The City of Madison has ordered that a part of the bargaining unit of Teamsters Local 695, the union that represents the bus system of Madison Metro, be removed as part of the unit. Local 695 has challenged this. On Wednesday, a hearing of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, the WERC, was held in a room at Teamsters Local 695, with WERC staff attorney Peter Davis presiding. Labor Radio spoke yesterday to Kyle McCoy, a labor attorney with the firm Soldon McCoy, who represented the Teamsters at Wednesday’s hearing. McCoy explains the background to the case, and the union’s position.
Wednesday’s hearing consisted of the sworn testimony of supervisors and managers, for the city side, and affected workers represented under the current collective bargaining agreement, for the union’s side. On a number of occasions, the city tried to present instances where the affected employees handled any confidential information, or where the employees had the power to change data, clearly implying that the ability of union members to do this was a threat to confidentiality. Immediately after the hearing, Labor Radio asked the City of Madison’s representative, Greg Leifer, the Employee and Labor Relations Manager for the City of Madison, whether the city had found any instance of such an abuse of data ever happening.
For the union’s part, McCoy questions the entire relevance of the city’s line of questioning here.
McCoy continues.
That was attorney Kyle McCoy, who is representing Teamster Local 695 in its case against the City of Madison before the Wisconsin Employee Relations Commission. We asked McCoy if he might have any idea why a nominally pro-union administration would expend this level of resources to remove four people from a union’s bargaining unit on such arguable grounds; McCoy declined to speculate. This is the last hearing in the case. Both the city and the union will submit written arguments, due next month, to the WERC. The WERC’s Davis estimates that a decision may come as early as June.
Reporting Courtesy of Greg Geboski for Labor Radio
Image Courtesy of Jason Dean on Flickr
