Thursday, May 22, 2008

Article on Collective Bargaining from Asheville Citizen-Times

*Blog Editor's Note* NASW-NC has joined the NC HOPE Coalition who is working on issues on collective bargaining for public sector employees.

‘Collective Begging’ Claimed
Bargaining Bill Supported
Asheville Citizen-Times, March 9, 1977
By: Jay Hensley, Citizen Staff Writer

RALEIGH – Firemen, school teachers, a city council and a college professor were among the supporters of a bill before the General Assembly Tuesday to allow units of government to bargain collectively with employee unions.
Dr. James H. Horton of the biology department of Western Carolina University at Cullowhee urged passage of the bill sponsored by Rep. Ernest B. Messer of Canton.
Two Firemen, Donnie Perry of the North Carolina Professional Fire Fighters Association and Bill Brawley of the firefighter’s association in Charlotte, called the law prohibiting collective bargaining a slap at free enterprise.
“We have collective begging – not collective bargaining,” Mrs. Barbara Brown of Winston-Salem, president of the North Carolina Federation of Teachers, told the House Committee on Manufacturers and Labor.
Wilbur Hobby, state AFL-CIO president, also spoke in favor of the bill at a public hearing in the auditorium of the Legislative Building.
The city councilman, Jerry Cohen of Chapel Hill, said Messer’s bill would not force any unit of government to recognize a union, but would enhance the state’s concept of free enterprise.
“I think that workers and local governments through unions and other groups are mature enough to bargain over their wages and conditions of employment,” Cohen said.
Messer, who had earlier in the day presented a similar bill before the House Committee on State Personnel, said that many of the things associated with unionization can now be done by governmental employees and that his bill would simply provide a channel of communications between workers and employers.
The prohibition against forming or joining unions was struck down in 1969 by the federal courts as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, Messer said.
“This bill has nothing to do with whether they can or cannot organize. They can do that now, and they are organizing in such places as Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, Asheville and a few other places,” he said.
Messer told the committee there is nothing in the law now to prevent public employees from going out on strike, “but when they get to that point, the persons in charge of local government are prohibited from making any agreement. It’s not a very good situation.”
Some city governments, he said, are ignoring the law and negotiating with representatives of their employees. And, in other instances, a city council has had to hire a “middle man” to negotiate with employees to avoid breaking the law, Messer told the Committee.
Dr. Horton told the committee that the code under which the faculty of the university system operates has created extra layers of management within the system and stripped local campuses of much of their independence of action.

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