Detroit budget crisis: Workers face big blow to benefits

Bing makes threat of emergency manager


Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is expected to present Tuesday both a proposed 2011-12 financial plan that contains $200 million in cuts and additional revenue needed to balance the city's $3.1-billion budget, and a five-year deficit elimination plan that will include deep cuts to employee health care and fringe benefits.

Bing's budget address before City Council will lay out his plan to suspend payment of a special allocation to the city's two pension funds next fiscal year, and his intent to ask the city's 48 collective bargaining units to renegotiate contracts in the hopes of gaining concessions.

Bing is expected to explain that without the concessions, the city is in danger of having the state name an emergency financial manager -- someone with the power to dissolve the existing contracts anyway, according to sources familiar with the mayor's plan.

City unions would have to agree to reopen labor talks just months after a three-year contract was imposed on the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the city's biggest union.

"I don't believe we would be inclined to do that," said Catherine Phillips, AFSCME's lead negotiator. "There is an anti-union movement in this country, and Detroit and Mayor Bing are no different."


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