misremembered your post. I even hedged as such in the comment you’re replying to.
I once again quote Kay:
To be honest, I don’t really disagree with you that the Dems should be more aggressively anti-corporate. I just don’t think being mad about inequality from the rich/corporations is an adequate excuse for choosing fascism, especially when that choice is a parody of a crony capitalist who represents everything wrong with American capitalism
ETA: This is also assuming that all of that anti-corporate sentiment is from people correctly ascribing their problems to wage stagnation from corporations, etc and not something stupid like corporations being seen as too “woke” by conservatives
Martin
I’m sorry. I’m getting overly defensive. Questions are starting to feel like attacks. I fucked up. Maybe I need to step away. Let me try this again.
So, there are a few theories around price controls. One is that you can set a floor and ceiling around a commodity to stabilize prices. This is designed to function the way that arbitrage does in other markets (like oil) by taking inventory off the market when prices are low, storing them, and then selling them back when prices are high to lower costs. That doesn’t work for perishable goods, though. The floor/ceiling approach basically keeps prices from spiking too high (the ceiling kicks in) so someone in the system needs to eat the costs, but the floor compensates for that by ensuring that competition doesn’t turn into a race to the bottom and bankrupt everyone. So long as the market disruptions are short (like with a flu) the supply chain can eat a few months of costs, and then earn it back later. That’s how the dairy price controls work, and their focus was more about trying to ensure that all parts of the country had access to milk by putting a floor under prices.
It’s when you have protracted periods of costs outside of the price controls that things go to shit. So it requires that government be fairly responsive to the problem. Nixons price controls were short lived but they were so broad in scope and it was so unclear that the underlying economic conditions wouldn’t require extending them indefinitely, that industry responded in ways that often undermined the point. Worth noting though that employer provided health care surged under both wage control efforts – Nixon and FDRs during the war as a way to compensate employees to attract them that evaded the wage controls. An interesting counterfactual is whether those wage controls prevented the US from implementing universal healthcare because it gave just enough workers employer provided care that it became something for those workers to fear losing and to then oppose a potentially less generous system (that does seem to be a theme in our country).
On my broader theory, I question whether government is capable of even being sufficiently responsive to that kind of issue though. Would USSC see it as improper for the USDA to set price controls without Congress having to pass a new law? Would Congress interfere with the activity? etc. Part of the theory is that it may not matter if he could implement these things because they would all be insufficient to the problem because government has become so weak.
I think the problem with this take, and it’s how we naturally think of these things, myself included, is that it’s a kind of frog boiling or ship of theseus problem. It’s like saying ‘you can’t handle a 3 degree temperature increase without complaining’ and yeah, maybe the first few times that happens, but eventually it hits 130F and I think that’s a valid point to complain because you’re going to die pretty soon at that temp. In fact, it’s probably valid to complain at 90F if you can anticipate it’ll keep doing that and eventually hit 130F, and maybe we shouldn’t do something now to stop that?
It’s easy to get sucked into incrementalist arguments. Businesses do it all. the. time. But people have breaking points. One day you wake up, or more likely, you bring up around the water cooler that your cable went up another $5, and someone mentions Netflix or BitTorrent or whatever and you decide ‘fuck it, I don’t need cable’ and then that industry just dies off. And it comes as a surprise to everyone – to the cable company, even to the customer who just then realized that their breaking point had been reached.
There’s two components to solving any problem. You need a good idea, and you need a good execution. Democracy is good at ideas but tends to have a really hard time with execution unless you are investing a lot of time and effort in making the machine efficient (and as a retired administrator, I can say I think the US is pretty bad at that). Authoritarians are terrible with ideas but usually pretty good with execution. If the price of eggs is too high, you just set the price lower, or you throw executives out of windows until it comes down. You have a lot of different levers you can pull to solve a problem.
I used to use the saying ‘problems have a way of getting solved’ as a threat. Either you help solve the problem, or I will find a way to remove you from the process (usually getting you fired). It’s in invitation to do it the good way, and a statement that we’re not going to allow it to go unsolved and will choose the bad way if necessary. All of the data I see – almost everywhere I look – is that Trump is the expression of ‘the bad way if necessary’. And I think we can turn back and say ‘I guess Biden fucked up then’ as why voters chose that option, but I don’t think that either – most of his policies are pretty popular even now, Harris’s polices were more popular than Trumps.
I won’t accept that voters are evil, or insane. I don’t think all of Trumps voters are malicious (many certainly are, but enough aren’t for Democrats to win). I just think those that can be reached are fed up with a system that doesn’t seem to work no matter who is in charge. That’s kind of what the double haters were saying, and there were a lot of them. That’s what a lot of the disaffected voters say: ‘nothing is going to change’. I think the problem is the system doesn’t permit change. The problem is the system. It’s 90F, it going to keep going up, I’m not in danger yet, but I will be soon – something needs to happen – I need to break the machine making the temperature go up. I think enough voters crossed that threshold and Trump looked more likely to break the machine than Harris. It doesn’t matter what comes next so much as the thing hurting us stop. Once that happens, we will have another election and pick the people we think will best build a better system. I think Dems are well positioned to do that, but I think in the meantime, they need to acknowledge that the machine is broken and stop defending it, and find a way to present that message more constructive than Trump does (or whoever might succeed him, if we’re given that opportunity).
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I don’t think it’s just wage stagnation. I think it’s a perception that the rich are too rich and too powerful. At least, that bears out in polling. I’m not sure a lot of these people even expect more money in their pocket so much as those people get knocked down.
It’s one place I think the Democrats ‘we’re for everyone’ messaging might hurt them. I don’t think the public wants lawmakers to be for billionaires. I think they want billionaires to be the enemy. Someone just shot one in the head and a lot of people seem pretty happy about that.
I think ‘woke’ is a little bit of a fair criticism about means. I was reading some polling and focus group information on Biden’s college debt relief and it’s broadly popular – like ⅔ or more of the public support it. But a majority are upset by it because they want to see similar program for other debt problems, notably medical debt. It creates this dichotomy of people liking it and simultaneously being upset because there’s an absence of something they think should also be happening. And of course that’s super easy to weaponize politically.
While a certain subset – probably a large subset – of Trumps supporters are upset that DEI programs to help people of color in the professional workplace (nobody is implementing DEI for assembly line workers – these are programs for professionals/executives) because they’re racist, I wonder if Democrats could have achieved similar goals by simply breaking up large corporations which would have created more professional and executive positions so everyone would have gotten more opportunities and been able to make that work even with the DEI push in addition. Right now, DEI only helps certain groups. The breakups would have helped everyone, and the DEI could have been sold as a broader effort that wouldn’t exclude whites. Because DEI in many ways operates as an admission that the market is zero sum, but it doesn’t have to be – and government can ensure that it isn’t, if it can wield that power. And if you do that, you can change the nature of how DEI programs operate and sell that to a broader audience.
rikyrah
@Quinerly:
Phuck Outta Here😒😒😠😠
rikyrah
May you have successful negotiations👏🏾
rikyrah
@Martin:
Once again….
The biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action and DEI…
ARE WHITE WOMEN.
The comparative crumbs given to Non-Whites cannot compare.
rikyrah
@Melancholy Jaques:
Uh huh
Funny how that happens
JML
Solidarity forever! A first contract can be a long and tedious process, but it’s unbelievably good. Well done!
(Would you believe it took over 2 years from the union vote to get an actual contract negotiated for HPB workers in MN? Management basically just wouldn’t negotiate and kept finding new ways to stall, hoping that the union organizers would quit or move on. Lot of turnover in retail after all. But they held together and got it done!)
We’re heading into negotiations again this year. It’s going to be hard, because management will cry poverty like they always do. We negotiated a Salary & Equity study in the last round…has it been completed yet? No. Has it been started yet? No. Because management wants to kick it down the road as long as possible, because it will bring real data and costs to the next contract and make them look terrible.
Never trust management. Never.
Barry
@Martin: “The immunity decision didn’t seal the argument. It required Smith to remove some aspects of the case but the case is still solid – he just ran out of time.”
It massively expanded presidential immunity and massively excluded evidence, and all for no good reason, except to get Trump off the hook.