Tom Buckel, running for Onondaga County Legislator, 7th 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: Yes. PLA's are valuable tools on construction projects. PLAs help the government control costs, guarantee a steady stream of skilled labor and prevent work disruptions on large public projects. I also find that they help increase productivity and keep complex projects on schedule.

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 do not support vouchers or tax credits for private school use. I do not support expansion of charter schools if their funding comes out of local school district budgets. However, if independently funded, charter schools can play an important role in providing educational choices tailored to meet students' and parents' needs. I am interested in learning more about the new sector of public charter schools created in Indianapolis. In 2001, the Indiana legislature granted the Mayor of Indianapolis the authority to issue public school charters to nonprofit entities as part of broader charter school
legislation. The Indianapolis Mayor received Harvard's "Innovations in
American Government Award" in 2006 for his management of this program.
Around the country there are other independent entities, such as public
universities and special charter school boards that can authorizer charter
schools. However, mayors or even County Executives bring unique c!
haracteristics to charter school authorization and I believe that
exploration of such programs may be useful on the County or City level in
our region.

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

ANSWER: The link between high quality facilities and educational outcomes has long been recognized by educators. New York law now requires equitable funding for public education. The State has taken positive first steps in providing more equitable state funding for schools in the 2007 budget. In order for the current city school district facility initiatives and state court mandates to succeed in all public schools in Onondaga County, I advocate local policies, regulations and procedures to improve the financing and implementation of school building improvements, such as:
- Increased county support for school facilities maintenance and
capital improvements.
- Broad public involvement in decision-making about school facilities.
- Implement and support policies that support schools as centers of
community life.
- Establish modern, state of the art management and oversight
practicies for school facility planning, design and construction.
- Ensure transparency in all aspects of the construction, modernization
and maintenance process and to allow the community the opportunity to
be involved in the oversight of these activities.
- Teachers, staff and students should also have a role in monitoring
new construction, modernization and maintenance.
- Support for alternative ways to finance school construction such as
public private partnerships (ie, private funding of community centered
amenities in schools) or the use of "Tax Increment Financing" ("TIF" is
a tool to use future gains in taxes from surrounding areas to finance
the current improvements that will create those gains.)

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

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

ANSWER: Until the federal government acts, state and local
governments can impose substancial penalties on employers who improperly interfere in worker organizing activities. My view is that there is no legal reason why states and local governments cannot enact stricter
protection for workers than found in existing federal law. Local legislation can be passed to ensure that workers are not penalized for asserting their legally-protected rights (minimum wage, overtime, and so on) in the workplace or for informing other workers of those rights. Local incentives to businesses, including IDA financing, can be conditioned on protection of worker rights to organize, as part of the larger system of accountability described below. Other potential local initiatives I support include denying public contracts, subsidies, or other funds, to businesses of agencies that have been found guilty of labor law violations, and requirign businesses to grant union organizers acces to parking lots and other public areas of their property.

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

ANSWER: Not answered

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: The money that our community spends annually on
firm-specific incentives should buy economic growth and a higher standard
of living, not low-wage jobs in no-growth industries. By modernizing
our incentive tools with features to make them accountable, we can
encourage firms to support employees, boost training, increase research and development, and increase investment in new capital equipment in high value industries. First, our community should focus not just on job creation, but on good-job creation. Subsidies and tax credits should be issued only to businesses that pay wages above the industry average, or above a set living wage. Without such restrictions, communities often find themselves spending public money to keep standards of living down, which makes no sense in any economic paradigm, new or old. Leveraging other programs with industry-targeted incentives will increase the overall impact of our region's development strategy. I will support new laws that require strong accountability provisions for tax incentives. For instance, I will support local legislation which requires all companies that receive more than $25,000 in state or local aid or tax credits to report the number of jobs actually created with the money, along with the wages paid. When information disclosure is not enough to make incentive recipients hold up their end of the bargain, companies should be made to return any incentives on which they did not deliver. I support "claw back" provisions to accomplish this recovery for broken promises. We should also raise accountability by fixing the way incentives are
budgeted. One problem with incentive programs is that benefits are often
made without a full budgetary accounting, leaving future legislators
and citizens to deal with revenue lost in decades-long tax break
agreements. By requiring that a percentage of every incentive package be paid out of the administration's current budget, legislators and citizens
will be forced to carefully consider whether government can actually
afford the plan.

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: I support living wage legislation. The Democratic Party was once captured by the slogan of "the economy stupid." Though important, "economy" only deals with things like efficiency, cost benefit analysis or gross national product. Morality and politics deal with justice, family values, community, and responsibility. The Democratic Party at its best is a party based on people and justice. A true living wage is an essential component of justice. Most families in our region and throughout the nation have had their real purchasing power decline even as the economy has grown. My legislative district includes some of the poorest regions in our County. Our response to these realities says everything about the character of our community. Enactment of a true living wage is an essential step in defining the character of our community as a place which is centered on people and justice.

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: I will support an idea successfully pioneered in California and also implemented in Iowa: change the rules so that home-care and child-care workers would be treated as state employees for bargaining purposes. Then let the union organize them, and push for higher wages. This may cost the public sector more money in the short run, but more satisfied and professionalized workers would lead to better child care, lower turnover, more satisfaction for parents and patients and lower costs in the long run. In the absence of federal action to enact a single-payer system of universal, public health insurance, I would follow the lead of governors and local governments in other parts of the country which have begun launching ambitious efforts to expand health coverage, control costs and improve quality. There are numerous ways to improve the delivery of
health care services to uninsured and Medicaid patients alike through local
initiatives. We can apply for federal waivers to implement a County
based Medicaid delivery program, emphasizing primary and preventative
care. Our County could initiate a Kaiser health care delivery model
throughout our region. It could emulate initiatives from Hillsborough
County, Florida, in levying a limited local-option sales tax to fund a new
approach to financing health care for poor or uninsured patients. We
could follow the lead of other communities, such as Pennsylvania, which
focuses on promoting non-emergency settings for non-emergency care!
, in part by increasing the number of care centers in areas of need
and providing incentives for providers who offer services on evenings and
weekends. We can mandate the introduction of state-of-the-art patient
safety and electronic health records systems. I am an aggressive
advocate of local action, and will constantly challenge the outdated and
expensive system in our region to do better and ensure that all citizens
have necessary health care.

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. Support for the essential role of government in promoting and securing the common good is central to my faith and sense of justice. The tragedy of the Army's decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which caused an exodus of highly skilled and experienced personnel and led to the disgraceful, horrific conditions at the hospital annex, is a monument to the failed philosophy of privatization. These deplorable conditions were aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers. The privatization of FEMA relief services which spelled disaster in Katrina relief, and the dangerous effort to privatize retirement benefits under Social Security, are further monuments to the failed promise and danger of privatizing essential services which the government, serving the common good, is best able to provide.

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 IDA, like all essential government agencies, must be comprised of competent, expert people of diverse backgrounds who reflect the various stakeholders in our community: business, education, organized labor, government, employment & training, economic development and community-based organizations. I am an advocate of investing based on financial, social and environmental criteria and believe that the principles of socially responsible, community investing ought to be implemented in the IDA.

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Greater Syracuse Labor Council Questionnaire