Mayor Rahm Emanuel and city employees will resume their roiling dispute Monday, with labor leaders and Emanuel aides scheduled to meet at a union hall on the South Side.
A source close to the negotiations told the Chicago News Cooperative that the closed-door summit will take place at 10 a.m. at the headquarters of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 399, at 2260 S. Grove St.
Despite calls from union leaders that he personally meet with them, Emanuel apparently will not be at the Local 399 hall. Instead, the mayor will hold a news conference at 9:30 a.m. Monday on the far North Side to “make an announcement about implementing innovative strategies to better deliver services to the residents of Chicago,” according to a statement released by Emanuel’s office on Sunday evening.
The latest moves in the chess match between the new mayor and labor bosses follows Emanuel’s announcement Friday that he would begin issuing layoff notices to more than 600 city
workers.
Emanuel said he was seeking private companies for several tasks now performed by city employees because union officials did not agree to changes in work rules that he had sought.
Tensions between the unionized city workforce and the administration could deepen, as Emanuel appears intent to follow through on his campaign pledge to aggressively deal with the city’s financial woes.
Mayoral aides project a deficit of more than $700 million next year, and personnel costs represent 80 percent of the city’s expenses. About 90 percent of the roughly 35,000 city workers belong to labor unions.
The city is paying many of the workers under 10-year deals reached in 2007 by their union representatives and then-Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Labor leaders so far have rejected Emanuel’s requests that they agree to changes in some of the terms of those contracts, and they said they are preparing a report with cost-saving suggestions that they hope will help avert layoffs.
But there is one area where the Emanuel administration and the unions could find common ground. A labor source said Sunday the union report to Emanuel will include a call for the implementation of “managed competition” in some city departments. Managed competition involves allowing public employees to compete against private bidders to provide city services.
During his mayoral campaign, Emanuel said he would call on city workers to reduce the expense of picking up garbage. If they could not cut costs, he said he would institute managed competition in waste collection.
Such an approach does not necessarily result in privatization. In Houston, the city government entered into a contract with a private company to collect garbage in part of the city, but the sanitation department later bid lower than private garbage haulers and won back the work.