With the news about the Irene-related labor grievance filed by the Vermont State Employees Association now on the front page, Governor Shumlin could have made a few different choices. The safe, and perhaps obvious thing to do would be to stay mum on the subject, leaving it in the hands of his Administration Secretary and letting the process play out around him. Stay “above the fray” as it were.
Instead, Shumlin has doubled down – personally, rather than through proxies. In doing so, he’s all but declared war with the union leadership in a divide-and-conquer strategy that seems designed to turn Vermonters – and most State employees – against Conor Casey and the VSEA leadership (as well as the 91 employees whose names are on the grievance):
This head-on confrontation and escalation surprises me a bit, but it must be the result of a political calculation by Shumlin that he has little to lose, the VSEA has more to lose – and perhaps he has something to gain.
Consider: as Shumlin’s first term continues, his approach to crafting a political persona as Governor seems to be to go all in on a couple marquee liberal agenda items – health care and energy. On most of the rest, he is tacking to the right (watch out permit reform). It’s a modified “captive constituency” theory on his part; by working to (hopefully) actually deliver on the two most precious progressive priorities, he’s betting his base will tolerate the energy he spends trying to look good for conservative monied interests in the state in order to secure their support as well for his future plans. It’s a sound approach tactically, if not ideologically, even if it does depend on producing the progressive deliverables (and Shumlin is moving with clarity and determination on health care, so I’m sure he will deliver… energy might become surprisingly dicey).
Possibly he’s turning the rhetoric up and putting his own face on this battle in order to build up that conservative cred, and he’s calculated that it’s a win-win battle for him. He either sends VSEA whimpering into the corner, or he loses at the labor relations board and casts himself as fighting the “good” fight.
It certainly puts his administration in a stronger position to win this war if he’s in front of the cameras, rather than Administration Secretary Spaulding who does not come off nearly as cool and collected when the topic of state employees comes up.
And looking at how this entered the media’s eye in the first place, it’s hard not to see the VSEA as hopelessly outgunned here, on the communications front. They already let this story completely get away from them. Not pretty.
The administration is calling for across the board 4% cuts to all state agencies for next year’s budget. To me, that suggests potential lay offs. Easier to sell those layoffs if you’ve already painted state employees as unreasonably costing the state revenue in the aftermath of Irene.
Of course, this is outrageous when you consider that state employees have already been forced to accept substantial pay cuts, loss of benefits, and a retirement give back in the last two years, as well as layoffs, while the wealthiest Vermonters have been asked to contribute exactly nothing to solving the state’s revenue problems.
How can our governor denegrate the work that day of the state hospital workers and the people that went in and saved those servers, while their car floated away? Are those the people who want the double time? If it is, I would give them a hearing at least. Maybe some of these 90 workers really did earn some extra pay, I don’t know. I think the road workers have their own set of contreact terms they work by during an emergency, or that’s what someone said on WDEV today. And on channel 3 tonight the governor said that only snow is an emergency? That didn’t sound right.
Today I received notice of a “public forum” being conducted in locations throughout Vermont by the ANR and NRB seeking input on just that topic.
Here’s a link to the schedule
It came as a bit of a surprise that tomorrow night is the St. Albans forum (from 7:00 until 9:00 at the Town Hall.) I have seen nothing in the Messenger about this event and wonder why, if this is a public forum, more effort hasn’t been made to engage the public in a timely manner.
If anyone can tell me just how long this plan for public forums has been in the works, I’d truly like to know. Written comments are only being accepted until October 27.
I believe the last form of discrimination is economic. As rights were eventually won by women, by Catholic and Jewish immigrants, by blacks and Hispanics, by gays and others, economic classism and its attendant forms of exclusion are the final barriers of discrimination, walling off the general populace — the 99% — from true emancipation and freedom.
During the Civil Rights movement in the ’60’s, the great monk Thomas Merton stirred controversy when he correctly “outed” many white liberals involved in that struggle. He diagnosed that many white liberals participated in the movement for essentially two reasons: first, out of some generalized good will and abstract love of mankind; and second, to keep their feet poised to press the brake pedal if the aspirations of blacks began to intrude on the white liberal’s own privileged status and conditions.
To white liberals, he wrote that black America,
Of course the VSEA is outgunned. Shumlin is using the power of the establishment to drive a wedge between those VSEA members asking that their contractural right be honored and, not only other union members but, the general populace. Shumlin’s tactical verbiage, it seems to me, is little more than Reagan’s convenient use of “welfare queens” to discredit social programs on behalf of the have-nots.
Shumlin, as with too many other corporatist Democrats, is more than willing to practice that old tactic of “kick down and kiss up” to ultimately protect the interests of the dominant economic class.
This is a situation that never should have happened. As an older unemployed worker that cannot hope to get a job in today’s wonderful economic climate, I have little sympathy for a few vsea folks that are suing over the failure of being notified by mail about a change of work address after a hurricane practically destroyed the state. As a believer in unions I agree with the stance that something in a contract with management/employer was violated. Whether the violation was a purposeful move to tick off the union or whether it just got lost in the clutter in the chaos of a natural disaster is an open question. As someone who knows conor Casey, I do not envy the position he’s been put into.
But on this one I am afraid that I have to side with Shummy. I think that the vsea, who i support, could not have found a worse public relations disaster than this one. I know that only a few signed onto it, not the whole of the union, but it sends a message to those wiped put by the floods or those of us poor saps that cannot find a job that they only care about themselves and little or nothing about Us. I just hope that they manage to work it out before the damage spreads too far.
KB: Agreed. It’s too bad. Some of the vsea’s own members are mad at them too.