U.S. Labor News Roundup

Detroit Bankruptcy Takes Aim at Pensions

The city of Detroit’s “emergency manager” announced bankruptcy July 18, enabling an appointed judge to impose cuts to city expenses and void union contracts. A prime target is the pensions owed to 21,000 city retirees and 9,000 active workers.

Michael Mulholland, vice president of the city’s largest public employees local, said workers are angry: “Everything they’ve been promised is being pulled out from under them. It’s morally indefensible.”

Mulholland retired after 29 and a half years in the Water Department. “I could have worked someplace else and made more money,” he said, “but I was told if I worked here I’d have a steady job and in my old age not be in poverty.”

The bankruptcy of Detroit is the largest city bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Pundits said other cities would look to Detroit as a template for how to manage ailing budgets. A recent law in Rhode Island specifies that in a city bankruptcy, bondholders must be paid first, before pensioners.

Asked if the Michigan legislature could pass a similar law, Mulholland laughed. “If they proposed a law that Detroiters should all be shot,” he said, “some of them would get up at midnight to sign that one.”

The emergency manager say the bankruptcy will improve city services—which often, in the world he comes from, is code for privatization. Water, garbage pickup, an island park, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts have all been mentioned as potential saleable items. “The only thing they’re going to ‘improve’ is somebody’s bottom line,” Mulholland predicted.

Operating Engineers Reformers Hope Election, Lawsuits Will Clean House

Reformers in the Operating Engineers (IUOE) union have attracted a national following among members by daring to sue their international officers for corruption, while also running to take over their southern California local.

They call themselves The Resistance.

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In the 400,000-member union of skilled crane, bulldozer, and boiler operators, dissenters can be “blackballed” from getting jobs.

But Finn Pette, a member of IUOE Local 501 from Los Angeles, said his group is leafleting worksites, holding meetings, and hosting barbecues with supporters. The local election takes place in August.

Current and former presidents are named in the lawsuits, along with the international executive board and several employers.

The list of complaints is staggering: underfunding or misusing the union’s pension and training funds, threatening members, using union money and resources—including a private jet—for personal use and profit, and making union deals with the officers’ own, friends’, and relatives’ businesses.

The alleged financial crimes add up to millions of dollars. The reformers’ proposed remedy includes putting the union in receivership and repaying money that was taken.

Electronic Medical Records: Friend or Foe?

Hospitals across the country are adding electronic medical record (EMR) systems. The trouble is, these systems are getting in the way of the work nurses do.

“Contemporary EMRs are notoriously unusable,” wrote nurse Jared Sinclair. “All EMRs are clearly designed by programmers with no understanding of nursing care. Their software is written at the behest of healthcare administrators whose primary concerns are compliance and cost. Workflow efficiency comes last, if it comes at all.

Companies like Apple and Nintendo, Sinclair points out, have refined their applications and made them user-friendly. Could there be something wrong with the priorities of a country that uses its most advanced software technologies to develop games, rather than save lives?

Nurse unions understand the need for EMR to reduce medical errors, make patient information available simultaneously to collaborating providers, and reduce data storage problems.

However, nurses do not want to become lost in the land of acronyms, drop-down menus, and endless gray pages in which endless boxes must be clicked.