Doing its duty in support of the Left-liberal Colorado coalition, the Bell Policy Center released a report today that expends a lot of megabytes (and ink?) to say almost nothing relevant. The Rocky Mountain News first picked up on the story:Labor-management partnerships such as the one Gov. Bill Ritter ordered for state government are positive on balance, according to a report by the Bell Policy Center — a group that consulted with Ritter's staff as he launched his partnership plan. However, such agreements mostly have been used to turn around adversarial labor-management relations in already unionized workplaces with collective bargaining, the report points out. [emphasis added]The report presents zero evidence of so-called … [Read more...]
Search Results for: Ritter union executive order
More Unions Jockeying to Get a Piece of State Employee Action
From this week's edition of the always insightful & entertaining Education Intelligence Agency Communique:2) Colorado Public Employees Union Hooks Up with CWA. Organized labor in Colorado is about to become very volatile. The dust has yet to settle from Gov. Bill Ritter's executive order establishing "partnerships" between state agencies and labor unions, which is clearly the prelude to public sector collective bargaining. The plans of Colorado WINS, a coalition of SEIU, AFSCME and AFT, are in evidence in the new organization's founding documents, first released exclusively by EIA on November 19. But Colorado WINS will have some competition. The formerly AFT-affiliated Colorado Federation of Public Employees has dissolved and … [Read more...]
Ouch! More Pain in Ritter’s Behind-the-Scenes Union Revelations
The Rocky Mountain News today published an article which may qualify as one of the richest, most revealing local political stories of the year. It begins: On the day he issued his executive order making unions a bigger player in state government, Gov. Bill Ritter and union representatives assured Coloradans they weren't going to rock the boat. But behind the scenes, the waters were anything but calm, e-mails and other documents provided by Ritter's office in response to a Rocky Mountain News open records request show. Ritter's senior staff scrambled in the hours leading up to his announcement to deal with what they accurately predicted would be "a good deal of backlash." And a group representing seven Colorado unions rushed … [Read more...]
Chieftain: Ritter’s Order Unnecessary, Counterproductive, and Harmful
The Pueblo Chieftain joins other Colorado newspaper editorial voices in rejecting the arguments made for Gov. Ritter's executive order unionizing state employees:While he hopes his partnership arrangements will lead to new efficiencies, just the opposite could result. Unions are notorious for demanding - and receiving - work rules that often run counter to efficient operations. In addition to high medical insurance costs, old-line industries such as steel and autos had work rules that made them less competitive than those plants which operate without unions. The governor maintains that the restrictions on the state budget ensconced in TABOR would limit the amount the state could meet in future union pay demands. But there’s always the … [Read more...]
Gazette: Ritter Throws Tasty Raw “Sirloin Steak” to Labor Leaders
The Colorado Springs Gazette's editors decry Gov. "Back Room" Bill "Bag Man" Ritter for his executive order unionizing state employees: For the second time in less than a year, Gov. Bill Ritter has gotten into political trouble by throwing a bone to his labor union friends. In this case, however, he didn’t just throw them a bone, but a sirloin steak, by granting state employees de facto collective bargaining powers in an executive order issued late in the afternoon of Nov. 2. Contributing to the backlash this time around is the secretive, unilateral way the political payoff was orchestrated, and the slick, Clintonesque way the governor has tried to spin the issue by playing semantics. Ouch - it's worth reading the whole thing. … [Read more...]
Ritter Unionization Order to Cost Taxpayers
With input yesterday from Colorado Attorney General John Suthers comes the first evidence that Ritter's union executive order will cost taxpayers money after all - despite the protests of the governor's office: Suthers told the committee Wednesday that he expects leaders of other state agencies to seek out legal advice on how to handle labor-relation issues in light of the new bargaining power of state workers. That, in turn, will probably require his office to either contract with or hire lawyers with labor-law experience, he said. "There is no question in our mind that there is going to be an increase in demand for legal services in our office," Suthers said after the meeting. Suthers, a Republican, said he cannot yet put a … [Read more...]
CDOT “Partnership” Success Begs Questions about Ritter Order
The Pueblo Chieftain's Charles Ashby reports (H/T Mike Saccone) that Gov. Bill Ritter and the Democrats are trotting out a Republican state department chief as safe cover for his executive order: A Republican Cabinet member in Gov. Bill Ritter's administration already has found the governor's plan to "partner" with state workers beneficial to running his de- partment. But Russell George, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, would have done that anyway, the former GOP House speaker said. "It's very much in my nature to want to know the people I work with," said George, who previously was head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources under former Gov. Bill Owens. "So, as I got here, I would have … [Read more...]
Debunking One Lefty Lie about Ritter’s Executive Order
Rather than take on all the lies and distortions in the debate over Gov. Bill Ritter's unionization executive order en masse, it makes more sense to deal with them one at a time. For starters, in two previous posts (here and here), I highlighted the internal contradictions and patent inaccuracies in the Left's attempt to deny that the order constitutes "collective bargaining." Lefty political hit man David Sirota, who recently appeared on a TV show hosted by my boss Jon Caldara at the Independence Institute, told this to his "progressive" buddies at the national Left-wing echo chamber known as Huffington Post: The most absurd attack on Ritter is the one that claims he acted in secret - even though, of course, he campaigned on a pledge … [Read more...]
Liberal Post Writer Gets Issues Behind Ritter’s Executive Order
On Friday I highlighted the Left-labor-Democrat coalition's internal confusion about whether or not Gov. Ritter's executive order constitutes collective bargaining. Over the weekend, Denver Post editorialist Bob Ewegen - who has actually earned a degree in labor relations - set the record straight with some important observations: The ground rules for collective bargaining in the private sector are spelled out in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which does not cover public employees. Ritter's order basically paraphrases those federal regulations to apply to state (but not city or county) employees. The NLRA specifies how unions can be certified as "exclusive bargaining agents" for eligible employees in a specific workplace … [Read more...]
Ritter’s Executive Order: Is it Collective Bargaining or Not?
It's been kind of funny to watch the Democratic Party coalition in Colorado dance around the term "collective bargaining" since last Friday afternoon's executive order from Gov. Bill Ritter. Here is a sample: Denver Post (11/4/07): "Mitch Ackerman, president of Service Employees International Union Local 105, called the partnership with Kaiser a '21st century model of collective bargaining,' a departure from the traditionally adversarial relationship between managers and workers." Colorado Federation of Public Employees Press Release (11/6/07): "Union Leader Says Partnership is Not Collective Bargaining" Bill Ritter, Rocky Mountain News Speakout (11/6/07): "Twenty-nine states provide collective-bargaining rights to their employees. … [Read more...]