Carla Katz's blog

When he was growing up, Chris Christie's folks must have taught him that when he went to a new playground, he should pick a fight with the biggest kid there to show he has grit even if he got his nose broken.  During this year's gubernatorial campaign, Chris Christie seemed to go out of his way pick fights with organized labor and he seemed to be picking fights that did not appear to need picking. 

First, Christie forcefully snubbed New Jersey's largest teachers' union, the NJEA, by refusing to even be interviewed for their endorsement. Then, he called for mass layoffs of state workers while Governor Corzine hammered out givebacks at the bargaining table.  And finally, he infuriated the building trades unions by demanding a ban on project labor agreements when they weren't on anyone's radar.  At the time, labor was not feeling too warm and fuzzy towards Corzine due to some tense battles with his administration. However, Christie's escalating anti-union rhetoric became a magic potion that turned Christie into labor's nightmare and Corzine into their dream date.

As Governor-Elect, Christie may believe he has to live up to his anti-union campaign rhetoric or face a backlash from conservatives in his party.  That would be a mistake. While the current union leadership may not have been able to effectively muster the get-out-the-vote strategy and bodies needed to reelect Corzine, treating the labor movement as vanquished and continuing to pick those fights will be counterproductive.  New Jersey is a highly unionized, pro-labor state. There are more than one million union members here, meaning more than one million union families. Significantly, one in every four New Jersey families includes a public worker.  Sixty thousand state worker union members will soon be more than potential voters.  They will also be his employees.  To deal with the fiscal tsunami and to make strides in education, the new Governor needs labor's cooperation, not their ire.

In the first week after his victory, Gov-elect, Christie signaled state worker unions that he wanted givebacks and that he would be willing to declare a financial emergency to get them. While he now speaks of "tough but fair negotiations" rather than of slashing and cutting, the threat of massive layoffs remains. Last week, Christie told some in the press that he wanted an astounding and impossible $1.5 billion in givebacks from the state worker unions.  That number was in addition to the $2 billion he intends to "save" by not funding the underfunded public employee pension again. Achieving those savings is impossible without a staggering number of layoffs in the tens of thousands. Now, that's a street fight in the making.

The ugly economy is taking its toll on everyone, including union working families. Their anger is not likely to subside just because the election is over.  If the economy and the job market do not improve, workers' fury will just be redirected towards the new guy in charge.  It remains to be seen whether Christie wants any allies in labor or whether he believes he doesn't need union members to succeed as Governor to or to win reelection.  He may decide that his rhetoric should become reality and he should treat unionized labor as the enemy for the next four years. It's his call.  If Christie chooses that path he politically endangers the many moderate Republican legislators who have made some good long-standing labor friends and who are up bat at the ballot box long before Christie will be.

However, if Christie and his legislative allies are imagining or desiring collaboration or support from organized labor or from union members in the months and years ahead and for future elections, there are FIVE THINGS HE MUST DO:

It was a dark and stormy November night.  An icy wind whistled through leafless moonlit trees. A loud thud is followed by a piercing scream.  A lone figure emerges from the mist, bloodied and weary, but victorious.  Coming to your hometown, Tuesday November 3rd.

This year has brought the usual ration of menacing slasher movies that inexplicably compel us to spend billions at the box office just to be scared out of our seats. It is possible that we are collectively trying to find something more pulse pounding and heart stopping than opening the bills.  Here, in New Jersey, we don't have to go to the movies to get our dose of ghouls and goblins, as the governor's race is giving us all an unhealthy, unwelcome dose of good old American horror.

Trimming the state budget is a little like dieting. The plan might be good but sticking with it is tough . Most of us have had to diet at some point and we start out with great intentions, will power and a pledge to stick to a detailed diet and exercise regimen to shed those damn extra pounds.  But then we get hungry. Then we get cranky.  We whine, "It's hard!"  And, then we eat the Ho-Ho's.  

As with any diet, reducing the fat in the state budget and shrinking the waistline on the people's ‘taxes belt' that's making it hard to breathe, is far easier said than done. Every gubernatorial candidate, for the past 25 years, has campaigned on promises to make our collective tax-fat melt away and make our state budget leaner.   We all want to believe.  Just like we all want to believe those hyped up ads for the newest pills that guarantee we'll lose 20 pounds in our sleep.  The reality is, we still wake up fat.

Chris Christie's diet for New Jersey is a failure before it even gets under way.  The biggest problem is that he has no solid ‘diet' plan for the state budget, or for the looming $8 to $10 billion deficit, at all.  Christie has spent the last six months loudly criticizing Governor Corzine, and blaming Democrats, for not cutting the state's flab without presenting any solution of his own. We know from own dieting experiences that ‘no plan' means no results.

There have been numerous press stories covering the "F" word in the past month-furloughs, not the other New Jersey favorite.  The fight over furloughs has been characterized by the press in a variety of ways. The Governor's "tough times budget" spin-the state is in an economic meltdown, everyone must share the pain, and 14 unpaid days and a wage freeze is better than layoffs. The unions' collective message-a contract is a contract and furloughs (AKA pay cuts) and demands for givebacks of negotiated wages undermine the collective bargaining process and unfairly penalize middle class working families who have already made massive concessions and cannot afford to give more in this troubled economy any more than their neighbors can.

Some of this battle is playing out on the streets, some in the press, and now also in the courts as the state appellate court  has recently agreed to hear argument on the issue of public worker furloughs and whether an emergency rule of the Civil Service Commission was an illegal end around the contract as the unions say or a proper exercise of government in "imminent peril" as Governor Corzine says.  Similar high profile furlough battles are taking place across the country, including in California and Washington State, and in cities like Newark where the Mayor just proposed city employees take 18 furlough days over the next year.

As it tends to, history seems to be repeating itself as 240 laid-off workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago revive a decades old tactic -- a sit-in siege of their factory. Without warning, their employer closed shop last week when the Bank of America, which received $25 billion in the government bailout package itself, abruptly cancelled the factory’s financing. The workers occupied their plant for five days, demanding severance and vacation pay, and angrily said they would not leave until they were assured of their benefits. Facing increasing public pressure from the sit-in, the Bank of America today agreed to extend loans to the factory to resolve the workers’ claims but not enough to reopen the factory.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother, Angelina Katz, did her second debate on behalf of Barack Obama. A debate? My mother? If you knew her, you’d be both shocked and amused. Just over one year ago she suffered a stroke that took most of her sight, and her mobility. She had to quit the day care center job she loved and was alone much of the day unable to read or even watch TV. Politics was the furthest thing from her mind.

After living her entire life in New Jersey, my mom is now happy to live in western Pennsylvania, a few minutes from my brother and his family in an apartment in a wonderful assisted living St. Barnabus facility. Happily, this move has positively changed her life. She and my father were politically active in my youth (my dad was Mayor of Edgewater Park and my mom was on the Township Committee), but I thought that era was long past. My mom’s latest long hand letter (she writes to me since her hearing is bad and phone conversations become surrealistic yelling fests) had me both laughing and crying. And, it convinced me that hope and change are truly ageless. So, here it is, in my mother’s words.

As I drove home from a VP debate party on Thursday night, I surfed radio talk shows and heard countless callers say that Governor Palin ‘won’ the debate and express that they liked her because she could “relate” to ”regular” people.  Call me crazy, but I don’t think the President or the Vice President of arguably the most powerful country in the world should be a “regular person.”  On the contrary, I think the country’s top leaders should be extremely special or at least better informed, smarter and more experienced than the rest of us.  I am sure most of those callers would agree that their next-door neighbor could relate to “regular” people but they sure wouldn’t want them to run the country.  

Why do we need the Vice President to relate?  Yes, we desperately need a Vice President and President who understand the needs of working and middle class families who are suffering economically at the same time that corporate CEO’s get multibillion-dollar bailouts and golden parachutes. But the fact that Sarah Palin gets points from some folks for repeating obviously memorized and overly rehearsed talking points and political platitudes simply because they were peppered with homespun lingo like “there ya go” and “you betcha” is demoralizing.

She is reported to be smart, tough and a politically savvy working mother.

She has become the subject of celebrity-style media interest and of an astonishing barrage of stories and photos about her and her family -- some real and some fabricated -- winging across the internet.

Her arrival on the scene has triggered endless kitchen table discussions about parenting, work, teenage pregnancy and feminism. Her name has outpaced Google hits for "Paris Hilton" and "Michael Phelps."

Her speech to the Republican convention met with such breath less excitement from the mostly male delegates that I wondered if she had appeared, as depicted in that now-famously faked photo, in a flag bikini with a rifle rakishly held aloft.

Last year, like many New Jerseyans, I spent Labor Day weekend, with my family at the ever-shrinking shoreline on Long Beach Island. This year, I stayed close to home and ran a 5K race with my other family, my union brothers and sisters from the fire service, police officers and EMS in honor of Jimmy D'heron--a hero, a firefighter, a union member, father, husband and grandfather.

As labor is burning, our National union leaders are fiddling. Some of them are simply arsonists. While the labor movement has made tremendous progress in the past, every working American knows that we are facing exceptionally challenging economic times and a union movement that continues to decline. Everyone, that is, except for some national union leaders, who these days seem too focused on creating internal divides and engaging in selfish politics to focus on the fight for their members' rights.