Legislature rattles Washington unions

The Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, is still sifting through the wreckage of its hopes for the 2009 legislative session, weeks after the session’s end. WSLC staff are trying to come up with a fair way to rate lawmakers when most of labor’s priority bills never got a vote, and in one case, a majority of Senate Democrats colluded to prevent a record of how they voted on a bill important to labor.

Lawmakers passed no significant pro-labor bills during the session, which ran Jan. 12 to April 26. And that was despite the overwhelming majority held by Democrats: 64 to 34 in the House and 31 to 18 in the Senate.

Republicans could not be blamed for halting progress on a paid family leave benefit, for example, which the Legislature approved in 2007 but never funded. Now it was the Democrats’ own leadership who nixed labor’s agenda — chiefly Gov. Chris Gregoire, House Speaker Frank Chopp and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown.

And the most dramatic betrayal took place mid-March, when the three Democratic leaders killed WSLC’s top priority bill, using a leaked internal e-mail from a WSLC staffperson as an excuse. The three even asked police to investigate whether the e-mailed threat to withhold future contributions crossed a legal line into undue influence. Washington State Police said no law was broken, but that didn’t give the Worker Privacy Act a second life. The bill would have stopped employers from disciplining workers who refuse to attend anti-union meetings at work.

But it wasn’t just the state-level labor law reform that was shot down. Virtually every legislative position staked out by labor went down to defeat. A labor-backed bill to give organized labor a non-voting seat on local transit district boards died without a vote. So did a bill giving a group of community college teachers the right to unionize. And a bill requiring payment of the prevailing wage on mixed public-private construction projects. And a bill to protect farm workers from unscrupulous labor contractors. All died without a vote.

In Washington as in other states, the recession is cutting deeply into state revenues. Rather than heed calls by labor and others to look for new revenue sources and get rid of business tax breaks, legislators passed an “all-cuts” budget. That was in keeping with Gov. Gregoire’s “no new taxes” campaign pledge. As a result, about 40,000 low-income Washingtonians will lose state-subsidized health benefits. As many as 8,000 public workers will be laid off, including 3,000 to 5,000 public school teachers. And university tuition will be going up as much as 14 percent a year for the next two years. The Evergreen State College Labor Center, which provides educational and research services to labor unions, had its budget cut by two-thirds.

Lawmakers voted to delay, for three more years, implementation of the paid family leave program, which is supposed to provide up to five weeks of partial wage replacement of up to $250 per week upon the birth or adoption of a child.

In the final hours of the session, the Senate stripped pro-worker amendments from a business-backed cut in the unemployment insurance tax, and the House followed suit. Changes made by previous legislatures to the state unemployment insurance system reduced unemployment benefits slightly. As a result, unemployment trust fund reserves swelled: By early 2009, reserves were enough to cover 21 months of benefits. This year, business used that as a justification for lowering unemployment insurance taxes, and won passage of a Senate bill to do that.

In the House, WSLC fought and won amendments to the Senate bill: eliminating those earlier benefit cuts, and restoring the right of workers to get unemployment insurance benefits if they quit a job to move when a spouse gets a job in another area. But the House and Senate have to pass the same version before a bill can go to the governors’ desk. When the Senate voted on the bill a second time, there was a push to eliminate the pro-worker House amendments. Sen. Karen Keiser (D-Kent) demanded a roll call vote on each of the amendments. It takes nine senators to require a roll-call vote. Only three other senators joined Keiser. So the amendments were eliminated by a “standing vote,” with no record of who voted to eliminate them. The bill went back to House. There it got the roll-call vote at least, but the amendments were eliminated.

In the battle between the business and labor sides of the Democratic caucus, labor was routed, said WSLC spokesperson Kathy Cummings. If there was any “up” side to the debacle, Cummings said, it was that the rebuff has brought labor together more in a shared sense of outrage. Cummings said WSLC heard anger from elected leaders and rank-and-file members in nearly every affiliate, and that’s prompting the labor federation to look for a whole new way to evaluate the Legislature.

While it’s too soon to say how the state labor movement will change its approach to politics, it’s hard to envision Gregoire’s already-announced campaign for a third term getting labor support.