Written By : Warner Todd Huston

The Engineers and Architects Association, a 48,000 member public employees union in L.A., has come under attack from the politically active Service Employees International Union (SEIU) for having the civic sense to realize that the high times of ever rising pay at the taxpayer’s expense is coming to an end.

In a deal about to be voted on, the Engineers and Architects Association agreed to present to its members a new contract that would require them to pay a whopping extra $10 per visit to the doctor (that will put it up to $20 per visit). Also gone would be the $15 a month to “enhance their life insurance and disability insurance” paid by the city. Finally, union members would have to pay five percent of their monthly healthcare premiums.

In the deal, the city proposed to reduce furlough days from 26 to ten.

As it stands right now, union members that work for the city of L.A. pay nothing toward premiums for their healthcare.

All of this is rather weak budget cutting. The requests upon the engineers union are entirely reasonable. In fact, most would agree that the cuts don’t go far enough because the pension that these employees are scheduled to get still amounts to $56,000 a year — more than most taxpayers make at the peak of their work career. The estimated median income of citizens of the city is only $48,882 a year yet these poor taxpayers will be paying its city engineers and architects $56,000 annually upon retirement!

Then you pile on the three percent automatic yearly “cost of living” raise figured into that pension as well as the free healthcare for life and, well, you get a King’s ransom as far as the average citizen of the city is concerned, a fortune few of them will ever see in retirement.

But these niggling concessions that the engineers and architects are voting on is vehemently opposed by other unions in the city, notably the SEIU. SEIU Local 721 is decrying the tentative agreement as a game of “divide & conquer” being played by city negotiators.

EAA claims these givebacks are unavoidable given the current economic climate. Our MOU 8 and 17 bargaining teams stand united against bringing members a contract proposal that sets our City back decades and embraces the CAO’s vision for a second-class LA, with a cheap workforce and stripped-down, privatized services.

Sets the city back “decades”? These union hacks will already make thousands a year more in retirement than the poor citizens forced to shoulder the bill will ever see! How is it that the city employees are in the red over these tiny concessions?

Once again, the SEIU proves that public employees unions don’t care about what’s right. They only care about how much they can bleed the taxpayers for and they see the taxpayers as a bottomless wallet filled with cash they have a right to raid at will.

Let’s hope that the EAA agrees to these small concessions and they become the tip of the iceberg that begins to crack the greed of public employees unions everywhere.

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