Days before a concession agreement with city employee unions is set to expire, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has summoned the head of the Chicago Federation of Labor to City Hall for a meeting Tuesday.
The federation’s president, Jorge Ramirez, is scheduled to go to the mayor’s office and then will meet separately with Ald. Patrick O’Connor (40th) who leads the new City Council committee created to handle union contract issues.
The discussions will take place just two days before Thursday’s completion of a two-year cost-savings pact that former Mayor Richard M. Daley and union leaders hammered out in July 2009. In a deal that has saved the city tens of millions of dollars, leaders of most employee unions agreed to concessions, including unpaid days off work and compensatory time off instead of overtime pay.
Daley again factored those savings into the city’s 2011 budget, which was approved months before his retirement, even though the agreement only covered half of this year. That accounting sleight of hand leaves his successor with a hole that administration sources estimate at more than $30 million, compounding the dire fiscal outlook.
To achieve such savings for taxpayers, city workers had taken as many as 12 furlough days and 12 unpaid holidays, which effectively represented a 9 percent pay cut. During the mayoral campaign, Emanuel told the Chicago News Cooperative that he did not want the furlough program to continue because the taxpayer dollars saved by it were not as great as projected and the practice had “demoralized the workforce.” At the time, Emanuel added that he would need unions to help him with “other changes,” but he did not say what he would ask union leaders to concede in exchange for no longer ending unpaid days off.
Ramirez said he has met with Emanuel since his inauguration last month. He said city officials have not asked labor for any further concessions yet.
“The meeting with the mayor tomorrow was at his request, not ours, so he has the agenda,” Ramirez told the CNC on Monday.
O’Connor said he did not think the situation has reached a critical juncture yet.
“I’m not sure people are looking at [Thursday's expiration of the 2009 agreement] as a drop-dead date,” O’Connor said. “We will have a hole in the budget, but it’s not like the world will come to an end and city services will cease to occur.”
In 2009, Daley threatened to lay off more than 1,500 unionized city workers unless their labor representatives agreed to concessions. Two unions that refused to give in to Daley’s demands suffered more than 400 layoffs.
Asked if he expected layoffs to be made now, O’Connor replied, “I suppose all the alternatives will be available, but that’s not a specter that we want to have out there. We are looking to work collaboratively with the unions.”
The impasse over concessions could present the first major test of Emanuel’s ability to negotiate with labor leaders who represent the vast majority of the city’s roughly 35,000 employees.
Strains began emerging in the relationship with labor leaders during the campaign for the February election to replace Daley. The CNC reported in January that Emanuel privately told labor leaders that he favored cutting pensions of current employees as well as future hires. Few city employee unions endorsed Emanuel, with many major labor groups instead backing rival Gery Chico.
Although Emanuel declined to publicly state that position, his Springfield lobbyists recently pushed for the inclusion of city workers in legislation that would have required public employees to pay more into their pensions. The proposal did not win approval during the state legislature’s spring session.