Unions smell a rat in Mayor Slay
On Tuesday morning the only authorized bargaining agent for the City of St. Louis was thrown out of a closed-door meeting of the mayoral-appointed Civil Service Commission.
The St. Louis City Charter authorizes the director of Personnel to negotiate with unions representing civil service employees. Richard Frank currently holds that position, which also entails a responsibility as secretary to the Civil Service Commission.
“I attended this meeting this morning, which was about pending legal issues – basically, the city counselor was going to be offering legal advice to the commission,” Frank told the EYE.
“My administrative assistant also attends these meetings. I asked if she was needed. I was told she was not. And then I was also excused.”
As reported this week on stlamerican.com, a number of unions are preparing to file suit collectively against the City, claiming that their negotiations with Frank were illegally undermined by Mayor Francis G. Slay, who appoints all three members to the Civil Service Commission.
JoAnn Williams, business representative for Carpenters’ District Council of Greater Saint Louis, said a number of unions representing City workers would file a suit against the City of St. Louis and its Civil Service Commission regarding what union officials describe as violations of collective bargaining procedures and the City Charter.
The unions say they have an agreement negotiated in good faith with Frank that the commission refuses to forward to the Board of Aldermen for approval.
As set forth in the City Charter, the commission’s three members – Stanley Newsome Sr. (chairman), Steven M. Barney (vice chairman) and John H. Clark – are appointed by the mayor. A union official called them out after a recent meeting as stooges of Slay.
“This whole process is ridiculous,” said Ted Williams, president of AFSCME Local 410, one of the locals filing suit against the City.
“You’ve had this plan for more than two months and it’s obvious that you’re just following the mayor’s orders. You should just submit your resignations right now.”
Williams said a lawyer representing union carpenters, plumbers and pipefitters, service workers, painters, operators and electricians who work for the City is going to demand that the commission submit to the Board of Aldermen the pay plan the unions had negotiated with Frank.
“We claim that the only authority the commission has is to forward the agreement to the Board of Aldermen,” Williams said.
“They’re saying they’re not sure of the City’s fiscal ability to pay. But that’s not within their purview. That’s up for the City’s legislative body to decide.”
The back story
A number of unions representing City employees have been picketing City Hall on Fridays, claiming that Slay undermined an agreement negotiated in good faith between union officials and Frank. Not that the mainstream media has covered this heat that has been steadily applied to the mayor.
Williams said Frank had negotiated a pay plan with a 2.5 percent pay raise and merit increases that could add up to 3 percent a year. She said this agreement was consistent with a promise made by the mayor in exchange for union support for the half-cent sales tax increase that city voters passed in February.
Williams and the unions’ legal counsel claim that Slay then worked behind the scenes with the commission to float a substitute pay plan with fewer financial incentives. It certainly caught Alderman Stephen Gregali and Frank off guard, as each was blamed for the bait-and-switch by City Hall when the unions smelled a rat on this deal.
A July 17 Labor Tribune report quotes from minutes from a June 13 commission meeting.
In the meeting, Frank asks commission Vice Chairman Steven M. Barney about the origin of the substitute pay plan.
Barney said, “I had the mayor’s office help me with this.”
Politics and the system
Frank said he has been in his position as director of Personnel since June 1, 2004 and been attending commission meetings “every two to three weeks” for more than four years. He said he has never before been asked to leave a meeting of the commission.
In the time he suddenly had on his hands Tuesday after his forced exit from the meeting, perhaps Frank pondered Slay’s new appetite for eating his own and what that might mean for Slay insiders. Frank – like Police Chief Joe Mokwa – had once worked very closely with this administration and has been regarded, at times, as a mayoral pawn. Those days are gone, it seems.
Frank told the EYE, “My role is to keep politics out of the system, but I have learned when you do that you can get into trouble with the politicians.”
EYEing Slay
Ironically, an editor from the American saw the mayor himself Tuesday morning, roughly at the same time Frank was being ejected from the commission meeting by Slay’s appointees. Ridiculously, the mayor was leaving a national black Teamsters conference where (according to protocol) he had been allowed to speak, briefly.
A local black Teamsters official told the EYE that Slay’s chief of staff Jeff Rainford had tried to pressure the black Teamsters into giving Slay an award when he addressed them Tuesday morning. The Teamsters balked. Rainford asked why. “Because we don’t give awards to (expletives),” the Teamsters leader told Rainford.
This same union man was showing Slay down the escalator at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Tuesday morning, as an editor for the American was ascending to the conference on the facing escalator. The editor was being led by the hotel’s director of sales, who had been looking out for him, at the Teamsters’ request. She doesn’t know the power politics at play (who would want to keep track of that, if they didn’t have to?). She called to the Teamsters guy, innocently, at the top of her voice, that this was the editor from The St. Louis American.
All parties had a good, long time to eye one another as the escalators moved them, slowly, toward and then past one another. At the mention of the name of this newspaper, the mayor looked, briefly, like someone had hit him in the backside with a cattle prod.
The editor waited upstairs, outside the conference meeting, for the Teamsters guy to show the mayor to the door and then come back up. The Teamsters leader looked happy to see someone from the black press and relieved to have shown Slay the door. The editor said, “Did we make the mayor pee his pants a little?”
The Teamsters leader said, “I think we made him pee his pants considerably.”
Black biz muscle for Clay
Businessmen Clifford Franklin, Eric C. Rhone, Donald M. Suggs and Tony Thompson are leading a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (who is also co-chair of the Barack Obama Missouri Campaign) on Friday, August 29 at Norwood Hills Country Club from 7:30-9:30 p.m. The two levels of participation are $2,300 (Host) and $1,000 (Sponsor). RSVP to Michelle Clay at mcclay@aol.com or 314-616-6123. Contribution checks can be made ouot to “Clay Jr. for Congress,” P.O. Box 4544, St. Louis MO 63108.