Council members and the Mayor should by playing a much more active role in workplace issues than they are now.... but I don't think politics should be injected into an ongoing contract issue so I'm not going to get into how I would handle this specific negotiation. But for background, I worked worked as a salaried employee receiving compensatory time at the Star Tribune and in that case it worked very well. Everyone knew where they stood, but that had to do, in large part, with the fact that there was a healthy labor management relationship. This included monthly committees in which labor and management sat down to talk about ongoing workplace issues. (For a time I chaired this for the worker's team.) As someone representing workers, I could talk once a month directly to the publisher and a lot of the issues got ironed out before they reached a crisis situation. We also interviewed candidates for management posts and shared out thoughts with workers, and from time to time had special committees to jointly tackle larger issues. I want to set that same kind of climate at the city and feel it's especially important right now. The city technically has a labor management committee but my understanding is that the Mayor is an infrequent guest....I believe the Mayor, and, in the city's case, council president, too....should be co chairing this and be active participants. These workplace issues will become increasingly important in the next few years as a mass of city employees get ready for retirement and we need to improve the workplace climate to make this an attractive place to work. I went into this in much more depth in the screening document I wrote on labor issues, which is posted on my website at this link: http://rtformayor.com/index.asp?Page=DISPLAY&GroupID=4&DTID=PP&ID=9455 (If the link doesn't work, just go to www.rtformayor and click "Thoughts and Positions" to find the labor screening document. R.T. Rybak www.rtformayor.com _______________________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
