Elections Have Consequences
Leo Sell, Legislative Committee Chairperson
Michigan lawmakers took their usual extended summer break but not before doing dreadful damage to the interests of the middle class and public employees – particularly those in K-12 jobs. Teacher tenure has been decimated. Educators will no longer be allowed to collectively bargain teacher placement and teachers at all levels can now be fired for almost any reason. Support jobs are more at risk than ever.
More broadly, legislation passed that places a “hard cap†dollar limitation on the amount of premium cost that can be paid by a public employer and forces their public employees to pay at least 20 percent of medical insurance premium cost. This is seriously onerous legislation that impacts all public employees except those working for the big three universities and civil service state workers. That means eventually every employee of every school district, local governance unit, police, firefighters, etc.  will be forced to bear this cost. One wonders what happened to local control and home rule concepts that are supposedly also so dear to conservatives.
Let’s be clear. It is not that the current legislature did not WANT to apply these measures to you and I. The ONLY reason this measure is not applying to us is because doing so requires an amendment to the Michigan Constitution.
One ray of hope is pending recall efforts. One particular legislator in the Genesee county area – Paul Scott, faces a November recall election after over 12,000 recall signatures were gathered in his district. Here in the greater Lansing area, we are fortunate at this time to have local legislators who are highly supportive of public education and public employees as well as middle class interests in general terms. Most of Michigan is not so lucky, though.
Which leads to the recently signed redistricting bill. A number of factors came in to play this year. First, redistricting in Michigan is effectively controlled by the very incumbent politicians who can benefit most by gerrymandered districts. Obviously, with Republican control of the entire machinery of lawmaking in Michigan, partisan advantages will be maximized. An additional factor was the loss of one congressional seat. Not surprisingly, congressional districts were designed to pit two Democratic congress members against each other.
That aside, the congressional districts drawn up for southeast Michigan appear to be designed to reduce minority vote strength and are probably in violation of the law – although it’s doubtful the GOP-controlled Michigan Supreme Court would so rule.
As far as state districts, analysis is still going on and it is not clear what kind of makeup exists district to district just yet. You can see the maps at http://house.michigan.gov/home_redistricting.asp.
Finally, the flip of the Michigan Supreme court back to Republican control (really, you don’t think that body is truly nonpartisan, do you?) has resulted in a couple of notable decisions. One is a reversal of a previous decision and has effectively eliminated the payroll deduction of PAC (Political Action Committee) contributions. That has little effect on us at MSU because we’ve never pursued that avenue. We do, of course, highly encourage members to contact the APA office to request a PAC form and make one or more contributions to help fight off these constant attacks on our livelihood.
The other interesting supreme court decision is better news. In effect, they’ve ruled that e-mails sent through the employer’s mail system among leaders of the union/association are not public documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We still advise caution, of course, about using the MSU mail system for purposes related to union representation, since in theory the employer can examine that data under the law (however to so would be a violation of MSU policies.)
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