Houston Chronicle, December 5, 2007, Wednesday

Houston Chronicle
December 5, 2007, Wednesday

Houston Chronicle.com

Union representing Houston city workers walks fine line

By L.M. SIXEL
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

After months of labor negotiations, the talks between the city of Houston and HOPE, the union that represents 13,000 municipal employees, are still slogging along.

To get things moving, the Houston Organization of Public Employees is stepping up the pressure. The union is running critical — and according to city officials, untrue — radio ads about staffing of key city services, it drafted Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to berate the city in a video clip over its "second-class wages," and it's sending employees to vent their grievances regularly at City Council meetings.

But is that a wise strategy for the union that is the combination of the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees?

City employees can't strike, according to state law, nor can they engage in organized work stoppages.

Their power is largely based on their persuasive abilities. However, under the meet-and-confer law that gave the union collective bargaining rights, either side can walk away from the negotiating table.

"The union is trying to figure out how far it can go — it doesn't want to alienate the public and its members — and (Mayor Bill White) is also trying to figure out how far he can go," said Richard Hurd, a labor studies professor at Cornell University. Neither side really knows how it will turn out, he added, especially since it's the first time the city's civilian employees are negotiating a contract.

In a written message to city employees in October, White let the union know he was listening to the concerns of workers but he had little patience for civil disobedience, especially the variety favored by SEIU, which led the Justice for Janitors strike last year.

"Now, I hear that some public relations specialists are being brought in from outside the state in order to mount a campaign, to claim city employees are being treated unfairly. I hope these are not the same people from outside of Texas who came down and sat in the middle of traffic intersections and caused a public backlash against janitors," the message read.


Wages a key issue
After months of negotiations over vacation time, grievance procedures and other matters, several sticking points remain unresolved. For instance, the city wants to reserve more than half of the money for merit increases — like most private sector workers get — while the union wants a much higher proportion distributed in across-the-board raises.

Some of the problems facing the city stem from not paying its employees enough money, said Jere Talley, a member of the negotiating team for HOPE. Low wages create turnover that puts additional pressure on remaining workers, she said.

"I want to stress the point that it's truly about quality public service and what's on the table now won't remedy that," said Talley, a city employee.

The union is hoping to gain traction through radio ads that claim high school student interns are answering 911 emergency calls.

City spokesman Frank Michel said high school students are not permitted to field emergency calls and he criticized the HOPE radio ads that featured a retired supervisor claiming that he supervised the students as they answered the phones. However Michel concedes that after the supervisor retired this summer, another supervisor improperly allowed four high school students to answer emergency calls, a practice since stopped.

"The ads just aren't true and I can only guess they're desperate and they're misleading people in an effort to put public pressure on the mayor and City Council to come to some agreement," said Michel. The mayor is working on his own radio ad to answer some of the union's criticisms.


Test of brinksmanship
It's a game of brinksmanship with each side wanting to push as far as they can, said A. Kevin Troutman, an employment lawyer with Fisher & Phillips in Houston who has represented companies involved in labor disputes with SEIU.

However, there's a fine line.

"I don't think they want to get into an all-out war with the mayor," said Troutman.

The challenge of public sector unions that deliver key services is not to alienate the public, said Mark Sherman, an arbitrator and mediator and associate professor of management at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. It's an automatic public relations problem if they stop collecting the garbage or responding to citizens' problems.

Those unions can't afford to lose popular support, he said.

"If you do, you just play in the hands of the (city)," said Sherman. "Then they can drop the boom on you — and they can use public disenchantment as the reason."

lm.sixel@chron.com