Union leaders boycott City Hall meeting with sick Daley

金牛银熊

Mayor Daley dragged himself out of a sick bed today to try and stave off 1,100 layoffs, but he never got the chance to deliver his personal plea to organized labor.

Union leaders boycotted the City Hall meeting, having already rejected the mayor’s demand that their members take 16 days off without pay by Dec. 31 and comp time instead of cash for overtime.

“I don’t think it’s embarrassing at all. It shows that the mayor made a commitment to try and do everything he could to come to some agreement to avoid layoffs. He’s here. They’re not,” said mayoral press secretary Jacquelyn Heard.

“You can’t have a meeting with yourself. Obviously, he needs someone on the other side of the table to talk to. And that side decided not to come.”

Asked whether City Hall would now pull the trigger on 1,100 layoff notices, Heard said, “It’s highly likely that it will happen soon and that it possibly will happen this week. ... Nothing’s etched in stone. We’d like not to — which was the reason for this meeting.”

Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon could not be reached for comment.

A labor source said the meeting was cancelled because “there was no deal or agreement to discuss.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that Gannon was still holding out for a two-year, no-layoff guarantee that Daley has insisted he cannot give because of steadily declining city revenues.

“You just want some sort of guarantee, some sort of time-frame, some protection for your members if you’re giving stuff up,” the labor source said.

The decision by organized labor to stiff Chicago’s mayor would have been unheard of during the 21-year reign of Daley’s father, former Mayor Richard J. Daley.

The elder Daley personally brokered many costly labor agreements in his City Hall office, some of which settled crippling strikes.

The younger Daley has had a tumultuous relationship with organized labor that saw only one major union endorse his 2007 re-election bid.

After the election, the mayor tried to smooth ruffled feathers by signing an unprecedented ten-year agreement that guaranteed labor peace through the 2016 Summer Olympic Games and locked in for 8,000 city tradesman the costly prevailing wage paid to their counterparts in private industry.

But, that was before the economy went south, sending city revenues into a nosedive.

Now, the gravy years are over for both the city and organized labor.

Chicago faces a threatened $300 million year-end shortfall. Union members — who saw 420 of their colleagues laid off Dec. 31, even after agreeing to furlough days and other cost-saving concessions -- now face 1,100 more layoffs.

Instead of a last-minute appeal from the mayor, today’s City Hall meeting turned into a strategy session with Daley and his labor team hashing out “possible alternatives” and, what Heard called, “the effect of certain layoffs.”

Heard said she has a copy of the layoff list, but she refused to release it, nor would she pinpoint which city services would suffer.

Earlier this week, Service Employees Union Local 73 warned that Daley plans to compromise public safety by laying off 293 civilian employees of the Chicago Police Department and forcing uniformed officers to do civilian jobs.

Employees targeted for layoff July 1 include 186 crossing guards, 67 detention aides and 40 traffic control aides, the union said.

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