Bucks Violating Promises on Unions?

The signs from this protest read, “Fiserv Forum Bucks Works.” Photo taken August 26th, 2018 by Jeramey Jannene.

Back in 1979 the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel was built under the leadership of developer Gary Grunau and had union workers. That was nearly half a century ago, and the last time a hotel in Milwaukee was unionized, says Peter Rickman, President of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization.

Rickman is trying to organize at the new downtown hotel, The Trade, run by what he calls a “vehemently anti-union company,” NCG Hospitality. The company has engaged in a “pervasive” and “illegal” union busting campaign, he has charged, after a majority of workers petitioned for a union.

While such anti-union campaigns have been seen before, this one is happening in a context that raises many red flags: it is located within a city-subsidized tax incremental financing district on land given to the Milwaukee Bucks by the State of Wisconsin as part of a massive subsidy going to the team. And the legislation providing that subsidy was passed only after the Bucks negotiated with Democrats and signed two pro-union documents promising that any businesses within the district must conduct negotiations when a majority of workers submit cards saying they want a union.

Both Milwaukee Bucks President Peter Feigin and its media spokesperson Barry Baum did not respond to requests for comments from Urban Milwaukee. But interviews with others tell a very interesting story, one that dramatizes Milwaukee’s change from being “one of best places in the nation for Blacks to have a family supporting wage” to what is now “a center for low-wage work,” as Rickman puts it.

Milwaukee was long one of the nation’s leading manufacturing towns, with a long list of companies paying union wages and benefits. Their ranks included many Black workers. But the decline of the midwestern Rust Belt, as it was dubbed, has transformed the city since the 1970s, as those manufacturers moved their factories and jobs to non-union southern states, then Mexico and ultimately China, gaining ever lower wages.

All of this was happening during a period when public subsidies of sports teams grew ever more lucrative for their owners. Supporters have claimed there is an economic impact on the community from these subsidies, but a broad consensus of economists has found there is little gain. And any jobs created are typically low-wage service sector employment.

That’s particularly true in a city like Milwaukee. “Milwaukee has a very low rate of service sector unionization compared to cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago. There’s hundreds of thousands of hotel union workers in the nation,” Rickman notes.

The low rate of unionization for service jobs in Milwaukee has helped make it one of the worst cities in the nation in the disparity between Black and white household incomes.

“Our theory is we need to organize the service sector,” Rickman says. With that in mind he pushed Democratic legislators, particularly from Milwaukee, to pressure the Bucks back in 2015 for a pro-union agreement in order to get their vote for the state subsidy of the team’s new arena. Milwaukee Democratic state Sen. Chris Larson was part of those talks.

“The bottom line for us was if you are looking at public dollars on public land, there has to be a public benefit to that,” Larson recalls, and that would be the creation of family supporting jobs with good pay and benefits.

Feigin and the Bucks agreed to this and signed a community benefits agreement and a memorandum of understanding with Democrats, outside of the proposed state bill (Republican lawmakers had no interest in including this in the arena legislation) whereby they agreed to negotiate with a union should workers vote for this and require the same of other businesses in the Deer District area.

But once the legislation was passed and construction began on the arena, the Bucks began to drag their feet on the deal, as Urban Milwaukee reported. After pickets by MASH members at Fiserv Forum events, which typically displayed a large inflatable rat to symbolize the Bucks, the team relented and cut a deal with the union for all arena workers.

But only after first forcing a concession from MASH. Feigin told Rickman the Bucks needed to have an exception to the MOU for future hotel workers. “He said the partner we want to work with to build the hotel won’t do the deal if a union is required,” Rickman recalls.

Rank-and-file members of the union agreed to this to get the Fiserv Forum deal, with the hope they could still try and organize a future union at hotels. “The Bucks said this deal will give you an opportunity to build a union and make a case for it,” Rickman notes. And MASH has done just that, pointing to the Bucks deal as a model for other service sector companies.

But NCG Hospitality has done everything possible to undercut union negotiations at The Trade Hotel and now the Milwaukee Common Council has approved a second proposed hotel by NCG, also on land that was given to the Bucks as part of the arena subsidy deal. And its a safe bet that NCG will want non-union labor in both hotels.

The council voted as it did because under state law you can’t oppose a zoning change (needed to build the Moxy) based on concerns like how much workers will be paid. But downtown Ald. Bob Bauman argued that the city does have power over this particular deal because there is “no right to a subsidy” and “this deal is on land owned by the Bucks as part of a project that is subsidized by the city, the county and the state.”

Larson says the Bucks have a responsibility to live up to the deal they signed regarding union workers. “I think they have the obligation to follow through on that. This is land that was sold for a buck with the idea it would have a public benefit.”

Then there is the role of Mayor Cavalier Johnson in all this. Rickman met with the mayor to urge him to push the Bucks and NCG to recognize the union only to get a tepid response. “The mayor has not used his bully pulpit and his various types of authority to push for this,” Rickman laments.

Bauman faults the mayor as well, saying “he just wants to get along and stay popular and not take on groups like the Bucks.”

When asked about this the mayor’s spokesperson Jeff Fleming says “the Mayor strongly supports unions.  That’s why he stood with multiple unions and the Milwaukee Area Labor Council publicly calling for the Moxy Hotel to be advanced by the Common Council.”

It is true that union groups supported the Moxy proposal, but as Bauman notes, they were supporting the construction jobs that would be created for a year or less, while the jobs at the hotel are “permanent jobs” that may be held for decades at non-union pay if NCG and the Bucks have their way.

“And these hotel workers tend to be lower-income city residents who are predominantly people of color as opposed to the construction workers who tend to be suburban residents,” Bauman adds.

In the past Feigin has called Milwaukee “the most segregated, racist place I’ve ever experienced in my life.” This is an opportunity for him to address this in a powerful way, by advocating for better pay for service sector workers who are often people of color.

“The day is not done,” Larson says. “I do think the Bucks have some level of responsibility. The hotel’s owners still have time to correct this and do the right thing.”