Paul T. O’Neill and Hugh L. Reilly (of the state’s labor relations board) call up Frank Phillips and make accusations about a Democrat. Phillips writes a he said/she said story because it’s easy to string together quotes from the two sides. Read the story. Then I’ve got a question about this passage from Suzanne Bump, the Democrat Phillips puts on the other side of the story:
“They [the Romney appointees] have been extraordinarily resistant to even establishing a working relationship,” said Bump, now the director of workforce development, who will become Patrick’s secretary of labor when his government reorganization takes effect next month. She cited her attempts to move the commission to less expensive quarters to save money and to resolve a huge case backlog. She said the commission had been ignored and neglected for more than a decade by Republican administrations.
While the commission is designed to be independent, Bump is responsible for the commission’s budget and can ask questions related to their workload and how much staff they would need to handle the cases before them.
Anybody know where this commission meets, or keeps its office space? Any BMG readers know about the backlog? It might be interesting for the readers of the story. I’m sure Phillips has a good idea who to call to get this info, and I wish he’d done so, in order to make the story more than “he said/she said.”
In spite of the headline, I think Phillips actually does a pretty even-handed job. For a he-said/she-said, at least everyone’s willing to put their own names to their quotes, so at least Reilly’s really putting his own credibility on the line.
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I would say the implication that it’s because of the campaign money is pretty bogus, but hey — that’s our campaign finance system. It definitely makes things look bad. Same goes for anything backed by AIM — was it just the campaign $$$?
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Here’s the key paragraph, towards the end, which really shows what more we need to know:
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Is this normal? Appropriate? What unusual aspects? Was pressure applied? Was it a misunderstanding?
“The message was received that this issue was of great importance to them,” O’Neill said. He said Bump’s comments were made as the commissioners were arguing for more funding for their beleaguered agency, which the two commissioners described as swamped with more than 600 cases a year.
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Reilly said he interpreted Bump’s introduction of the SEIU case into the budget discussion as pressure to approve the union’s petition. “I took it as a quid pro quo comment,” said Reilly. “I don’t know how else you would read it. The very discussion of that in any context, but especially the context of reviewing our budget, is an attempt to compromise the independence and integrity of the agency.”
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The fact that the story was written sort of implies it was inappropriate, doesn’t it? Reilly and O’Neill certainly say it was inappropriate. That doesn’t mean its unusual. And he gives Bump a fair chance to not only deny, but expliain the possible misunderstanding/partisan smear. But when you’re doing someing like this, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to, how much they hate you and how they might spin anything and everything you say to your disadvantage.
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It’s hard to run this as much more than a he said, she said at this point, isn’t it?
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My guess is that the SEIU issue might have been too complicated to get into in this story. It might have taken more space to explain that than the more juicy stuff. But you’re right, it certainly could’ve clarified one of the disputed issues.
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found here
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That seems to be his problem doesn’t it. Acting, or talking before he knows all the details.
for the appearance of quid pro quo. She agreed to a disposition so that the case would not go further.
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need backup? Here it is. Google is a wonderful thing.
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Does your guy do his homework at all? I wonder how many oher members of the Patrick Campaignistration have been fined by the Ethics Committee. That’s a project for tonight.
http://www.mass.gov/…
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Google Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission and you’ll get their office information, along with an announcement of declining budgets causing the closing of a Springlfield office.
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This is actually an interesting bureaucratic problem that Deval will have to deal with. Not everyone in the administration can be cleaned out on day one. And to a certain extent, you have to deal with who you inherit; like Christy Mihos.
This is my first post. As an old short term employee of the LRC, who was laid off by the Republicans, I know that the Commission is stacked with two kinds of folks. One small group that does the work, and the Commissioners who do not even have to be lawyers or have any labor experience at all, just be good hacks.
that it would be prudent to tread cautiously if there is even the slightest possibility of impropriety, especially considering Ms. Bump’s past track record. The Ethics Commission would likely have given her answer in an hour absolving her of all responsibility and culpability.
I don’t think that Phillips did a very good job here because he presented “vague feelings” as the equivalent of fact.
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Fact: Bump called Jesensky and told him that she was unhappy with the fact that he didn’t tell her a few hours earlier that they were handing down an important decision.
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Feeling: Jenesky felt that the implication was that she was displeased [with him?] about the ruling because “the union supported Patrick last year” [Jenesky’s words].
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Fact: Bump “conveyed the administration’s strong support for a petition by Service Employees International Union, Local 1199, to extend collective bargaining rights to personal care attendants for Medicaid clients.” during a budget meeting with O’Neill.
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Feeling: O’Neill said “The message was received that this issue was of great importance to them”. Reilly “said he interpreted Bump’s introduction of the SEIU case into the budget discussion as pressure to approve the union’s petition.”
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Jenesky isn’t so independent if he is so attuned to the fact that the union supported Patrick that he perceives anything out of the Patrick administration as “taking care of a donor”. It sounds to me like they are being overly sensitive to the Patrick administration.
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It’s proper for the Patrick administration to have a different opinion on labor relations. It’s also proper for them to make this known to the board. It is improper for them to threaten the board unless they vote a certain way, but it also isn’t proper for opposite-party commissioners to take any form of communication as an implied threat.
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The second issue bears more investigation, but it would depend on the context of the support conveyed. If they were talking about adding or cutting funds to the budget, and Bump said “by the way, you know we support SEIU”, then it is in fact improper. If, when they walked into the room, they were talking to the commission, not about the budget, and mentioned that they supported the SEIU in the case, then that is entirely proper.
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I think the article gave Jesensky, O’Neill, and Reilly too much credit here. Phillips gave full weight to their feelings, treating them as equivalent of fact, and used that to portray Bump in a bad light.
The Labor Relations Commission’s office is at 399 Washington Street, in Downtown Crossing – next to the (closed) Barnes & Noble. It’s hardly luxurious, but I can’t speak to the rent. There are other state agencies in the same building.
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The backlog of cases is pretty ridiculous – I have one case there that was filed in 2002 and hasn’t yet been resolved – but my impression is that the delays are due to low funding and low staffing. Unfortunately, as much as the LRC (and other state agencies) need funding boosts to counter years of neglect, it seems unlikely in the current budget climate.
Pardon my ignorance but what exactly does the Labor Relations Board do? Is it basically arbitration agency. If so would that function not be better served by a private arbitration group. Is this a place that creatively one could save money by requiring the parties involved to pay arbitration fees?
I’m sure the LRC’s website has a statement of purpose, but most of what it does is enforce Mass. General Laws ch. 150A and 150E, the state collective bargaining statutes. The agency’s work falls into two main areas: representation petitions (including union elections, de-certification matters, clarification petitions, and the like) and unfair labor practice charges (against employers or unions for alleged violations of the above statutes). It doesn’t do arbitrations; in fact, if the issue before it seems identical to one that could be arbitrated between the parties under their contract, it will often defer the case to arbitration. This deferral saves LRC resources, though it doesn’t always serve law enforcement purposes.
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It is basically the state equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board.
This is helpful to know.
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And if low funding and low staffing are the reasons for a 5-year delay such as yours, maybe those commissioners should tell the Globe that.
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At the moment, I don’t have enough information to judge claims that rightwingers will make about the LRC being some useless govt bureau. They tend to do that rather reflexively (William F. Buckley once mocked the Bureau of Weights & Measures by saying that it had not let the pound change by one ounce in its lifetime–but any researcher or manufacturer who needed precisely calibrated instruments needed that Bureau to do a good job!), so I’ll assume LRC performs a useful function. In that case, the commissioners need to speak up for the resources to finish their backlog. Presumably citizens and businesses would be served by getting quicker resolutions to their cases.
ASTM International or Underwriters Laboratory or some other organization could be the keeper of the pound and mile. I’m sure that actually an organization would love to have the added credibility being the keeper of the standard would bring.
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It’s not a function of government to keep the pound. Especially since we know what a pound is based on a certain amount of distilled water. The pound standard is always at hand.
to assure fair play in the marketplace. Jeff Skilling may tell you otherwise, but as the many former employees and former investors of Enron will tell you, he’s not to be trusted.
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It’s good if organizations like ASTM exist and offer standards and calibration services, but NIST, as a government office, can always be there for any citizen, as Social Security is.
always there like social security is. I’m 33. I will never, ever see a dime of my social security. The Ponzi scheme is about to go bust.
Social Security will be fully funded until 2046, according to the Congressional Budget Office. At which point, funding may drop to 80 or 75%, which is not bankruptcy, and if we raise the cap on Social Security contributions (so rich people don’t stop paying into SS on their earnings above $90K), much of that gap can be covered. Social Security won’t make anyone wealthy, but it’s good insurance against poverty among retirees and the blind.
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Oh, and people who’ve predicted the bankruptcy of Social Security have a long history of being wrong, as Kevin Drum has pointed out.
The prediction of SS bankruptcy or the prediction of global warming?
than predictions of SS bankruptcy. Global warming has peer-reviewed science behind it, and the SS doom-mongering crowd are going against calculations by the Congressional Budget Office.
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Something makes me think maybe you intended that comment as a zinger but choose the wrong word and now you can’t edit it.
We can all believe what the congress tells us. It ain’t gonna be there. Demographics show that it won’t be there. It’s a Ponzi Scheme that will collapse upon itself, as all Ponzi schemes do.
to the exact study you second hand reference?
“stardom”? Looks like Bump ( an admitted ethics violator)could turn out to be yet another “Cadillac” embarrassment…he should consider going “outside” of his campaign ‘team” i.e Amy Gorin , et al( let’s not forget the Internet gurus who just totally screwed up deval .conm)… the latest fiasco. This whole thing has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime… What will tomorrow’s disaster be??? People are shaking their heads and laughing now. Mitt’s looking better every day, isn’t he?. Maybe he could take a little time off from becoming the next President and spend a week or two tutoring the “Governor trainee”? He certainly could use some help.
Last I heard, anybody was allowed to get a copy of the voter lists. I certainly have forked over my hard earned ducats to the state for copies in the past, and nobody behind the counter asked me what I was going to do with them or how I’d share them. This isn’t a privacy issue, people. The site designers did nothing wrong and should have told Galvin to stick it.
Here’s a portion of what I picked up from the first link when I googled “Hugh L. Reilly”:
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“BUILDING & C. TRADES COUNC. v. ASSOC. BLDRS., 507 U.S. 218 (1993) . . .
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“Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed . . . for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc., Hugh L. Reilly . . ..”
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So, Hugh L. Reilly, one of the Commissioners on the LRC, on whom Frank Phillips relied for his story, has a history with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the renowned right-wing, anti-union group. Gee, think he might have a bias?
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Here’s my take – Republican ideology says that government is bad, ineffective, and doesn’t work. So you put Republicans in charge of an agency and look what happens – the agency falls apart. Ask any public sector labor lawyer – union or management side – about the LRC’s performance over the past 16 years and how its performance has deteriorated. Yes, the LRC needs more staff, but a huge portion of the backlog stems from the Commissioners’ own mismanagement. And don’t forget that every single Commissioner who helped to create this mess over the past 16 years was appointed by a Republican Governor.
Suzanne Bump appointed George Noel, former VP of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO as Director of the Department of Labor
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blockquote>”George Noel is a great choice for Director of the Department of Labor. Anyone who has worked with George knows him to be a passionate and dedicated person who always has the best interests of the organization he serves as his absolute priority. He is loyal, hard-working, and committed to thinking and planning for the long-term. As Department of Labor Director George will bring an even keel approach and a commitment to the fairness towards employees and employers alike that was missing from our Executive Branch for sixteen years. As a labor leader he understands the needs, concerns and fights of working families. He has been an advocate for workers his entire career, and has done so in a way that even the employers he deals with respect and praise him for his intelligence, character, toughness, and fairness.
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So this goes both ways.
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By the way, since when is the right to work free of compulsory union membership a bad thing. Shouldn’t we have the right to belong or not belong to any organization we wish? Or do those people not qualify as being a part of a “working family”?
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And what families don’t work? Even the Trumps are a working family.
the quote ends directly above, “so this goes both ways.”
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Oh and the AFL/CIO had this to say about Suzanne Bump.
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I thought Deval said nobody was going to get any special treatment during the campaign. But he made some commitments to labor it seems.
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Perhaps one of them was protecting the SEIU.
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Why, just ask the person bagging your cool whip and corn dogs next time you’re at the check-out at Shaws. How nice that you’ve never needed the labor movement or the security of union membership. Must be comfy on your planet. Do they have child labor laws, workplace safety, weekends, sick leave or health insurance up there? Just wondering…
I asked the UPS recruiter if I really had to join the teamsters, and said I would like to not. I did not get the job. I fully believe I was discriminated against because of my not wanting to join the union.
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If I was in a right to work state, I would not have had to join the union and that would not have been a problem.
You always have the right not to join the union. If you don’t join, you can be required to pay for the services the union provides (mostly, bargaining and overseeing the collective bargaining agreement).
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If you think you weren’t hired because you didn’t want to join the union, you could have filed a charge at the National Labor Relations Board.
Hey you don’t have to join… But you do have to pay dues!
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In that vain, I would like to require all of you to pay dues to the Massachusetts Republican Party. Who’s in?
This is funny, because the argument usually goes like this:
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worker: I want a union.
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union opposer: Too bad.
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worker: But it would help wages and working conditions.
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union oppposer: This is a nonunion job. If you don’t like it here, go get a job somewhere else.
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So essentially you got the same treatment at UPS.
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By the way, if you were in a Right to Work state you would’ve made significantly less money. This is assuming it was your anti-union stance and not your charming way of presenting your philosophy that got you passed over.
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http://www.epinet.or…
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“We find that the mean effect of working in a right-to-work state results in a 6% to 8% reduction in wages for workers in these states, with an average wage penalty of 6.5%. Controlling for regional costs of living reduces this amount to approximately 4%.”