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Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
For Labor, a Fight to Lead Heats Up
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: June 8, 2012
The nation’s largest union of state and local government workers — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — faces another important election this month, beyond last Tuesday’s recall vote on Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, who retained his job despite the union’s all-out effort to oust him.
Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Lee Saunders said his Washington experience would help him at the helm of Afscme.
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Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Danny Donohue, head of the Civil Service Employees Association, said being close to the rank and file would help him lead.
Afscme’s long-term future will also be profoundly shaped by the fierce fight to succeed Gerald W. McEntee, the union’s colorful and influential president, who is retiring after 31 years. Union delegates will vote on June 21 to decide who will take the helm of the organization, which is the largest union of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and one of the most politically active.
Whoever wins will have his work cut out for him. The union’s membership — nearly 1.4 million last year — has fallen as many states and cities have laid off workers. Labor experts expect that Tuesday’s election results in Wisconsin, San Diego and San Jose will embolden officials elsewhere to seek to curb collective bargaining and cut pensions for public sector employees. And the union, which worked hard to elect President Obama in 2008, is going up against far more Republican money in this year’s presidential election.
Like the Wisconsin recall, in which Mr. Walker ran against his 2010 gubernatorial opponent, the Afscme election is a rematch, featuring the two men who vied in 2010 for the union’s No. 2 position, secretary-treasurer.
Lee Saunders, who won that race by 3,000 votes out of the 1.3 million cast, is a longtime member of the union’s Washington headquarters staff and is known for being quietly influential. As Mr. McEntee’s right-hand man, he is closely associated with the union’s recent successes and failures.
Challenging him is Danny Donohue, who for 18 years has headed the union’s biggest local, the Civil Service Employees Association, which represents state and local workers in New York State. Feisty and at times acid-tongued, Mr. Donohue styles himself the candidate of change who would better represent rank-and-file workers.
“It’s going to be a very close race,” said Richard Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University. “They both have strong support within the organization.”
Many labor experts say the election is the most important and closely fought internal union battle since the mid-1990s. In 1995, John Sweeney narrowly edged out Thomas Donahue to win the A.F.L.-C.I.O. presidency. And in 1996, Ron Carey beat back James P. Hoffa’s challenge for the helm of the 1.4-million-member Teamsters union, 52 to 48 percent (although Mr. Carey was ousted the following year in a campaign finance scandal and Mr. Hoffa later won the post).
In interviews and campaign materials, both Afscme candidates vowed to make the union stronger without offering many specific proposals.
Indeed, the race is less likely to be decided on issues than on the candidates’ personalities and on whom they have befriended or offended over the years.
Mr. Donohue has gone on the offensive, calling Mr. Saunders a Beltway insider and a bureaucrat who does not listen enough to the members.
“When he was elected two years ago, he said, ‘Make me secretary-treasurer, and I’ll do things differently. I’ll make things better,’ ” Mr. Donohue said in an interview. “Two years later, nothing really has changed. The people in our union want change.”
Mr. Saunders, who joined the Afscme staff in 1978, first as a labor economist, insists he is the better candidate. “I have experience working for the national union,” he said. “I understand Washington, and because I’ve been out there a lot, I also understand the issues confronting our members around the country.”
Both candidates were dismayed by the Wisconsin results. Mr. Donohue said Mr. Walker’s victory “was a punch at labor.” Unions now “have to work closer with the public” to solidify support and get their message across, he said.
Mr. Saunders, 60, also vowed to continue the battle to persuade voters about the union’s cause. “We have to lick our wounds and get out of bed and continue the fight,” he said. “Our folks are so angry and frustrated about being used as a scapegoat that they’re going to continue to engage in this battle.”
Mr. Donohue, 67, portrays himself as Mr. Rank-and-File, rising up from his beginnings as an attendant at a psychiatric hospital.
He said his main achievements included transforming the Civil Service Employees Association from a loose grouping of locals across New York into a powerful, closely knit union. He also takes credit for unionizing more than 25,000 child care workers after a former governor, Eliot Spitzer, gave the green light to organize them.
Henry Bayer, Mr. Donohue’s campaign manager and head of Afscme’s main Illinois affiliate, predicted that Mr. Donohue would win because he had picked up delegate support in Massachusetts, Florida and Wisconsin that he did not have two years ago.
“Danny has been laboring in the vineyards for over 30 years, while Lee has been sipping wine in Washington for 30 years,” Mr. Bayer said.
Mr. Saunders, who is mild-mannered and diplomatic — some supporters say too much so — grows angry at the Donohue camp’s belittling of him as a Washington insider.
He said he had worked in Ohio’s Bureau of Employment Services for three years before joining Afscme’s staff. “I spend more than half my time outside Washington,” he said. “I’ve been in Wisconsin constantly for the past year. I was in Ohio repeatedly, listening to members, knocking on doors, participating with members in the fight to repeal S.B. 5.”
That 2011 law, backed by Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, stripped government workers of their ability to bargain collectively. Organized labor, led by Afscme, engineered a successful referendum last November to repeal the law — a very different result from Tuesday’s Wisconsin vote.
“Danny didn’t set foot in Ohio for that fight, and he only went to Wisconsin to campaign for the presidency,” Mr. Saunders said. “You have to have a leader who leads from Day 1, and I’ve been there since Day 1.”
Mr. Saunders exudes confidence that he will win, noting that he has picked up support from delegates representing an additional 60,000 members in California and 20,000 in New York City.
There is no question that the two candidates have different styles.
When a former New York governor, David Paterson, was threatening furloughs and health care cuts, Mr. Donohue called his administration “incompetent” and said Mr. Paterson needed “a good psychiatrist.”
“My members didn’t hire me to be nice to governors,” Mr. Donohue said in an interview. “We want government to work, but we don’t want to do it on our knees. If you treat my members right, with dignity and respect, then you’ll have no problems with me.”
One Saunders supporter, Ray Markey, the longtime head of a New York librarians’ local, took to Facebook to hammer Mr. Donohue for negotiating a contract for state workers that included a three-year freeze on base pay, higher health insurance payments and furloughs. “Afscme cannot afford to have Danny do to the rest of the country what he has done in New York,” he said.
Mr. Donohue said many labor leaders had had to accept concessions in recent years.
He has repeatedly attacked Mr. Saunders and Mr. McEntee for “checkbook unionism,” saying they have spent too much on national races, including the $90 million that Mr. McEntee said the union spent in the 2010 campaign. Mr. Donohue has suggested he would cut back Afscme’s national political ambitions to make the union more effective in state and local elections.
Mr. Saunders accused Mr. Donohue of spreading misinformation. “Sixty-five percent of our political budget goes into state and local battlegrounds,” he said. He also noted that Mr. Donohue sat on the union’s executive board for two decades without objecting to Afscme’s political spending.
Mr. Saunders said he had fought important battles alongside Mr. McEntee, including the effort to block President George W. Bush’s attempt to partly privatize Social Security and last year’s moves by Ohio and Florida lawmakers to curb collective bargaining. He said he also helped set up Afscme’s Next Wave program to train and mobilize younger union members.
In a nod to the Wisconsin results, he said, “We have to build a Main Street movement and develop and rebuild our relations with others, inside and outside labor. We can’t take on all these fights by ourselves.”
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