10/7/16
The A&R Negotiation team met with the State on Thursday October 6th. While we were hoping for some progress, the State simply confirmed what we suspected: the State has no interest in settling our contract. The State chose to pay an outside law firm to do nothing more than waste our time.
The State officially declared that the first 2 years of our successor agreement must be hard zero’s...for 2 years. Hard 0’s mean no General Wage Increase and no Step movement. It is also the State’s belief that this means that the Top Step Payment would not be paid in January 2017 nor would it be paid in January 2018. At best, their offer would give employees their next raise in July 2018.
While this certainly started to close the door on the negotiating session. The State felt it necessary to slam the door shut and nail it closed with their “meet-us-half-way” offer on AWS. It is the State’s contention that AWS should only be available if a unit consisted of 25 or more A&R members and that the AWS selections would be limited to a 4/5, 5/4 schedule or having variable start/end times…absolutely no pure flex. This was their attempt at meeting us half-way, remove AWS from 95% of the membership rather than 100% of the membership. Again, hardly a compromise and certainly not acceptable.
There was no discussion of a ‘next’ meeting between the parties. The A&R Negotiation team will meet and discuss the obvious: declaring impasse and filing for arbitration.
It is quite telling when the State has 30 open contracts for a year and not one of them is settled. Clearly, there is no interest in settling contracts on a unit-by-unit basis. So far, four unions have filed for arbitration. Expect this number to rise quickly.