There’s a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal this morning from Roberta Lynch, Executive Director of the Illinois chapter of AFSCME. In her letter she complains about the WSJ editorial I mentioned on Gov. Rauner, Illinois’s budget impasse, and the negotiations between the state and AFSCME:
It is Gov. Rauner, not our union, who has chosen confrontation over compromise at every turn. More than six months into the fiscal year, state government has no budget because the governor won’t sign one unless legislators first enact his agenda that includes stripping collective bargaining rights [ed. that’s an accurate charge], cutting help for people injured on the job [ed. reforming Workman’s Compensation] and reducing construction workers’ wages [ed. dumping Davis-Bacon wages]. He’s taking the same my-way-or-no-way approach in union contract negotiations, demanding that public-service workers pay double their current costs to keep their health coverage while getting no pay increase for four years.
Now, in keeping with his campaign vow to force public-service workers to bow to his demands by causing a strike instead of negotiating a compromise, the governor has walked away from the bargaining table, declaring an impasse when none exists.
In the governor’s defense that’s not “negotiating in bad faith” as the title given to the letter suggests. It’s being a hard bargainer.
Note, too, the assumptions made by the executive director: that wages should be set by the government or construction workers’ soviet rather than by the forces of supply and demand and that there need be no relationship between what the community is willing to pay and what the workers have a right to demand.
Technically, the Governor won’t agree to raise income taxes unless he gets some of his turn-around agenda passed. In theory, the Democrats have the votes to pass any legislation and override any veto, but they don’t have the votes to raise income taxes without Republican support. They need something from each other.
Allowing local government to opt out of prevailing wage requirements are probably one of the easiest because a lot of local governments controlled by Democrats won’t opt out. OTOH, local governments (and contractors) are the hardest hit by the budget stalemate, and any cost savings on construction will help pay employee wages, making it somewhat of a wedge between government unions and trade unions.
The Illinois Development Act of 2013 was a spending bill that included expansion of prevailing wage requirements. The legislative debate made it clear that Democrats believe paying above-market wages to construction workers is a stimulus to the state economy, even in the face of rising taxes, government shutdowns and delayed payments of bills. This folk Keynsianism is probably the most difficult obstacle to this compromise.
I look at it another way. Because Democrats can’t (or don’t care to) preserve party discipline they’ve put themselves into a bind.
IIRC, since the state instituted the current redistricting system, any time a new map could not be agreed to because of partisan splits, the map went to the all-or-nothing coin toss. Very interesting from a game-theory perspective on how compromise is valued.