PHOENIX - Gov. Jan Brewer is threatening to veto some union-busting bills unless lawmakers first give her what she wants: reform of the state personnel system.
And even then, she's not promising to sign anything.
The unusual warning from the governor comes less than 24 hours after the Senate Committee on Government Reform approved four separate measures aimed at undermining union membership. The most sweeping would make it illegal for state and local governments and school districts to have collective bargaining with employee groups; others would restrict payroll deductions for union dues.
Brewer has had her own disputes with unions. She even supported a successful 2010 ballot measure that could make it more difficult to organize groups of workers.
But press aide Matthew Benson said Brewer believes it is far more important that she get the changes she wants in personnel rules, changes that would give department chiefs more power to fire and discipline workers.
People are also reading…
"What we're saying (to lawmakers) is, before you pursue this other stuff, you need to take up personnel reform," he said. "That is the governor's priority."
Brewer's comments did not sit well with Sen. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, who is sponsoring the measures aimed at unions and who shepherded them through the committee he chairs on Wednesday.
Murphy pointed out that while Brewer laid out her desire for changes in her State of the State speech, the governor has yet to provide him with specific statutory language she wants. And Murphy said he is one of the people who need to be convinced.
"Presumably, my committee would be among the committees you might expect a bill like that to go to," he said.
"Nobody's come to me, nobody's come to talk about it," he said. "I had no reason to believe they were doing anything more than talking about personnel reform, because I hadn't actually seen a bill, or even a proposal or even a fact sheet or bullet points or anything."
Benson said draft legislation is coming "very soon."
Brewer's plan, laid out in broad details last month, proposes to move away from the current merit system, where non-supervisory workers have certain rights if they are disciplined or fired. But rather than strip away those protections by force, the governor is offering 5 percent pay increases for employees who voluntarily give up their "covered" status and become "at-will" workers, meaning they could be fired for no reason at all, without recourse.
It also would give managers more power to provide pay hikes and bonuses to individual workers based on performance rather than being locked into a system of pay grades.
Benson said that is more important to her than any efforts to go after unions.
He stressed, though, that even if Brewer gets what she wants, that does not mean she will sign any of the anti-union bills if they reach her desk, saying the fate of those measures is "an open question."
Murphy said this isn't the way Brewer should be dealing with a Legislature controlled by members of her own party.
DID YOU KNOW?
State government (not including the University of Arizona) is Southern Arizona's third-largest employer, with more than 8,860 full-time-equivalent workers at the start of 2011, the Star 200 survey shows.
