FOP to Mayor Daley: Furlough Days are for Schmucks
Posted on August 6, 2008 at 10:28 am by Union Labeler
A week after the Chicago trade unions were thought to be warming up to the idea of shouldering some of the burden of climbing out of the city’s $400 million deficit, the Fraternal Order of Police publicly closed the door on negotiations.
FOP President Mark Donahue said Tuesday his members are in no mood to match the unpaid furlough days and canceled pay raises affecting the city’s non-union workers. Not after spending 14 months in nowhere negotiations on a new contract and watching the waste tied to the Hired Truck, city hiring and minority contracting scandals.
“We base what we’re gonna do in the future on what we’ve seen happen in the past. And what we’ve seen in the past is a scandalous waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars,” Donahue said.
The refusal is the first strong signal that the 87 percent of the city’s employees belonging to 40 different unions won’t be team players in filling the city’s budget hole. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Daley forced non-union employees to take two or three unpaid furlough days, canceled the next two rounds of pay raises, and offered buyouts. Mayor Daley may be feeling a little buyer’s remorse from last year’s pricey 10-year contract with 8,000 members of the building trades.
Already saddled with the most expensive sales tax in the nation, Chicagoans can now be expected to pick up more of the tab for the city’s irresponsible budgeting and spending practices.
