Collective bargaining trumps democracy in East Lansing

September 14, 2025

Forget about the democratic process, in which our elected representatives write legislation and enact it by majority vote. In East Lansing - as reported by Ayah Imran in East Lansing Info - agreements reached in a collective bargaining session are changing a city ordinance.

In a collective bargaining session, policy is being made behind closed doors. No elected official attends. It is not an "open meeting" subject to Michigan's Open Meetings Act. No meeting minutes are posted.

In Michigan, Donald Trump is not the only threat to democracy. The Public Employment Relations Act (PERA) and its companion Public Act 312 give unions the power to override local ordinances. PERA forced local governments to engage in collective bargaining and Act 312 provided for binding arbitration for public safety workers.

The dispute is between the East Lansing Independent Police Oversight Commission (ELIPOC) and the Capitol City Labor Program (CCLP), the union representing non-supervisory police officers. Reporter Imran says changes in a new contract between the city and the union

strip the commission of some of its powers. The changes include redacting officer information from reports, limiting what commissioners can talk about publicly and delaying the timeline the commission receives information about complaints on.

At a September 9 city council meeting, Oversight Commissioner Chris Root asked to see a document that explains the ordinance changes. But it was not on the meeting agenda and could not be discussed without a unanimous vote to add it. Council member Eric Altman's was the only vote against. Something is rotten when a document concerning a public body is withheld from the public body itself.

This all started back in 2022. As Ayah Imran explained in a May 21, 2025 story,

Typically, bargaining negotiations between the employer and the employee include wages, benefits and working conditions. During negotiations, the union believed that ELIPOC was a bargaining obligation. The city disagreed, and when the two could not come to an agreement, the city filed an unfair labor practice dispute with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission in 2022.

In 2024, Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) David Peltz ruled that several aspects of ELIPOC’s processes are a bargaining obligation under the Public Employment Relations Act (PERA), allowing the police union to negotiate terms around ELIPOC in its new contract.

Public Act 312 is the state law that provides for binding arbitration for public safety workers. It's been on the books since 1969. Usually, it is the union that files the complaint when it can't get the employer to agree to its demands. This time, it was the city...and it backfired. The problem is that the parties are putting their fate in the hands of a supposedly unbiased, well-informed arbitrator. In October 2016, I wrote about a 1997 arbitration between Ingham County and its sheriff supervisors bargaining unit. The arbitrator's brilliant decision resulted in 8 retirements within the next 12 months with pensions over $10,000 a year higher than they would have been otherwise, blowing a hole in the county's pension fund.

In a democracy, the people are supposed to be in charge. In Michigan, forced collective bargaining for local governments is taking control away from the people and putting it in the hands of labor unions and bureaucrats.

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