TARTAGLIONE WORKS TO SAVE LOCAL LABOR MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES 

            HARRISBURG, July 10 - Pennsylvania’s recently enacted budget contains funding that will avert disaster for local labor management committees, state Sen. Christine M. Tartaglione said today.

            From York County to Beaver County and Erie to Scranton, local labor management committees had been cut from the budget, and were facing layoffs and locked doors.  Tartaglione negotiated a compromise that will ensure adequate funding to keep the committees working with employers and labor groups to prevent future strife.

            “These labor committees were created during a time of transition in Pennsylvania industry that made labor-management relations stressful and complicated,” Tartaglione said. “With a global economy, soaring energy prices and opportunity in the alternative energy market, those stresses and complications still threaten to undermine progress.  We need the good work of these groups to keep our economic engine running smoothly.”

            Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry said most of the state’s dozen labor-management committees had exhausted reserves and were facing layoffs and a possible end of operations without restored funding from the state.  Budget cuts had left the groups nearly $400,000 short for the year.

            Tartaglione, Democratic Chair of the Senate Labor and Industry Committee, pressed budget negotiators for the restored funding.

            “Strikes, work stoppages and protracted contract negotiations can be disruptive and extremely costly,” Tartaglione said. “This is a comparatively small amount of money that can pay enormous dividends by making sure every region’s labor leaders and industry representatives understand each other and work with each other.”

            Pennsylvania’s 12 regional labor management committees were created in 1984 under the state’s 1978 MILRITE (Making Industry and Labor Right in Today’s Economy) Council legislation.  MILRITE expired in 1994, but the local labor management committees continued providing seminars for labor and management officials, assistance for dislocated workers, promoting economic development and working with students to prepare them for jobs in industry.

            The state Department of Labor and Industry calls the committees “quite frugal” in their spending, while local decisions are left to regional boards of directors made up of business, labor and government representatives.