Almost a quarter of a century ago, in the fall of 1987 on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sat in a law school classroom as part of a symposium put on by the Harvard Labor Law Project. The subject was the state of labor law in the U.S.
In a closely watched case, the Court of Appeal for California’s Second Appellate District rejected in late January a legal challenge brought by Orange County against the County’s own retirement board regarding the “3% at 50” benefit. Orange County had claimed that the past service portion of the 3% at 50 formula (i.e., applying the enhanced benefit formula to past years of service already worked by current employees) violated California’s Constitution.
It is time to restore a semblance of sanity to the white hot debate over public employee pensions. The discourse has reached a pitch of fever-level intensity. Critics of public employment retirement benefits have all but placed the blame for the worldwide financial meltdown a couple of years ago, and the resulting “Great Recession,” on government pension obligations.
At long last, there is some good news to write about: as I’m sure everyone is aware, Proposition B, the so-called “pension reform” measure, was handily defeated at the ballot box on November 2nd. What’s more, labor’s victory was overwhelming: San Franciscans rejected Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s “takeaway” legislation by a whopping 57.5%. As the New York Times reported, this victory amounted to an absolute “trouncing” by public employee labor of the Prop B forces.
It’s hard to remember a day more important to police labor’s future – and, by extension, to the future of all public employee labor – than the approaching Tuesday of November 2, 2010. For it is on that day that we will know whether the citizens of both San Francisco and San Jose believe that police officers and other public employees are equitably compensated or receive too much. There is simply no other way to put it.
Like some horror movie where monster after monster keeps on coming despite the hero's best efforts to slay them, we now see at the close of a summer filled with deep and painful concessions for most public employee unions - indeed, what many had hoped would signal the end of "takeaways," at least for the moment - the approach of fall with a November ballot filled with numerous voter initiatives aimed at further hacking away at public employee pay and benefits. Here's a sampling of what will be before the voters in the Bay Area, come November 2nd:
In recent months the federal courts have afforded some guidance in an area of the law that remains relatively ill-defined: the parameters of public employees’ Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by their employer, who, unlike that of their private-sector counterparts, just so happens to be the government.
A couple of years ago it was all the rage to file lawsuits claiming that police officers were entitled to be paid for the time they spent donning and doffing their uniforms and gear. Such lawsuits were based on a theory that a federal statute, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), required nothing less.
By wide margins, the rank-and-file members of both the San Francisco POA and the San Jose POA recently approved labor contracts with economic concessions. This was by no means an easy or uncontroversial process. Indeed, acrimony attended all sides of the debate, with some community leaders attempting to vilify the unions for not giving back more and some union members pointedly criticizing their associations, since no one wants to see their paychecks reduced. And yet, these twin votes constituted as sure a victory as any pay raise, strange as that may sound.
July 1, 2024
