UE Convention Resolutions
Stop Privatization
A global pandemic continues to threaten the well being of millions of hard working men and women across the globe. This insidious threat is privatization. Across our nation, "sub-contracting" and "outsourcing" have long been the credo of profit-thirsty private corporations. This mindset has now landed squarely on the doorstep of the public sector worker.
City and state leaders, swayed by greed-driven companies and their well-connected lobbyists, now claim the need to privatize government services and functions to save tax dollars and balance broken budgets. In reality, this is merely to cover up their incompetent, irresponsible, and frequently corrupt governance while currying favor with the corporate crowd. Significant numbers of lawmakers and their appointees are taking flight from the public payroll to sell their knowledge to the privateer crowd, a despicable betrayal of public interest and trust. Public sector bosses and managers leap from the public payroll to the staffs of various companies or consulting agencies pursuing the outsourcing agenda. Like suddenly finding a shark dropped in our bathtub, we have no choice but to fight the dangerous menace of privatization.
Over the last two years, UE members have been on the front lines of this battle to defend public services and public sector workforces:
In spring of 2009 members of UE Local 222, food service workers for the Suffield, Connecticut board of education, successfully mounted a public campaign to save their jobs. In March a subcommittee of the board released a study recommending partial or complete privatization. The members responded by gathering and distributing data showing private food service vendors often cost schools more, are correlated with lower test scores, and tend to serve unhealthy food with higher fat and sugar content. The members leafleted and met with parent groups and local politicians. Workers attended board meetings and drafted press releases, which resulted in articles in two local papers exposing the privatization scheme. In the face of this mobilization, the school board voted to subcontract only the management of the program, keeping the employees UE members.
Local 222 members in the public works department of the City of Stamford demonstrated the savings to the city that could be obtained by insourcing recycling work during the city budget crisis. The city agreed, and brought the work in house to be done by UE members. The same workers who know the city's routes and collect refuse now pick up recyclables.
In Norwich, UE Local 222 members pointed out many jobs that had been routinely subcontracted could be more efficiently done by the public works department, such as cleaning storm drains, light landscaping, and road repair. As a result of their efforts the city agreed and is working with the union to insource the jobs.
In Iowa, UE Local 893/IUP recently fought off several privatization schemes including a plan to contract out child welfare services. The state of Iowa unfortunately continues to devise ways to eliminate the jobs of state workers, a recent example being the contracting out of foster care licensing to a private agency. Union members fended off privatization attacks, but face an ongoing plan to "redesign" many of their jobs, a scheme that too frequently has the same effect.
In September 2008, UE Local 150 members in Charlotte, North Carolina, mobilized to halt the privatization of one quarter of the city's solid waste collection routes. UE members discovered the plan proposed by executives of Waste Pro USA only a few weeks before the city council was set to vote on it. The union turned out at least a dozen people for interim council meetings, distributed over a thousand fliers, and developed alliances with community groups. On the day of the vote, fifty workers and supporters showed up dressed in their orange work jumpsuits. Five workers made speeches, pointing out that $461,000 of the promised $500,000 in "savings" over the next five years would be from selling the city's fleet of trucks. At the end of the meeting, the council voted unanimously to reject privatization.
The specter of privatization spreads across the country as "government-for-sale" signs shoot up like weeds on a warm spring day. The shortcomings of privatization are well documented. It replaces living-wage employment with lower-paying jobs that offer few or no benefits and no union representation. Privatization rarely results in significant savings to the taxpayer. All too frequently, it costs even more. When privateers are forced to choose between quality services or higher profit, invariably they choose the profits, leaving the public with the worst of all worlds – poorer services and higher costs.
On the national level, the most costly and reckless example of privatization is the massive contracting-out of military support work for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More than a quarter of a million private contract workers are deployed in these countries. Not only are contractors performing ancilary tasks like food service, contractors are engaged in combat, armed mercenaries such as Blackwater, whose personnel are paid many times what U.S. soldiers make. U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outnumbered by a coalition of profit-making corporations, "winners" of no-bid contracts, whose actions have essentially no government oversight. The Obama administration has promised to address the worst errors, but progress towards this goal has been so far too slow.
The ranks of our union have been bolstered as thousands of public sector workers have chosen to join UE. We therefore redouble our efforts at turning back this poisonous tide, and extend our hand to assist fellow members as they work to chase the privatization shark from the waters in which they live and work.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 71st UE CONVENTION:
- Opposes privatization of public services and facilities;
- Supports a legislative moratorium on the contracting out of all public sector work, and demand that the Obama administration begin to rein in the out-of-control privatization schemes left over from the Bush regime;
- Demands any privatization proposals receive a thorough public evaluation;
- Supports passage of local, state and federal legislation to require that any work done with public money provide a living wage with decent benefits;
- Condemns efforts to balance public budgets through wage cuts, layoffs, speedup, and other steps which exploit public workers and undermine public services;
- Calls on Congress to restore adequate federal support for state and local governments so that public needs can be met without cutting the wages, benefits, and working conditions of public employees, therefore removing the main incentive to privatize;
- Strongly opposes the dangerous attempts to undermine our system of public education through privatization;
- Calls on all levels of the union to educate the membership and the community to strongly oppose the expanding use of inmate labor to replace public service workers;
- Calls on locals and regions to join with our public sector membership and other public sector unions worldwide, to defend public-sector workers against cutbacks and privatization wherever possible;
- Supports the unionization of private-sector service companies and agencies which would otherwise undermine the job security and conditions of unionized public-sector employees;
- Calls on Congress to cut off all funding that promotes global privatization, including the schemes required from developing nations by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.