Hindsight is 20/20. I think Governor Malloy did the right thing in labor negotiations by trying to work with the unions. They helped elect him. In my book, it’s always better to try and sit around a table and work together to resolve differences. That’s what Malloy’s administration did with union leadership.
Most commentary on the concession package was that it was generous to state employees. Colin McEnroe put it best when he wrote “My chief health care concern about the deal was that state employees might injure themselves while vaulting over each other to ratify it.”
Of course, the unions didn’t ratify the agreement by a significant margin.
I’ll never forget the first day of contracts in law school. Our professor was Jennifer Martin. She put the fear of God into us. She was strict. She was tough. Nonsense would not be tolerated in her class. She made this clear from moment one. Really and truly she was straight out of the Paper Chase.
As the year went on, she backed off and dare I say “warmed up”. She had the latitude to do this because we all feared her. It wasn’t nice but it was effective.
Despite union whining that Malloy was “a bully” he was actually nice. The problem is that being nice left him nowhere to go prior to the unions voting on ratification.
Malloy’s goal was a noble one: to balance the state budget without resorting to layoffs.
Over the course of the last week, I’ve thought a lot about whether or not the outcome may have been different if Malloy issued layoff notices first and then a concession agreement was reached. Perhaps, that would change some votes. Whether or not that would change enough votes is anyone’s guess but recent news reports indicate a willingness on the part of unions to try and renegotiate a concession package to save jobs.
Who knows what will happen? May be there’s some August miracle. Though, I’m skeptical that will happen.
As things stand right now, we are in the worst possible situation – we’ve had tax increases with cuts to services coupled with mass layoffs. That’s not a recipe for economic success.
As lawyers we negotiate all day. Simply as a matter of strategy, did Malloy error in not sending layoff notices prior to reaching a concession agreement?
I think Malloy may have had a stronger chance at getting concessions had he first issues layoff notices. I don’t fault Malloy at all – he has to take into account political considerations that we on the internet can ignore.
It may be a contrarian point of view, but perhaps the concession deal failed because Malloy was too nice. Contrast this with Jonathan Pelto’s take on Malloy (a search for “bully” on his site turns up two pages of results).
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