Activists Carry Alarming News of Government Shutdown Tactics in Michigan to TWU Executive Board
He put the current situation in a broad context. “The narrative is that mismanagement by elected officials led to this circumstance. But this has been sweltering for many years, much of it created by a conservative Michigan legislature. First,” he explained, “was the passage of a State law that said the Detroit public sector workers no longer had to be residents of the city. That hurt the tax base and led to a housing crisis. Then, Governor Snyder gave a $1.8 billion tax cut to business, and taxed senior pensions – which had never happened before – to pay for it. Then, he cut $500 million from state aid to public education.
“Within the first 60 days of the Snyder administration, he passed 60 bills against working people and unions. One required union members to make a 20% contribution to their health care plans. Another imposed a 5% pay cut on public employees.”
Then, on March 16 of 2011, the Emergency Manager bill passed Michigan’s legislature. In that bill, the Governor and Treasurer of the State conferred sweeping powers on these appointed managers, allowing them to usurp the powers of elected officials like mayors and members of city councils. With a stroke of the pen, the ability of people to vote for local legislators who represent their interests was nullified.
In the meantime, a coalition of unions and advocates led a huge petition drive to repeal the emergency manager law, obtaining 250,000 petitions and actually succeeding in November of that year. But the governor and legislature, undeterred, simply passed an identical law to replace the one that was struck down.
Sanders said that the broad outlines of the attack on public workers have to do with class and race. “Ninety percent of African-American cities have emergency managers. Over 700,000 African-American voters have lost the value of their local votes. This is the new Jim Crow. This is an epidemic that will carry to every blue collar state in the country.”
“This is a litmus test for conservatives [to see if it can carry to other states],” he added. “It’s the greatest form of voter suppression I’ve ever seen.
He added that the imposition of bankruptcy in Detroit -- something that was resisted by the Mayor who was trying to cut a deal to stave it off – has led to the ability of the bankruptcy judge and the emergency manager to rip up union contracts, impose their own terms of employment, and stay all litigation challenging those moves. For instance, an outsourcing law that protected union jobs in Detroit is now toothless, and even union grievances cannot advance to arbitration.
John Philo of the National Lawyers Guild, who has been working with AFSCME in Michigan, said that the conferring of nearly absolute governmental power on one individual – the emergency manager -- is profoundly undemocratic. “It’s literally true. We have one person running the City of Detroit who can write the laws from his desk. There’s no public comment. He can tell the City Council, you’re not going to meet. He can tell any manager that he or she can’t speak, even on their own time. I can’t believe in a democracy that this is allowed – that one person can write their own laws.” He said that the emergency manager can set contract terms for employees unilaterally.
“The fantasy that the news puts out is that this is about finances,” Philo added. “It’s not. It’s about putting in a program, and that program is privatizing the public sector.” He said that Detroit’s Health Department is now run by a “private for profit non profit” with ties to the Governor.
“Why is this allowed to happen and why do we accept it so easily?,” he continued. “It’s about class and race. The narrative of corruption is a big fat lie.” Philo said that laws on the books existed to root out corruption before the emergency manager law was passed, and that the law actually was passed because of a dispute in which a judge prevented a conservative agenda which would have picked textbooks and overridden a local school board. That motivated wealthy conservatives to plot the attack on elected legislators and install emergency managers with unprecedented powers.
Herb Sanders added that news accounts are touting the creation of new public authorities and utilities which will supposedly be more efficient than the public sector entities they are replacing. “However, the bottom line is that they will be run by cronies of the Governor who will profit from these entities at the expense of our jobs.”
At the conclusion of the presentation to Local 100’s Executive Board, and in response to questions, Philo and Sanders urged Local 100 to publicize news about how events are unfolding in Michigan and to organize locally to prevent this same agenda from being pushed in New York.