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February 12, 2012

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LABOR:

Union pitches county plan to raise $54 million at UMC

Union wants to be viewed as county’s ally as it prepares to sit down at bargaining table

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UMC, owned by Clark County, is the region’s only public hospital.

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Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010 | 2 a.m.

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As Clark County and the Service Employees International Union prepare to sit down at the bargaining table to negotiate a new contract, the labor organization is positioning itself as more of an ally than an adversary.

On Tuesday, the union reached out to the County Commission, unveiling four financial initiatives to help prop up the deficit-plagued University Medical Center, the county’s public hospital. By adjusting state funding formulas and maximizing Medicaid reimbursements, labor leaders said the hospital could reap from $48 million to $54 million a year in additional federal funds. UMC lost $70 million last fiscal year and is facing an estimated $80 million deficit this fiscal year.

Standing before commissioners, Al Martinez, president of SEIU Local 1107, reveled in the news.

“From the very first signs of the economic downturn, you’ve heard me say that SEIU wants to be part of the solution,” he said. “We’re well on our way.”

The move is part of the strategy to temper public and political hostilities toward public employee unions as Clark County cuts costs to cope with an anticipated $200 million deficit. Personnel is the county’s largest expense — and the union represents the bulk of the government’s rank-and-file workers and nurses and support staff at UMC.

Last year, the union reopened its contract with the county and agreed to lower cost-of-living increases, saving $15 million. It also held focus groups among its members and offered the County Commission a list of 200 cost-cutting ideas. The union hired Sellers Dorsey, a national health care consulting firm, to work with the county and UMC to analyze the hospital’s revenue and identify more federal funding.

SEIU, the country’s largest health care workers union, has used its leverage and expertise in that industry to buoy public hospitals elsewhere, notably in Texas and Pennsylvania. The union is working in Florida to find additional Medicaid dollars for Miami-Dade’s beleaguered public hospital system, where it represents nurses and support staff.

In Nevada, Health and Human Services officials have given preliminary approval to the Medicaid changes the union is advocating and will hold a public hearing on the initiatives next week. The plan must be approved by the federal government. The funding formula would be retroactive to Jan. 1.

Clark County’s financial chief, George Stevens, told commissioners Tuesday that his appraisal of the potential benefit was more conservative than the union’s. He put it at $32 million, largely because of the matching funds required to secure the federal dollars.

Labor experts said the strategy is smart politics as governments across the country seek to plug deficits by reining in the generous pay and benefits public employees have enjoyed for decades. The recession, they say, has emboldened elected officials to target public-sector unions, once thought to be untouchable because of their political muscle in elections.

SEIU’s approach is in contrast to the county firefighters union, which has refused management’s request for concessions. Firefighters argue that they’re at the whims of a county hiring freeze, resulting in exorbitant amounts of overtime.

“In the current environment, if you’re not innovative, you are not going to survive,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Unions aren’t simply feeling the heat in the public sector, they are feeling the blowtorch.”

According to an analysis by the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, governments across the country have announced more than 110,000 layoffs during the recession — a number that the group says could climb to more than 900,000 if governments rely on the same mixture of spending cuts and tax increases they did after the 2001 recession.

Politically, Republicans and their allies in the business community are seeking to use the recession to their advantage. In Nevada, during the last legislative session, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce developed a list of reforms to public employee collective bargaining and retirement benefits. Republicans — two of whom were needed in the Senate to pass a tax increase — adopted those demands as a condition of their support for any tax increases.

Unions, experts say, must present themselves as partners in helping to solve the fiscal crises.

“This is meant to redefine the bargaining process in a way that everyone benefits,” Shaiken said of SEIU’s strategy. “It creates public support, improved service and makes possible decent wages in a tough environment.”

He said the long-term stakes for labor are high, as unions sit down with state and local governments to bang out agreements.

With organizing campaigns foundering in private industry, unions have increasingly turned to increasing their ranks in the public sector. A majority of the country’s union members are public employees. (Just 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union, compared with 37 percent in the public sector.)

Shaiken said significant concessions in the public sector could further weaken labor’s standing in the private sector.

As Janice Fine, a labor relations expert at Rutgers University, put it: “SEIU is figuring out how to find the money. It’s the bread-and-butter part of what collective bargaining is about.”

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