Ficano forced to go against union ties

Detroit -- Bob Ficano gets it.

Stymied by a judge who halted weekly furloughs for 700 workers whose union refused to accept 10 percent pay cuts, the Wayne County executive this week issued the first round of permanent layoff notices to 31 county employees -- a process expected to be repeated monthly until roughly 200 lose their jobs by the close of the fiscal year in September.

"The facts are that the revenue is still falling," he said in an interview Wednesday. "Property values are going to go down. The bubble burst, and we're in the decline. The reality is you've got to manage. Nobody likes these decisions."

Least of all a Democrat seeking re-election to the top county job this fall with endorsements from the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters and the Building Trades unions, among others. This is a guy who isn't shy about his union connections; he says his grandfather experienced the Battle of the Overpass, a seminal event in the founding of the UAW and the unionization of the Detroit auto industry.

Ficano gets it because he's a realist more willing than most pols around here to go where the facts lead. They've taken him to China to stump for foreign investment; to Dubai and Amsterdam for ideas to bolster the "aerotropolis" development tying industry to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Facts force him to challenge labor in an election year and to grasp the limitations of his position.

He can't print money like the feds can. He can't run a budget deficit. He can't -- politically, anyway -- push to raise property taxes in a county with one of the highest millage rates in the state. He especially can't push higher taxes when tax tribunals are jammed with people protesting their tax assessments.

He also can't change the inexorable tide of economic leveling that will reset county financial capability for years to come. In a single year, Wayne County saw $67 million in property tax revenue disappear even as spending on courts increased by $20 million and contributed to a $105 million deficit that he must erase, one way or another, by Oct. 1.

In response, county salaried employees took a 10 percent pay cut. Some 70 percent of the county's unions agreed to do the same. The union that represents lieutenants and sergeants in the sheriff's office, once headed by Ficano, agreed to take a 5 percent cut. The AFSCME unit representing 1,400 county employees? Nope.

Evidently it's better to lay off low-seniority members and shrink the unit than spread salary give-backs across a larger number of dues-paying members who, by the way, vote in union elections and can vote their leaders out of a job.

The cynicism of that logic speaks for itself. There is, however, a broader question likely to be repeated here as a financial vise squeezes public-sector labor in ways only their private-sector brothers and sisters could attest:

What will it take for public-sector labor -- with no ties to private, for-profit employers -- to understand that the steady gravy train of the past 50 years has ground to a halt?

In autos and steel, the UAW and the Steelworkers finally learned brutal lessons for lagging the competition. In aerospace and airlines, the machinists paid a price. In transportation, the Teamsters got it.

In construction, the building trades intuitively understood the price they would pay in membership and the work to sustain them if the bills for their services weren't competitive. But in government, where a labor monopoly insulated from competition is funded by typically increasing revenue, they never really needed to learn any of those lessons.

"The public-sector unions don't face the same thing," Ficano says. Increasingly, they will -- even after a national economic recovery starts taking hold, adding jobs and building confidence shaken by the Great Recession.

dchowes@detnews.com">dchowes@detnews.com (313) 222-2106 Daniel Howes' column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.