DISAGREEING WITHOUT BEING DISAGREEABLE

Much legislative work occurs in committee hearings. With duties on eight standing committees, I am meeting myself coming and going. It is an enormously stimulating learning experience. Let me recount some highlights (lowlights?) from this past week.

For me, the week's most interesting action occurred in Tuesday afternoon's weekly hearing of the Senate Committee on Labor and Industrial Relations, chaired by Sen. William L. "Lacy" Clay Jr., D.-St. Louis. The first bill heard was Senate Bill 711, which would allow collective bargaining for public employees, effectively accomplishing the unionization of state government. This one is a perennial; it comes along every year about this time.

At the witness table with sponsor Sen. John Schneider, D.-St. Louis, was Duke McVey, President of the Missouri AFL-CIO and a familiar figure in Capitol hallways. With customary eloquence, Sen. Schneider began by reviewing the rise of the trade union movement as concurrent with the industrialization and modernization of America. Now it is time to bring the benefits of organized labor to state government workers, he eloquently testified.

I undertook to interrogate my colleague with the following line of inquiry: Every member of the legislature supports the right of free and independent trade unions to organize and bargain collectively in the private sector, where companies are subject to the competitive discipline of the marketplace. But isn't that the crucial distinction? That in the public sector, such competitive pressures are missing, giving rise to a plausible rationale for excluding collective bargaining?

Sen. Schneider denied this, and the inquiry moved on. He emphasized that his bill banned strikes; I produced evidence from other states (Pennsylvania, Michigan) that had the same law, where hundreds of illegal strikes flourished after its enactment. Schneider countered with Iowa, where he said there had been no such strikes. I asked Duke McVey, the labor official, if it were not a fact that in about 1958, labor unions claimed 32-35 percent of the American private sector work force as members, versus about 12 percent today, and that the only growth in union membership for 15 years had been in government employees. And isn't this what this bill is all about?

McVey answered that this is indeed true, but laid much of it at the feet of Ronald Reagan, who in 1981 fired the PATCO air traffic controllers and made it stick. Ignoring the opportunity he had handed me to point out how overwhelmingly Americans had backed Reagan's action, I pressed on.

After rambling through Harry Truman's 1946 attempt to seize the steel mills during a labor dispute, followed by Truman's 1947 veto of the Taft-Hartley bill, McVey and I sort of agreed to disagree. I turned my attention back to Sen. Schneider, the dean of the Senate. For each bill that's introduced, committee staff produces a Fiscal Note, an attempt to forecast proposed law's cost to state government.

I asked Sen. Schneider about the Fiscal Note for his bill. "I haven't seen it," he responded. I said "Well, Senator, as you know, most Fiscal Notes on various bills are one or two, maybe three or four pages long. This one is 20 pages. Let's review it."

I then began leafing through it, reciting its estimates that the bill would cost Missouri's local school districts $3.7 million annually; the community colleges, $500,000 and up; the state colleges and universities, $21 million; the Office of Administration, $61 million; and so depressingly on through the departments of state government.

Schneider objected strenuously, saying that he hadn't seen the Fiscal Note, and in any case could not see how it would be that costly and objected to me for relying on it, saying how could any senator (by which he meant me) be so easily misled? I responded by saying that I didn't write the Fiscal Note, but that staff had, before concluding with the observation that inasmuch as the bill's sponsor had testified that he had no knowledge of the bill's cost and no facts to lay before the committee, then I was done questioning him.

After more witnesses, both proponents and opponents, the hearing was over and the committee went into executive session, with the chairman intent on ramming the bill through in an immediate vote. I objected, citing custom that committees vote on bills the week after hearings on them. The chairman overrode me, and with the vote looming, I asked whether the bill's provisions applied to all employees of the House and Senate. Told the answer was no, I immediately moved that the bill's collective bargaining rights "be extended to all employees of the House and Senate."

In an eyelash Sen. John Scott, D.-St. Louis, a former President Pro Tem, seconded my motion, and on a voice vote it carried unanimously. Next came the recorded vote on the bill itself. A party line vote of five Democrats voting "aye" to four Republicans voting "no" sent the bill to the floor.

Because supporters cannot count past 14 "ayes" in the 34-member chamber, it is presently thought by most that the bill is going nowhere. A senior Democrat came up to me the next day on the floor and told me I had done a good job and he agreed with me, but had to vote with organized labor. I smiled and told him that of course I understood. Before the hearing was concluded, a laughing Sen. Schneider approached me and asked that I accompany him and two colleagues to watch the Billikens of St. Louis U. play basketball the next (Wednesday) evening, which I did. (John Schneider is delightful company and lives and dies with his alma mater's Billikens.)

The Senate is a collegial place. The whole, instructive episode serves to illustrate the possibilities of disagreeing without being disagreeable.