Politicker NJ Op-Ed: Disjointed Rutgers Still Bests Governor in Union Bust
Citing potential legal fallout from cultivating a controlled substance, Rutgers management backtracked away from a request to be the state's exclusive pot grower, according to Governor Chris Christie. The snafu left Christie questioning the university's decision-making process, but Rutgers President McCormick has hardly been indecisive in attacking university unions.
Governor Christie has dominated headlines by battling with the large public unions, but McCormick has gone several steps further than the Governor in freezing contracted raises while leveraging the ugly threat of layoffs. During last year’s election, candidate Christie promised to quash 2009 state worker deals that deferred raises to save the state money. Once in office, the new Governor quickly reversed his position in March by admitting “I was wrong” and acknowledging that last year’s deferral deals were legally-binding.
The state made good with its unionized workforce paying raises in July while Rutgers management unilaterally decided to negate agreements modeled on the state deals. In this respect Rutgers management stands alone as the only entity in the state to break last year’s deferral agreements.
Read the full article at Disjointed Rutgers Still Bests Governor in Union Bust
Nat Bender, August 2, 2010
Despite claiming that Rutgers' increased budget (up to $2 billion this year) reflects “austerity,” Rutgers management has not slowed hiring, delayed plans for building, been forthcoming about hundreds of millions in unrestricted cash and short-term investments not reflected in the budget and refuses to provide separate accounting of Rutgers Foundation activities on the university financial statements. Transparency and accountability remain empty buzzwords as even Board of Governors members complained that they did not fully understand the budget they approved on July 15.
Just as Governor Christie has attacked NJEA by appealing directly to teachers to offer concessions in their districts, President McCormick wrote to Rutgers workers to undermine union leadership for taking action to defend the integrity of agreements. These two-year agreements were reached in Fall 2009, one as late as December, and honored by management for a little as six-months—until it actually became time to pay the deferred raises. However, McCormick blames union leadership for taking legal action to order his administration to honor their agreements. Calling for yet another round of concessions talks, McCormick continues to belie his credibility by publicly inflating the value of contracted raises through adding raises for non-union high-level managers.
The foundation of trust—the basis for a successful relationship between workers and managers—has been repeatedly fractured by McCormick’s mischaracterizations, contract breaches and lack of transparency in budgeting. Public sector unions will continue to oppose Governor Christie’s priorities and policies, but he made the right decision by respecting the deferral agreements and paying raises. It would be a stretch to characterize the relationship between the Governor’s office and state public sector workers as having high-levels of trust, but at least there is a shared understanding to abide by the basic principles of respect for legal agreements. Unfortunately that understanding does not compute for Rutgers management.
As a former history professor, McCormick knows that breaking contracts, crying poverty and direct dealing with workers to bust their unions while threatening layoffs is nothing new. While Gov. Christie may be seeking to starve the public sector—perhaps to privatize state services, certainly to weaken public unions, lower pay and charge workers more for health coverage or even parking—McCormick seeks to have it both ways by denying workers contracted raises while expanding the university, accepting more students and continuing to build on campus.
When it comes to fighting with unions, Governor Christie is brash, forceful and contentious. University management has apparently displeased the Governor by deciding not to cultivate a cannibas cash crop for medicinal purposes. However, perhaps the Governor appreciates that the polite, soft-spoken university manager McCormick has taken his administration further than the Governor in breaking last year’s deferral agreements.
Nat T. Bender is the executive vice president of the Union of Rutgers Administrators-American Federation of Teachers and signed the broken deferral agreement for his local.
