Brian West Easley, a partner in the labor and employment practice in the Chicago office of Cleveland-based law firm Jones Day, led a team of five other attorneys charged with managing Detroit’s labor relations during the city’s bankruptcy. He was responsible for negotiating new, five-year agreements with 48 collective-bargaining units, many of which were working without a contract. From October 2013 to June, he and his team were involved in “pretty much nonstop bargaining,” he says.
With many of the city of Chicago’s 32,000 employees represented by a constellation of unions, and with 10 local public-employee pension funds underfunded by a combined $37 billion, Easley talks about what Chicago can learn from the Motor City when it comes to dealing with labor unions.
Build trust through transparency and accessibility.
Labor relations (in Detroit) were really not good due to years of political patronage, and with money troubles the city was having, people weren’t always paid on time. There was lots of distrust between the city and the unions. The two sides didn’t communicate that well.
We were very transparent in what we were doing and what the city’s objectives were. The city was not particularly forthcoming with information before the bankruptcy. But after the bankruptcy, the unions knew what we were telling them was true because it was all public.
We didn’t come to the table with any preconceived notions or history. We treated these folks with respect, and I don’t think that was always the case. We came in with a very lawyerly approach, and we were very accessible. Phone calls, text messages, emails. There was a lot more communication than was typical between the city and the unions. Face to face was always the best way to communicate.
It was still a process. It didn’t happen overnight. It’s not like we were holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” at the first meeting. But over time they knew we’d listen and treat proposals with respect, even if we couldn’t always agree.
Overshoot the bargaining objective.
The most difficult things we asked unions to do was agree to a change to their pension plans. It may be required; as we all know in Illinois, we have significant issues when it comes to pension funding. There were announcements made by the emergency manager’s office that the pension plan may be frozen, and it may be replaced by a defined-contribution plan, a 401(h). The emergency manager never implemented this announcement because the city reached agreements with the labor unions representing city employees to amend the pension plans.
We started out taking an aggressive position on pensions, and then the alternative was less onerous. In collective bargaining, that’s a very common approach. You start with a beginning position, and you move off of that.
Find a way to collaborate with labor.
It’s very easy for people outside the process to demonize the unions and blame whatever problems happen on labor. No matter who you’re talking to, you’re talking to people about things that they know a lot more about than you do. Management has no monopoly on good ideas. The unions have ideas, too, and they’re not always bad ideas or ideas that are inimical to the city.
In the fire department, there was antiquated equipment. The fire trucks, hoses, ladders, helmets—everything was old. We established a working group with labor, management consultants and lawyers and came up with a plan to upgrade the equipment. The guys on the labor side, they know it better than anybody else. It was obviously expensive, but by working together we figured out a way to prioritize the needed replacements and make the money go further.
Offer options and allow different unions to make different choices.
The fire department and a large part of the police department got close to the same wage increases, but they gave up different things. They made their own judgments. The police department got an 8 percent wage increase and gave up some leave benefits and allowed the privatization of some functions. The fire department didn’t want to give up holidays, so they did overtime reductions and eliminated some other forms of paid leave.
We just told them: This is what we got, how do you want to spend it? They may not like the budget, but we didn’t have to convince anyone Detroit was in financial trouble.