Will County strike lingers on
There really is no good time to call a strike, but late in November might just be the worst. That sums up the situation faced by around 1,000 Will County government employees. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1028 called a strike against the county back on Nov. 18. If AFSCME...
There really is no good time to call a strike, but late in November might just be the worst.
That sums up the situation faced by around 1,000 Will County government employees. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1028 called a strike against the county back on Nov. 18. If AFSCME officials were hoping for a short work stoppage that would force the county into making immediate concessions their plans have failed: unlike Chicago Public Schools, which closed down when teachers went on strike, Will County government has muddled through so far.
This means that 600 to 700 county employees are going without paychecks with Christmas only a few weeks down the road. And the strike could drag on for a while.
Every day Will County employees spend on the line means a day they won’t be able to work and a day’s pay they won’t be able to earn. Every week on the picket line means 2 percent of a worker’s annual income is lost. Union strike pay, if it’s offered at all, is usually only a fraction of what a worker would ordinarily make. After a week or two, odds are that the union will not be able to win enough concessions to make up for the lost work time. After Thanksgiving, Will County workers will have been on strike for two weeks.
One would hope that negotiators for the county and the union will work around the clock a resolve issues quickly, but there are no guarantees this will happen and signs right now are not good. A bargaining session on Monday night did not result in much progress. Will County’s managers do not feel the same sorts of pressures that their striking subordinates do – they are still being paid. For that matter, so are officials at AFSCME. So while civic-mindedness or a sense of duty might spur negotiators on, neither union nor county representatives stand to lose much materially if the strike drags on.
With county government open, Will County workers have an option. If they lose confidence in union officials, or the threat of lost paychecks weighs on them too heavily, they can cross AFSCME’s picket lines and return to work. But that is not without its own risks. Union pickets can be intimidating, and after one crosses the line there is a division between co-workers who remained on strike and those who returned to work. And there is also the worry that union officials will remember who crossed the line if you have to file a grievance with them. There is no easy way out for workers affected by the strike.
All of this leads to one conclusion – one that should have been common sense all along. A union should not call a strike except under extreme provocation. It is hard to see how Will County’s bargaining position has been bad enough to warrant a strike. The county is offering increases to the pay schedule on top of automatic, annual “step” increases that work out to 14.5 percent over four years. With wages in the private sector stagnant, this is actually a reasonable deal.
The union is – understandably – concerned about the cost of health care, but the county doesn’t set health insurance rates any more than the union does. Those are set in a marketplace, which is undergoing all sorts of stress thanks to ObamaCare.
If union bosses were really concerned with its members’ well-being, they would not have picked this fight against Will County. They would have turned their energy instead to a health care law that is a far greater threat to its members’ well-being. AFSCME Local 1028 has put its members in an extremely difficult position. Making matter worse, it has picked the wrong fight against the wrong party. Will County workers could end up paying dearly for their union’s misjudgment.