Last August’s AFSCME message.
The first aftershocks of the labor debacle in Hartford may have been felt in New Haven, where City Hall and negotiators for school custodians have stopped fighting and managed to reach a long-elusive contract agreement that includes a Solomonic solution to an outsourcing dispute.
The two sides hope that rank-and-file school maintenance workers vote yes Friday on a proposed agreement to cut the custodial workforce, ease work rules, turn the lowest-paid janitors into non-union labor, and revise previously agreed-upon wages and health and pension benefits.
The agreement essentially splits in half the two sides’ long-running dispute over privatizing custodial work.
It comes just as the contract was headed toward arbitration, when each side faced losing the whole privatization question.
It also comes as state government workers are taking a second vote on a contract renegotiation with the Malloy administration. That deal failed to gain enough votes for approval the first time, leading Malloy to issue 3,000 layoff notices—sending panic through organized labor’s ranks and provoking near-universal public outrage at a time of economic hardship.
AFSCME Council 4 Local 287 President Robert Montuori and city Labor Relations Director Craig Manemeit reached the New Haven custodial agreement. Click here to read the tentative agreement and side agreements, which now go before union members for approval. The custodians have worked without a contract for two years.
The administration plans to brief members of the Board of Aldermen on the deal. The board must approve the deal, too, because it contains pension changes. City officials and union officials are declining public comment on the deal pending the vote, in hopes of avoiding the debacle that occurred in the first round of the state concessions negotiations.
“What happened at the state does affect New Haven and certainly played a role” in breaking the logjam on the custodian pact, said a union source close to the process.
“I’m happy to hear they came up with a compromise. I look forward to hearing the details,” Hill Alderman Jorge Perez said Sunday.
Meanwhile, one of the Democrats challenging Mayor John DeStefano this year, Jeffrey Kerekes, questioned whether the deal endangers the city’s long-term financial viability “pushing costs off” on pensions.
The Register’s Abbe Smith first reported the news about the pending agreement.
If approved, the agreement would end two years of acrimony over the DeStefano administration’s efforts to privatize custodial jobs, or otherwise dramatically cut costs, in order to avoid laying off teachers, raising taxes, or making other cuts amid a budget crisis. The union has held demonstrations accusing the administration of pursuing a “corrupt” policy; the administration has struck back with surprise job visits it claimed caught workers not working. Click here to watch a discussion on the subject among Montuori, Mayor John DeStefano, and custodian Dorothy Greene.
The tentative agreement covers a six-year period that began July 1, 2009 and ends June 30, 2015. It would cut the number of unionized school maintenance employees from the current 157 (and a previous high of around 200) to 130 by Dec. 31, then to 100 by next July 1. The categories of maintenance employees represented by the union would shrink to include drivers, building managers, assistant building managers, and “floaters” who swing from school to school when regular staffers are sick. Each school would have a full-time on-site union custodian. The Board of Ed would be able to hire other custodians on its own, outside the union. Much of the cleaning would take place at night with non-union custodians.
The deal aims to shrink the rolls first through attrition and an early-retirement offer for employees with 30 years on the job. After that, if layoffs occur, they’d be based on employees’ “two-year history of attendance and discipline.” If employees have similar histories, only then would layoffs take place based on seniority.
Custodial workers would get no wage increases for the first two years of the contract already passed and 2 percent increases a year over the next two years. The two sides would negotiate the increase for the final two years in the future.
Employees would pay more toward their pension and health insurance plans (from 6 to 9 percent in both cases) under the deal, as well.
Work rules would relax, too.
Candidate Kerekes raised concerns about the early-retirement aspect of the deal. Noting the current precariousness of the city’s pensions funds, he challenged the administration to release detailed financial projections of the long-term costs of the early retirements before the deal’s approval; he wants to see what kind of return is being assumed on pension investments.
“He’s [DeStefano] basically trying to get a workforce reduction at the expense of the pension fund” in order to solve a problem in the short term, Kerekes charged.
Kerekes was asked what terms he would have negotiated instead with AFSCME. “It’s a great question,” he responded. “I don’t have the answer because I wasn’t privy to the negotiations. I am interested in seeing if he can release” the details.
Time was when a worker in the U.S. could earn a wage sufficient to support his or her family. Possibly no more.
There is a living wage ordinance that is the law in New Haven, passed in 1997. It mandates that contractors providing services to the city pay their employees a living wage.
http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/purchasingbureau/ProtestProc.asp
But is that living wage enough to live on? Found a Register article from 9-1-2010 about an effort to increase the current $12 to $14.67 with health benefits. Even $14.67 an hour, $30,000 annually, would be a problem for a family of four with only one wage earner.
http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2010/09/01/news/new_haven/doc4c7dcf335b2f0177631461.txt
[To NHI editor: are my facts and numbers correct?]