Procedures matter!!! And the New York Times misleads its readers

Sandy Levinson

The New York Times reports, in a story headlined "Connecticut Budget is Upended as State Workers Reject Deal," on the "rejection" by Connecticut's public employee labor unions of a deal crafted by the Democratic governor that would have, he says, avoided the necessity to lay off 7500 public employees (and throw the state into a renewed recession). So why do I have scare quotes around the word "rejection"? The answer is simple, although one has to go deeply into the story to discover this absolutely vital information:

But the rejection reflected a complicated whirl of factors, not least of them the approval process itself, in which about 60 percent of workers voted in favor of the agreement only to have it fail.

Under longstanding collective bargaining rules, the agreement needed to be approved by 14 of the 15 unions in the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, with the bargaining units voting in favor representing 80 percent of the 45,000 state workers covered by the deal.

What doomed the package was its rejection by two unions —including, notably, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 4, which covers about one-third of all unionized state employees.

What's also interesting, though one has to read one of the "comments" to Peter Applebone's story to discover the information amind the host of other comments denouncing the labor unions, is that this odd procedure is the result of "a system imposed by [Republican Governor Lowell] Weicker in the 90's during his income tax crusade in which the unions representing state employees had to agree to bargain as a group (through SEBAC, the State Employees Bargaining Coalition) on medical and retirement components of their contracts."

This is like saying "country rejects the ERA," whereas the correct story is that because of our indefensible amendment procedures set out by Article V, it really doesn't matter if a majority of the population in a majority of the states supports an amendment; it still goes down. Or, of course, the various headlines about "Senate rejects...." even though a majority of the senators representing a majority of the population have voted in favor of the proposition (including the nominee for office, see, e.g., Goodwin Liu).

This is basically a terrible job of reporting and headlining by the "paper of record," insofar as it only adds to the venemous hatred of public employee unions, a majority of whose members in fact supported the deal that was made. Anyone who is critical of the public employees in this case is simply being dishonest, for the criticism should be directed at the procedures that gave the minority of dissenting public employees a veto over the deal. (For all I know, there were good reasons to reject the deal, but that's obviously not the point. Rather, this is just another example of how truly undemocratic so many features of American government are.)
Posted 3:55 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]