Delaware, Kentucky Push for Collective Bargaining
Pointing out the “employee drain” to surrounding states with better wages and benefits, leaders in two states — with strong prompting from AFSCME — opened the new century by renewing discussions on an old topic: allowing workers in their states to bargain collectively.
DOVER, DELAWARE
In Delaware, AFSCME Council 81 has been pushing for changes to the state’s collective bargaining law to allow state workers to negotiate for their wages. In an important first step toward that move, Gov. Thomas Carper (D) signed an executive order Dec. 30 which bolstered employees’ right to organize and said that managers and supervisors could not interfere with employees who want to join unions.
Michael Begatto, executive director of Council 81, says the executive order would “get the dialogue started” in extending collective bargaining to state workers. He said leaders plan to introduce a bill later this year “and we hope the new governor will support it.” (Under term limits, Carper is prohibited from running for another term.)
“In past, if the governor’s office and/or the budget office allowed it, state employees could go in to talk about their salary concerns. Now legislators have to talk to us about these things. And we want to talk about them in August, when they’re preparing the budget, not in January, when it’s a done deal.”
FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY
In Kentucky, Gov. Paul Patton (D) led off his “State of the Commonwealth” address Jan. 4 with a powerful pitch for collective bargaining for workers in the Bluegrass state.
The governor noted a 69- percent turnover rate among the state’s approximately 35,000 full-time employees, and said it was “directly attributable to the fact that the private sector and every state around us pays more.” Illinois pays corrections officers 49 percent more than Kentucky, he noted, while Virginia pays parole officers 58 percent more and Indiana pays social workers 43 percent more.
He added that the state gave firefighters in some of its largest cities the right to collectively bargain. “If we’ve given this right to one group of public employees, what’s wrong with giving it to all of them?” He urged the general assembly to take up the issue in the new legislative session as well as to address a pay grade structure that is “near the point of collapse.”
AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee and National Education Association Vice Pres. Reg Weaver spoke to a pre-address rally that filled the rotunda; more than a quarter of the participants wore AFSCME green.
