By Cy Ryan

Tue, Jan 29, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Carson City — In a slumping market, the state Public Employees Retirement System, with 140,000 state and local government workers, is suffering just like everyone else with its investments.

In the past fiscal year, it enjoyed a 14.8 percent return on investments of $23 billion, the highest mark in the past nine years.

But unaudited figures through about the first half of this fiscal year, which began July 1, show the fund is in negative territory, down 3.4 percent.

Steep drops in the stock market during the first two weeks of January hurt the fund, said Dana Bilyeu, the system’s chief executive officer. Ken Lambert, the system’s investment officer, added that it’s been more challenging this fiscal year to meet the fund’s goal of an 8 percent annual return.

Bilyeu and Lambert presented the latest figures to a legislative committee that monitors the retirement fund, which covers 103,693 active members and about 37,000 retirees.

As of June 30, the system had 45 percent of its money invested in U.S. stocks, 10 percent in foreign stocks, 25 percent in U.S. bonds, 10 percent in foreign bonds and 10 percent in private investments including real estate.

Bilyeu told the panel the average retirement check for government workers is about $2,200 a month, a figure that rises to $3,500 for police officers and firefighters.

For the past 23 years, the fund has earned an average of 10.8 percent on its investments, putting it among the top in the nation in retirement systems.

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An employer is free to talk to his workers when they are considering joining a union as long as he does not use threats or promise benefits to discourage them from joining, a federal appeals court has ruled.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has cleared two executives of the Aladdin (now Planet Hollywood) in Las Vegas of violating federal law in 2003 when they interrupted conversations between union representatives and workers on joining the Culinary or the bartenders union.

Culinary Workers Local 226 and Bartenders Local 165 were on the site trying to sign up employees. When Tracy Sapien, vice president of human resources for the Aladdin, saw union officials talking to buffet servers during a lunch break, she interrupted and told the servers: “I would like to make sure you have all the facts before you sign that card.”

She told the workers that there was no guarantee a union contract would mean better insurance coverage and that the union would deduct $32.50 a month from their check for dues.

Union official Sheri Lynn assured Sapien that she had covered everything, including the dues and health insurance. Sapien then walked away.

In the second incident Stacey Briand, the Aladdin’s director of human resources, saw a housekeeper on June 6, 2003, signing a union card. She suggested the housekeeper, Adelia Bueno, should not sign something about which she was unsure. Bueno did not understand English and union official Azucena Felix translated Briand’s statement, after which Briand walked away.

The unions contend the interruption by the Aladdin executives of protected union activity was unlawful.

But the National Labor Relations Act found that the two Aladdin executives did not engage in coercive speech and cleared the hotel-casino.

Quoting from an earlier ruling, the federal appeals court said Monday that an employer “is free to communicate to his employees any of his general views about unionism or any of his specific views about a particular union, so long as the communications do not contain ‘a threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.’ ”