State workers get new contracts

LANSING – Some 33,000 state government employees will receive a 1% bump in salary on Oct. 1 after the Michigan Civil Service Commission on Wednesday OK’d collective bargaining contracts with five unions.

Those employees will also see 1.5% lump-sum payments this fall and flat health care costs and benefits through new contracts with the United Auto Workers Local 6000, the Michigan Corrections Organization, the Michigan State Employees Association, the Service Employees International Union Local 517M and the American Federation of State, County, & Municipal Employees Council 25. Collectively, those unions represent about two-thirds of the state government workforce, covering everyone from corrections officers in state prisons to child welfare workers to transportation employees.

The commission also approved three-year deals on other contract language, but the state insisted on a shorter-term deal on economics because of uncertainties over how a federal health care tax would affect the state budget.

The new contracts take effect Jan. 1.

The commission already approved a new, three-year contract with the Michigan State Police Troopers Association this spring. Troopers received a 2% raise for the first and second years and a 1% raise for the third year, but higher health care costs for troopers.

Meanwhile, the commission also voted Wednesday to accept the recommendations of a separate compensation panel to deny special raises for nurse managers at state psychiatric hospitals.

The Michigan Association of Governmental Employees, the union that represents those nurses, sought the raise to help with recruitment and retention. The State Journal reported in October that staffing shortages are frequently causing nurses to work unexpected, mandatory overtime. Nurses say that hurts to keep nurses on the job or recruit new nurses, compounding staffing shortages and mandatory overtime.

State nurses say they work too much OT

Commissioners said the union had brought only anecdotal evidence to the request and encouraged union officials to sit down with the Office of the State Employer and the Department of Health & Human Services to compile more hard evidence on the problem, including the actual amount of overtime worked and salary surveys comparing pay at state hospitals to other health care facilities.

"Our problem is we're here listening to the explanations of individuals about a problem that the department says doesn't exist," Commissioner Robert Swanson said.

The union contracts approved Wednesday will influence changes in pay and benefits for the 30% of state employees who are not covered by collective bargaining. The commission on Wednesday also recommended 1% pay raises and 1.5% lump-sum payments for unclassified employees such as department heads.

The 1% pay hike is less than the 2% increases employees saw this year and last but better than the flat pay unions saw in 2012. However, union officials note that much of their higher pay was eaten up by higher costs in a less-generous health care package. As of this summer, the average state employee made $56,752 a year and had been on the job for 12 years, according to the Civil Service Commission.

The contracts, negotiated with new State Employer Marie Waalkes, were approved in relatively swift fashion. Talks kicked into high gear only in September and deals were announced by mid-October. That was a far cry from the agonizing 2013 negotiations, which ended up before an impasse panel and then stalled with an unprecedented tie vote at the Civil Service Commission. The commission finally OK’d those deals in a 3-1 vote in January 2014.

Prohibited subjects of bargaining rule approved

Commissioners on Wednesday also approved a rule change that commission General Counsel John Gnodtke said would "memorialize (a) longstanding past practice" related to the types of grievances unions can file on behalf of their members.

There had been "a spike" in recent years, Gnodtke said, of so-called "prohibited subjects of bargaining" complaints against grievances. The state employer or departments file such complaints when they believe a union has filed a grievance about an issue outside the scope of contracts.

Union officials on Wednesday highlighted, for example, issues of job requirements, such as when snow-plowing duties were added to the job descriptions for certain Michigan Department of Transportation Employees earlier this year. Because of the requirement for a commercial driving license to drive a snowplow, unions worried some employees might suddenly become ineligible for their own jobs. Under the rule change, such an issue couldn't go through the grievance process, union officials said.

"We are creating a patchwork, and it's not done by arbiters, it's done by management," George Heath, of the SEIU, told commissioners Wednesday. "Because we now have classifications that bleed over."

But commission Chairman Thomas "Mac" Wardrop raised the specter of the new plow drivers winning a grievance process, and then the old plow drivers winning a grievance process, and then there being no one to plow the roads. That's why such issues have been excluded from bargaining, he said.

The commission approved the rule change unanimously.

Contact Justin A. Hinkley at (517) 377-1195 or jhinkley@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter@JustinHinkley. Sign up for his email newsletter, SoM Weekly, at on.lsj.com/somsignup.