The Denver City Council hasn’t yet ordered a company doing business with the city to dump its chief executive, as the Obama administration did with General Motors, but give council members time. They’re still at the starting gate of this brave new world of meddling in the labor market. Who knows what opportunities they’ll seize as they move forward?
First things first, of course. Today a council committee is scheduled to begin considering a “worker retention” ordinance that would protect the jobs of service workers whose companies lose their contracts with the city. In other words, when a private contractor wins a competitive bid to supply, say, janitorial services for a city facility, that contractor will be required to offer the jobs to workers employed by its predecessor.
And the new contractor will have to keep those workers on the payroll, for the most part, for at least 90 days.
Now, you might suppose that the last thing any city would want is to saddle a company with workers that it might not consider up to the task, but that just goes to show how old-fashioned you are. The ordinance even dictates the order in which layoffs will occur in the event that the new contractor is more efficient and wants to downsize the work force. “The successor contractor shall retain the predecessor’s service employees by seniority within job classifications,” the ordinance says.
We certainly wouldn’t want any business to retain workers on the basis of productivity. Why, that might lower costs and ultimately save taxpayers money.
To be sure, a few mossbacks have protested the effort to provide, in the words of Councilman Chris Nevitt, “badly needed improvements in the stability and predictability of employment for the thousands of mostly low-income service contract workers who serve us . . . .” The Denver Metro Chamber and the Downtown Denver Partnership wrote a letter to Nevitt arguing, for example, that the ordinance “defeats the purpose of competitive bidding” while shifting the economic hardship from one set of workers to another — namely, to those employed by the winning firm.
Nevitt told me Monday that’s not true. Most service-management companies hire only if they win a contract, he said, and as a practical matter tend to keep the existing workers in place. “But they have no obligation to,” he added, “and they don’t always.” The “don’t always” part is what bothers him.
In their letter, Joe Blake of the chamber and Tamara Door admit that companies might want to retain the existing workers. They simply argue for the companies’ freedom to decide what’s best themselves.
They’re the experts at delivering the service, after all.
What a quaint idea. Even Mayor John Hickenlooper, who presumably preferred to screen and hire his own employees when he was a small-business owner, hasn’t exactly leaped to defend that right for other businesses. “I understand Councilman Nevitt is reaching out to interested stakeholders — labor folks and the business community — for feedback on his ordinance,” he said late last week. “I’d like to review that input before taking a position on the ordinance.”
Fair enough, mayor, but this is pretty straightforward: One side wants to throw sand into the gears of efficient government and the other side doesn’t. It shouldn’t be a hard call.
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Pueblo County School District 70 did the right thing last week when it rejected a proposal to go to a four- day school week to reduce expenses. If kids are consistently receiving homework and participating in an extracurricular activity or two, their school days are already pretty full. Squeezing all of that class time into four days is a terrible idea.
If anything, as Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Denver Post editorial board last week, districts should be going in the other direction: extending the school week, not reducing it, at least for disadvantaged students.
“I don’t like it,” he said bluntly of the four-day school week
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E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
