Fellow members,

Our August meeting has been canceled. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1900 hrs at the Teamster Union Hall. Please read the below article about the federal collective bargaining bill that may pass in the near future.

Rick Armstrong

DURHAM — Mayors of the state’s major cities look to be trying to form a coalition with business leaders to oppose an expected federal move to override North Carolina’s restrictions on bargaining with public-employee unions.

The N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition has organized a seminar on labor issues next week in High Point and invited mayors and city managers from its member cities to attend.

The move follows talks between city and Chamber of Commerce leaders from Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point.

The Aug. 5 seminar’s “goal is to learn more about [collective bargaining] and think about what we can all do together on the issue,” Metropolitan Mayors Coalition Director Julie White said.

White said her group has not added a position on collective bargaining to its formal advocacy agenda, although its parent organization, the N.C. League of Municipalities, has.

The league wants to maintain the state’s current ban on public-sector collective bargaining.

City leaders are beginning to talk more about the issue because Congress is considering a bill that would force them to negotiate with unions representing police, firefighters and other public-safety employees.

The bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., has 128 co-sponsors in the U.S. House. They include four North Carolina congressmen: Democrats Brad Miller, Heath Schuler and Mel Watt, and Republican Walter Jones.

An earlier version of the bill passed the House in 2007 on a bipartisan, 314-97 vote but stalled in the Senate and died when the 2007-08 session of Congress adjourned last year.

As drafted, Kildee’s bill would bar strikes, but holds that employer-employee cooperation in the public-safety arena is in the national interest. It also says that in many agencies, it’s “the union that provides the institutional stability as elected officials and appointees come and go.”

The bill hasn’t moved out of committee in the House so far this year, but it appears to have “a good chance of passage” in 2010 because Republicans from pro-labor districts have gotten behind it, said Rick Kearney, director of N.C. State University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Kearney added that if Congress wipes out state bans on collective bargaining for public-safety employees, it’s likely that legislatures will come under pressure to allow negotiations with all government employees.

North Carolina and Virginia are the only states that ban public-sector bargaining by statute, though South Carolina and a few others limit the practice in different ways, Kearney said.

Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy, the metropolitan coalition’s chairman, said he and other mayors “are not in favor” of addressing the issue through federal legislation.

Foy said he personally wants the state General Assembly to repeal North Carolina’s bargaining ban, and thinks it likely to fall eventually. But “the federal government isn’t the right place to be setting those rules,” he said.

He also downplayed the short-term prospects of forming a coalition with business leaders on the issue, saying that upcoming meeting is more about swapping information.

“What we’re doing now is trying to see where we have common interests,” Foy said. “As a general rule, I don’t think the chambers would have had an idea that this legislation was even on the table, much less how it might affect the operations of a municipality. What the ultimate conclusion of that is remains to be seen.”

Foy and Kearney agreed that however the legislative debate unfolds, it’d be smart for city leaders to start educating themselves about how collective bargaining works.

“If it happens soon and local governments aren’t ready, the unions are going to walk all over them,” Kearney said. “It won’t be just the local union and its president [on labor's side of any talks], it’ll be the national firefighters’ association with grizzled veterans coming down from D.C. They will be experts in collective bargaining