Fidel Castro thinks retention is muy bueno.

Fidel Castro thinks retention is muy bueno.

UNITE-HERE Local 11, which represents Aramark food service workers at the Honda Center, has been pushing to impose a Los Angeles-style “retention” ordinance on Anaheim Arena Management (AAM).

A retention ordinance requires that when a city changes contractors, the new contractor has to pay the old contractors employees for a period of time — usually 90 days — and provide other benefits. Obviously, this is a significant barrier to outsourcing city services.

UNITE-HERE Local 11 is desperate to avoid the loss of members (i.e. revenue) that will result from AAM bringing food service in-house (in an effort to provide better food service to its customers) — as well as the additional $3.50  to $4.00 per hour/per employee the union receives for its expensive  health care plan overhead. Their protests are about the union’s bottom line, not the supposed loss of jobs to UNITE-HERE members who work at the Honda Center — only about half of whom have applied for jobs under the new arrangement.

Enter the liberals who are running the asylum known as the California Legislature. According to the OC Register, they are trying to impose a retention policy on Honda Center:

The Honda Center would be required to pay hundreds of food workers employed by one of its vendors for at least 60 days, and then offer them jobs, under budget-related legislation currently before Gov. Jerry Brown.

The provision, which Republican lawmakers criticized Thursday as unnecessary and heavy-handed, came in response to arena management’s plans to hire 500 new food service employees after its concession contract with Aramark ends June 30 and the vendor lays off its unionized workers.

Earlier this year, Assemblyman Tom Daly, D-Anaheim, proposed that the budget include a provision to specifically prevent operators of the Anaheim Ducks’ arena from receiving enterprise-zone tax credits for terminating workers and replacing them with lower-paid employees.

Assembly Bill 76, approved by the Legislature last week, does include that provision, but it has since been learned that the bill also includes language requiring the Honda Center’s operator, Anaheim Arena Management, to pay Aramark’s former employees for a period of time and offer them jobs.

Where are we? Venezuela? Cuba? This is the kind of left-wing governmental action engaged in by left-wing South American caudillos. As Sen. Marco Rubio observed regarding a different left-wing lunacy, this is an example of the kind of government policies immigrants come to America to get away from!

I wish I was surprised by this, but I am not since the state legislature is dominated by politicians who not only do not comprehend free enterprise, but are ideologically hostile to it and under the impression they can succeed where the Soviets failed and operate a function command-and-control economy.

Here’s an idea: makes this legislation apply to members of the state legislature. When a new legislator takes office, require him or her to keep his/her predecessor’s staff for at least 60 days. I have a feeling they wouldn’t think retention is such a good idea in their case.

Anaheim Arena Management is a private company. This legislation seeks to force AAM to give severance packages to individuals who aren’t even AAM employees — and then give them jobs! This attack on free enterprise is contrary to the nature of free and limited government. This is one of those “red lines,” and how Anaheim’s elected officials — local, state and federal — react to it will be a testament to which side of the free enterprise v. planned economy divide they are standing.