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An Auto Bailout?
Latest News - Auto Workers Call for Rally at Auto Show Jan 11
December 9 - Auto Worker Caravan Shakes up Capitol Hill
December 4 - Detroit News Editorial - Cutting Auto Wages Won't Solve Big 3 Crisis.
November 21 - Abandoning autoworkers and their communities is not the answer.
November 13 - Listen to Mark Brenner on AM talk radio, Portland's KPOJ, discussing the auto industry bailout.
November 12 - Labor Notes' Mark Brenner tackles the auto industry bailout on Democracy Now!
Song of the Month
Los Lobos, Santa Isabel Children's Choir
De Colores
I have actually looked in great detail at food service as a potential area our Local could pressure public sector employers to bring back in house. What I have found is that it is very expensive for public sector employers to bring this back in house once it is has been contracted out due to some extent equipment costs and that public sector employers achieve tremendous cost savings through contracting out this service. Therefore, it would be a tremendously heavy lift for our Local to bring this service back in house and the use of union resources would come at the expense of other services we are trying to contract in.
However, there are plenty of other areas where unions should push to have services contracted-in and performed by public sector workers such as the use of contracted RNs, CNAs, and other healthcare workers. Usually it costs public employers more to contract out work in this area than it does to bring it back in house. A lot of people, including elected officials, assume that it is always cheaper to contract out work when it is not always true. Therefore, it much easier for the union to get public employers to contract this in, and make sure that people performing this work have quality jobs.
Also there are services where public employers are achieving cost savings through contracting because they are not enforcing quality control standards for the private vendors performing the work. One specific area I know about that affects my local is litter control, where the public entity simply achieves cost savings because they don't enforce the quality standards in the contract. If it did it would actually be less expensive for the public employer to have the work performed by public sector workers.
In my local there are numerous areas that fall into the two categories above which is where I think unions should focus there efforts first on the contracting issue, rather food service where unions could spend a large amount of resources for a relatively small gain to the detriment of public sector workers who work in other areas such as the ones listed above.