Greater Syracuse Labor Council

Lance Denno, running for Syracuse City Council - 5th District

1. A Project labor agreement is a comprehensive pre-hire collective bargaining agreement that establishes standardized conditions and wages for all contractors and subcontractors on a PLA covered project. PLAs offer:

Stable labor costs so you can bid without guessing.
Reliable supply of local skilled workers for the project duration.
Apprenticeship trained and certified workers.
A no-strike, no lockout commitment.
Binding procedures to settle disputes, so no work stoppages.
Management flexibility to meet special project needs.

Do you support Project Labor Agreements? If not, explain why.

ANSWER: Support.

2. Private school vouchers and other schemes like education tax credits for K-12 private school expenses undermine public education by taking scarce public funds away from public schools that are open to the public and shifting them to private schools.
The AFL-CIO strongly supports legislation that would strengthen public education by helping states and local school districts reduce their class sizes and finance school repair, construction, and modernization projects with protection for prevailing community wages. A growing number of public schools all across the country are being forced to set up classrooms in trailers, hallways, and closets in order to accommodate their rapidly rising enrollments. One-third of all public schools also need extensive repair or replacement.

What is your view of proposals to provide for private school vouchers and/or charter schools?

ANSWER: I am opposed to the use of public funds for vouchers and charter schools. If public schools were adequately and properly funded we wouldn't have this argument.

What would you do to improve the state of disrepair many of our public schools are currently experiencing?

ANSWER: The widely touted Spitzer education funding reforms are fundamentally inequitable. The floor on the use of the Income Wealth
Index, the guaranteed minimum increase regardless of need, and the four
year rollout of fully implementing the foundation formula reforms when
applied to the big five dependant districts, has created a system in which you can't be too wealthy to get more, but you can be too poor to get what you need. While I hear Spitzer's plea of "political necessity", the fact remains that the NYS education funding system is still fundamentally unfair to the children of Syracuse. Significant personal and corporate income tax increases for those with income in the top 5-10% would provide the revenue needed to solve the problem.

3. Ninety-four percent of workers say firing an employee for supporting union representation is an “unacceptable action” and 80 percent say they are aware that such actions are against the law. Nevertheless, employers illegally fire union supports in 31 percent of organizing campaigns and many use other tactics to thwart workers’ efforts to form unions.
A recent report by Human Rights Watch shows that existing laws are too lax and unenforced to prevent employer attacks on workers’ rights. For instance, while employers can prevent unions from contacting workers at their work places to discuss the advantages of union membership, they are free to deluge workers with anti-union messages.

Do you believe employers should be held accountable for their anti-union activities?

ANSWER:Yes - (Which is why I was proud to attend a HUGE rally in front of a car dealership on Erie Blvd. last year.)

If yes, what actions should be taken against companies that violate workers’ rights to organize?

ANSWER: The political/public response has to be flexible, adaptable to the type of business, appropriate to the local political climate, and conducted in consultation with the affected workers. Boycotts might be appropriate in one case and disastrous in another. Public education is essential. Government and public authorities should not do business with them, to the extent possible. The legal response should be immediate and effective - and it is usually neither.

How could labor laws be improved to guarantee workers’ right to organize?

ANSWER: Using the example above, public purchasing agents should be allowed - even directed - to disqualify low bidders to a contract if the bidding company has a record of labor law violations.

4. While the economy has been growing, this growth has been accompanied by a sluggish job market that seems to provide too few with a rising standard of living or greater economic security. Economists have attributed this unique predicament to several factors, including corporate downsizing, global competition, the introduction of labor saving technologies, and a pattern of increasingly large rewards to more highly skilled employees. Indeed, a recent study found that most Americans today are worse off than they were before the 1989-1991 recession.
Many northeast communities have lured businesses or encouraged them to stay through tax incentives. However, these incentives have not prevented those companies from downsizing the jobs of those very same taxpayers who offered the tax breaks in the first place.

Should companies be able to accept such tax breaks only to downsize thereafter?

ANSWER: No

How would you correct this apparent inequity?

ANSWER: Tax benefits need to be carefully spelled out in terms of the jobs and community benefits that are expected in return. The deals need to be reviewed annually, and must be subject to cancellation for non-compliance.

5. An honest day’s work should be rewarded with an honest day’s pay. That’s what a “Living Wage” is all about. Living wage ordinances have been enacted in 80 localities across the nation and have been passed in Rochester, Buffalo and New York City.
A living wage ordinance requires employers to pay wages that are above federal or state minimum wage levels. Only a specific set of workers are covered by living wage ordinances, usually those employed by businesses that have a contract with a city or county government or those who receive economic development subsidies from the locality. The rationale behind the ordinances is that city and county governments should not contract with or subsidize employers who pay poverty-level wages.
The living wage level is usually the wage a full-time worker would need to earn to support a family above the federal poverty line, ranging from 100% to 130% of the poverty measurement. The wage rates specified by living wage ordinances range from a low of $6.25 in Milwaukee to a high of $10.75 in San Jose ( A wage of $8.96 an hour with health benefits is recommended for Syracuse, NY.).
Living wage ordinances provide much needed raises for low-income workers. Wages for the bottom 10% of wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999. The number of jobs where wages were below what a worker would need to support a family of four above the poverty line also grew between 1979 and 1999. In 1999, 26.8% of the workforce earned poverty-level wages, an increase from 23.7% in 1979.

Can you provide a good reason why you would not support legislation that requires a living wage for workers? Please include your position on a living wage for Syracuse-area workers.

ANSWER: The current Syracuse living wage ordinance is very narrowly structured, and has a number of legal loopholes that should be closed. As a chair of the city's Living Wage Advisory Committee my first concern is to see the parking garage contracts rebid with specific inclusion of Living Wage Ordinance requirements. This has taken far too long, but significant process is finally in sight.

6. “Down-waging” has become a standard practice by highly profitable companies who replace full-time workers with part-timers, temps or sub-contract out for lower wages and poorer benefits. Between 1980 and 1995, 42-million jobs were lost in the United States. Each year, there are 50 percent more people laid off than are victims of crime, which raises the question of which is the greater social ill.
Reduced wages and benefits negatively impacts on families’ ability to afford adequate health care. Forty-three million Americans do not have health insurance and another million lose it each month.

And, while many parents believe college costs will be the biggest expense they face for their children, in fact many will spend more in a year on quality child care than on public college tuition, according to a new Children's Defense Fund (CDF) report.

The AFL-CIO supports guaranteed high-quality child-care, health care, job education and training.

What steps can elected officials take to ensure that these benefits are available to all Americans?

ANSWER: For public employees they should support the benefits in direct negotiations with labor. In private business a tax benefit-penalty system could be used to promote introducing certain benefits in specific industries. For example, a tax surcharge could be implemented for a company that does not provide day care benefits, and the proceeds should be used to reduce the tax burden of the similar company that does provide the benefit.

7. Those who advocate the privatization of government services seek a significant reduction in the government’s role in society. But, market-oriented policies cannot be relied on, by themselves, to meet our citizens needs.
Studies conducted by Cornell University found that the claims by privatization ideologues, are “quite groundless” and the empirical research supporting such claims are “so flawed as to be useless as a policy guide.”
Instead, privatization of government services has been shown to
•diminish the access to public services
•reduce employee morale, productivity and turnover
•exploit part-time workers through low wages and benefits
•increase discrimination against minorities
•cause the loss of government sovereignty
•weakens constitutional rights (e.g., whistle blowing, ethical conduct)
•reduce quality of services
•increase corruption, bribery and kick-backs
•lose accountability for public values and services.

Do you support privatizing public services? Please explain your answer.

ANSWER: No. (I was there when they tried to privatize the fire service in Scottsdale AZ. As usual with privatization, you got reduced services to the public, and reduced benefits to the workers.) I don't know if public seizure of National Grid assets in Syracuse is financially practical, but I certainly think we ought to find out.

8. As an elected official, how would you ensure that the voice of labor and community-based agencies are recognized on decision-making bodies such as the Industrial Development Authority?

ANSWER: The authorizing legislation of NYS based IDA's needs to be completely overhauled:
1) Appt to the board of Syracuse IDA rests exclusively with the mayor,
with no restrictions or requirements. At a minimum, the Common Council
and Bd of Ed should have seats at the table.

2) A 2/3 vote of the appropriate legislative body should have the
authority to cancel an IDA contract proposal for a fixed period (eg 30
days.) In Syracuse the Council could vote 9 to 0 against a proposal, and the IDA can go ahead anyway.

3) Any member of the IDA board that votes to give away tax revenue
should be resident in the jurisdiction loosing the taxes. Today we have a
"developer" resident in Manlius sitting on the board that gives away
Syracuse tax benefits!

4) Any tax relief that the IDA offers should take account of the loss
of revenue to the school district, not just the city. While the city
may realize a compensating benefit (jobs, land use, etc.) the school
district usually does not. Unfortunately, in Syracuse the lack of
leadership at the Bd of Ed allowed the SIDA proposed Destiny PILOT to take affect without a single of objection from the school district; the only
objections came from a few citizens (including myself) speaking for
Parents for Public Schools. A PILOT could be structured to benefit the
schools - for instance an agreement could require the developer to provide
certain education programs, or build athletic fields.

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