How Union Contracts Get Covered In The Media

From the ever municipal union-friendly NY Post:

A day after the MTA offered its workers a new contract with retroactive pay, Mayor de Blasio insisted the deal doesn’t set a precedent for the city’s ongoing negotiations with its unions.

“We have a very different reality here — we have our fiscal circumstances. We have a separate history in terms of labor relations than that which state and MTA has,” the mayor said Friday at a press conference in Brooklyn.

“So we’re going to do things our own way with our partners in municipal labor.”

Chuck Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, agreed that the proposed MTA deal — an 8 percent raise spread over five years — doesn’t directly impact the mayor’s options.

“He doesn’t have to be bound by any other model, and to the extent there’s been pattern bargaining, the pattern is usually what’s happened to other city unions rather than state,” Brecher said.

He estimated that if the city were to follow in the MTA’s footsteps the tab this year would run about $3.5 billion — and that doesn’t even include teachers-union demands for retroactive pay dating back to 2009.

The mayor has said previously there’s no way the city could afford to pay full retroactive pay to all 152 unions that have been working under expired contracts.

Ah, but when the state pattern was the old CSEA contract of 4% over 5 years, with three years of zeroes and health care concessions, that's when the editorial boards thought de Blasio should follow the state pattern (even though, as this Post article points out, pattern bargaining is relegated to what happens in city contracts, not state contracts.)

Funny how that is.

Even funnier is how the the MTA/TWU 100 deal is being talked about as if it's some grand giveaway, even though, as NYC Educator points out here, the MTA contract actually leaves TWU 100 workers a little bit behind inflation, so it's not that swell a deal at all.

Sure, the TWU contract is better than the CSEA contract pattern that came before, but it's still not replete with a "bunch of new goodies" as the Post's resident Ayn Randian specialist Nicole Gelinas says it is.

Somehow we've gotten to this point in American culture where any contract that pays union workers just below the rate of inflation, doesn't shove too many onerous work rules on them, and only nails them with a half percent in health care concessions is "full of goodies."

Meanwhile on Wall Street, the criminals at Bank of America and Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase continue to lose money hand over fist due to bad bets and/or criminal penalties lodged by the feds for fraudulent activity and yet, they still keep paying themselves more money.

Funny how that it is too.
 
Can't wait to see the Nicole Gelinas piece criticizing that.

Oh, right - that's the "free market".

You know, the one with the Too Big To Fail banks who took all those government bailouts after nearly taking the world economy to total collapse.

Here's A Solution For The Teachers Contract Negotiations

Comment left on the NY Times story on contract negotiations:

Just declare all the teachers to be bankers and that they deserve bonuses regardless of performance. That seems acceptable for real bankers (hi there, Jamie Dimon), who are extracting money from society, so why not extend the model?

Guy has a point.

When Does Jamie Dimon Get Put in Jail?

President Obama's favorite banker is a crook:

JP Morgan's $6.2bn London Whale trading debacle was born out of secretive trades and creative bookkeeping as the bank attempted to limit losses using a practice that one regulator called "make believe voodoo magic", a Senate investigation has concluded.

The report by the Senate subcommittee on investigations, published on Thursday, detailed a series of failures in which accounts were hidden and trades were valued incorrectly to minimize losses. It also alleged that regulators were kept in the dark, a head trader's concerns went unheeded and a $51bn trading portfolio ballooned to $157bn in three months.

The inquiry follows JP Morgan's own internal investigation in January and provides the first look into the emails and internal discussions at the bank around the infamous Whale trade. It centers on the secretive JP Morgan chief investment office, which accounted for as much as one-sixth of the bank's assets last year.

The 300-page report alleges that JP Morgan hid losses, did not share information with its regulators, and misled the public. The report also blames the bank's regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and recommends reforming the way regulators oversee derivatives, the complicated financial instruments that played a role in the Whale trades and the financial crisis.

The report also concludes that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bonus was cut in half to $11.5m last year, knew about the sustained trading losses when he dismissed the incident as a "tempest in a teapot" in April 2012.

Dimon is still an arrogant prick, completely unchastened by any of this, as shown by the "That's Why I'm Richer Than You!" exchange with bank analyst Mike Mayo as reported in February.

Gotta love America - accountability is for teachers, not the banking heads who lose billions and try and blame it on underlings.

Jamie Dimon - not enough bad stuff could happen to a prick like this.

When Will Jamie Dimon Be Held Accountable?

Hey, it was just $2 billion his bank lost - nothing to sweat, right? Plus he said he was real real sorry and promised it won't happen again. So everything's fine, right?

Uh, no:

Flawed. Complex. Poorly reviewed. Poorly executed. Poorly monitored. Sloppy. Self-inflicted. Stupid. Badly judged. Yes, Jamie Dimon scored high marks in the confessional stakes for his various descriptions of how JP Morgan came to lose $2bn by trading credit derivatives.

But there are two points to remember here that no amount of breast-beating can disguise. First, the losses occurred right at the heart of the bank – its so-called chief investment office, which is responsible for managing JP Morgan's entire balance sheet. This was a failure at mission control.

Second, JP Morgan had been warned that something was amiss. The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Zero Hedge website have been writing for weeks about the out-sized positions taken by the so-called London Whale. JP Morgan's response was to say it was "comfortable" with its positions. When outsiders know more about what's going on inside a big bank than the bank's own management, none of Dimon's adjectives does justice to the character of the cock-up. He even ended up saying he wished he'd paid more attention to the newspapers.

I would add one more thing to the list above - it is clear that nothing has changed on Wall Street post-meltdown.

Nothing.

And it won't be long before the next one comes along.

The NY Times hints today that the next bubble to burst will be student loans.

Others say China's economy is the next major problem.

And of course European sovereign debt remains an incubating crisis.

One thing is certain, no matter what comes.

The criminals running things on Wall Street will continue to land on their feet.

Accountability, like austerity, is only for the little people.

Hey Cuomo - Here's Your "Crisis In Accountability"

And guess what?

It isn't in public education:

Wall Street stocks and profits took a beating in 2011. But there is one corner of the Street that took a lighter hit: the compensation paid to chief executives.

Three big banks disclosed on Friday what their top executives will receive in deferred stock for their work in 2011. Such stock is expected to make up most of their bonus as banks are increasingly paying employees more in deferred stock. Those awards to top bank executives are coming as lower-level employees are finding out that their own bonuses will be much smaller than a year ago.

Brian Foley, a compensation expert in White Plains, said that for top executives, he would have expected “the belt to come in a few more notches” this year given the banks’ lackluster stock performance. He added that executive suite pay packages this year might further lower morale inside the banks.

“A lot of people in the middle took big hits this year,” he said. “It could create some big ‘us versus them issues’ as to why the rank and file are taking a bigger hit than the senior executives.”

It seems the people running the big banks - you know, the zombie banks that were so loaded down with debt that they had to be bailed out with billions in federal money and billions more in 0% interest free "loans" from Uncle Ben Bernanke and his Merry Fedsters - are still partying like it's 1999.

Bad year at the bank?

So what - I'm getting my big bonus and pay, says Jamie Dimon:

Shares of Citigroup’s rival, JPMorgan Chase, also had a rough year, falling almost 22 percent. Still, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, was awarded $17 million in equity-linked stock for his work in 2011, according to a regulatory filing. Last year Mr. Dimon received $17 million in equity awards around this time of year and his total pay for the year came to $23 million. His total pay is expected to be roughly the same this year, according to a person close to company but not authorized to speak on the record.

Where's the accountability there?

Ah, there is none.

This is very simply about people in power squeezing all the profit and productivity they can out of those under them and paying themselves lavishly no matter how their companies do.

The next time Cuomo says teachers are unaccountable, somebody in the press who doesn't have his or her lips around Cuomo's ass ought to ask our good governor what about accountability for the banksters?