Vote no on the Senate version of HB 1828

Sometimes there are no good choices.

No one wants the city of Philadelphia to adopt Plan C, the plan to balance the budget by drastically cutting services. And there is a risk that if the State House votes down the Senate version of HB 1828 we will wind up with it.

But that is far from certain.

There is time for further negotiation between the House and the Senate. Labor has some influence over some Republican state senators. And now that organized labor has recognized how bad 1828 it could put its whole force behind a clean bill that allows Philadelphia to raise the sales tax and reduce pension spending.

And there is a long way to go before we can rule out City Council passing other, possibly better, taxes that replace sales tax revenues if 1828 is never passed.

What is certain, however, is that 1828 violates a principle that we should take very seriously: the right of working people to organize and bargain collectively over their wages and benefits.

It is still not clear how bad it is. I’ve looked over the bill quickly and I’m not sure what freezing benefits for existing workers would mean. Ben Waxman’s initial interpretation–that it locks workers into the pension benefit they have accrued at whatever number of years they have worked, which would be horribly unfair–has been challenged by others who say that it just means that there is no possibility of unions and the city reaching an agreement to increase pensions for existing workers.

(It would be nice if our newspapers or our state representatives could actually clarify this.)

But, either way, this is wrong. Even on the more benign interpretation, it is potentially disastrous for city workers if we hit a period of severe inflation, which would could reduce the value of pensions.

And, most importantly, it violates a fundamental right of working people and we should not take it lightly.

And the consequences are not just for the city workers. Every time the government undermines the rights of working people, private businesses do so as well. We just elected a pro-labor government in Washington, which gave many of us how that this would be a time at which government would help the labor movement rebuild by enacting the Employee Free Choice Act. It would be a terrible shame if a city with one of the strongest Democratic majorities in the country, a city which played a major role in electing Barack Obama, a city lead by a Democratic Mayor, moves in the other direction.

And when city workers—our friends and neighbors, by the way—and other workers see their wages and benefits reduced, the city as a whole, and especially the businesses in working and middle class neighborhoods, suffer.

So, this is a tough choice for our state representatives. But once you stop and think about it, the right decision is pretty clear.

Tell your State Representatives to Vote no on the Senate version of 1828.