especially Republicans, run screaming from confrontation and controversy. I spent my whole career with the State carrying the spear for political management. If you’re the spear carrier, you’re also the spear catcher. Even though for all but the last three and a half years, I was a career merit system employee, not an appointee, my head was on the auction block at every election.

You’d find yourself in the situation where powerful constituencies and their associated legislators would be telling the Governor to take those employee unions down a notch, so you throw some concessions on the table. They’d start howling about the heartless employer and the next thing you knew one of those legislators would be on TV talking about how heavy-handed you were and offering to step in and restore peace and harmony.

I always told my principals that I would never support causing a strike in any visible service without having made an agreement with the union and submitting it to the Legislature for approval. Quite literally, I would walk away from an impasse declaration and do “a tell me what it takes, boys,” I would agree to it, and then submit it to the Legislature. If they approved and funded it, it might not be good public policy but it was the will of the Legislature. If they refused to approve it, then they were in on the strike too and that would reduce, though not eliminate all the good advice from legislators on TV. And I’m not talking about advice from the minority, the unions own them, so you expect it from them; I’m talking about advice and criticism from Republicans who still foolishly think they can get a union to like them.

And thanks for the kind words.

which did consider them a conspiracy in restraint of trade. That’s why there is explicit language in the NLRA and in state collective bargaining laws authorizing “concerted activity for mutual aid and protection” and legally requiring an employer to bargain. That ended the anti-trust angle for employers.

You really won’t find any unionized employers having an adversarial relationship with the union. Many will fight the union tooth and nail to prevent being organized, but they can pay a terrible price for that too, e.g., WalMart. Most of the safety complaints against airlines are really just safety or work to rule campaigns by the union(s). And if you try to build a big project non-union, you’re going to have your own personal OSHA, Wage and Hour, and EEO investigators.

First, it depends on whether you have a sane employer that tries to represent its own interests. That isn’t commonly the case in the Blue states and it isn’t commonly the case in the “legacy” industries that remain unionized in the US. In the Blue states and legacy industries, there really isn’t the adversarial relationship that collective bargaining contemplates; the union and management really function as partners in trying to get more money and power from the taxpayers or shareholders. So, there are all sorts of crazy things in labor agreements in Blue states and in legacy industries.

Furlough is pretty much a public sector concept. In the private sector, you’re either working or you’re laid off and not working. In industries that have drastically reduced their workforce, there are negotiated agreements that provide some pay for laid off employees for some period of time. It really is just a creature of contract. Some industries have periods of retooling or model changes, notably but not exclusively the auto industry, and the regular workforce isn’t needed in those periods. In some instances, this is considered the vacation time and employees get their leave or vacation pay. There are some instances where there is some sort of pay for employees who have no work in these periods and, again, it is a creature of contract and is negotiable.

In the public sector, employees normally have a work day and work week guaranteed in statute, regulation, or contract; sometimes in all three. Reducing an employee’s work day or workweek is called a furlough. Furlough is distinguished from layoff by the fact that a furlough is for a time certain and a layoff is a period without work but from which there is an expectation of return to work but not at a time certain.

Most labor agreements have elaborate provisions controlling how employees are laid off and those provisions vary from employer to employer. Seniority is the most common determinant and it normally goes by classification seniority and often has some provision for a more senior employee to “bump” a less senior employee at another location to avoid being laid off. Generally, a union seeks as much notice as possible before employees are laid off and sometimes there is some sort of pay package upon lay off. Most agreements require that all temporary and contract employees be laid off or dismissed before any permanent employees can be laid off. Where unionized employers get in trouble with layoffs is there are lots of chickens&*t managers who use an economic layoff as an excuse for getting rid of an employee who isn’t performing well or who they just don’t like. Unions will grieve alleging that the economic layoff is a pretext and that the employee’s layoff is a constructive discharge. Often the union is right and it can be expensive and embarassing to the employer. I’ve done a few unpleasant labor arbitrations where I as the employer’s representative was the last person to find out that the supervisor/manager who laid off the employee had very loudly said to all who would listen, “I’m going to get rid of that SOB.”

Where you have a guaranteed work day and workweek and an expectation of continued work, you have to bargain reducing that workday or work week or eliminating the expection of continued work Employers often get in trouble by trying to furlough employees due to lack of funds without bargaining the terms of the furlough. I wrote a diary here a year or so ago about how California was just giving its employees a paid vacation rather than furloughing them because they hadn’t bargained the furluough. Hate to have been so right; the judge awarded the back pay as any labor relations practitioner would have expected. Gotta wonder who was advising Aahnold or whether it was all just done for show.

The reason employers like furloughs rather than lay off is that it is cheaper. A laid off employee is basically severed from employment and retains only the right to return if needed by the employer, usually in seniority order. Of particular importance to public employers with their elaborate leave and retirement schemes, a laid off employee is entitled to pay for all their accrued leave and, if they desire, their accrued retirement contributions. Since public employers commonly are laying off employees for lack of funds, they don’t have the money to pay off all the accrued benefits, so they try to furlough rather than lay off. I danced with this all during the late ’80s and early 90s during the oil price crash. We simply couldn’t afford to lay off employees because we couldn’t afford to pay off their accrued benefits, so we eliminated all sorts of things because we couldn’t afford to lay off the employees.

So the short answer to question 2 is that you can do all sorts of things to “increase efficiency and reduce costs” but you have to bargain most of them with the union. If you can’t get the union’s agreement you in the best cases face a grievance that goes to arbitration and possibly to court or you can try to unilaterally implement your changes after bargaining to impasse but you certainly face an unfair labor practice complaint to the state or federal labor board that you may or may not win. In some instance, even if under contract, an attempted unilateral change will give the union a right to strike, so you might face that as well, though most unions won’t strike because they know that is giving the employer what it wants; the employees not working and not getting paid.

As you’ve prabably figured out by now, it can be a complicated business.

Trouble is; the answer is always, it depends. There aren’t a whole lot of people in America who know more about public sector labor relations than I do, but there are very few situations for which I can give you a guaranteed answer.