Branstad on labor bills: ‘Those ideas are dead when I become governor’

Republican gubernatorial hopeful Terry Branstad promises that if he replaces incumbent Democratic Gov. Chet Culver in November, legislation advocated by the state’s labor unions will be dead on arrival.

Speaking to the Iowa Association of Business and Industry’s annual convention, Branstad listed off the bills organized labor unions have been fighting in favor of for several years, then concluded, “All of those ideas are dead when I become governor.”

Terry Branstad (photo by Dave Davidson, www.TEApublican.com)

“I know, having been to some of your meetings over the last few years, you’ve been fighting a defensive battle trying to stop these job-killing labor bills,” Branstad said. “Prevailing wage, a bill that I vetoed in 1984, nine states have repealed it. No state has passed it since that time. And yet they came within one vote of passing it through the House.”

Organized labor’s four legislative priorities – prevailing wage, choice of doctor, open-scope bargaining and fair share — have all stalled over the last four General Assemblies. Prevailing wage would set minimum pay and benefit standards for workers on certain public projects. Choice-of-doctor legislation would change the state’s workers’ compensation law to allow employees the right to designate a doctor to treat them for workplace injuries. Open-scope bargaining would expand the topics and issues that public employees could negotiate during contract discussions. Fair share would would require some non-union workers to pay a fee when they receive union services, such as representation during grievances and arbitration.

While the votes are there in the state Senate, in the House a handful of Democrats have joined with Republicans to block the passage of any of labor’s priorities. And when a bill expanding collective bargaining rights of public employee unions cleared the legislature in 2008 it was vetoed by Culver.

Iowa ABI has been outspoken in its opposition to labor’s priorities.

“Help is on the way. Change is coming,” Branstad said. “I am not going to ever let [those bills] become law when I am governor of this state.”

Since Culver’s 2008 veto of the collective bargaining bill, his relationship with labor has been strained. At the time, labor leaders called the move an “out-and-out betrayal.” Since then, though, the governor has managed to patch things up with organized labor, at least publicly, although some resentment remains. While the governor got some big campaign donations from labor unions  — $50,000 from the Carpenters District Council of Kansas, $25,000 from the Iowa UAW, $10,000 each from the Office and Professional Employees Union, the Operating Engineers Local 234 Political Fund, the Great Plains Laborers’ District Council and the AFL-CIO — he got nothing from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the state’s biggest union and a huge contributor in the 2006 gubernatorial election.

But as the Iowa Democratic Party is happy to point out, though, any disagreements between Culver and labor come nowhere close to those that exist between Branstad and labor.

“During the recession of 1991-92, Terry Branstad decided the state didn’t have the money in its budget to pay state workers the wages for which they had already contracted,” the party said in a press release. “The workers had to sue the sitting governor, Branstad, just to fulfill the wage contract they had bargained for with the state. They won and Branstad lost.”