FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
2003-2007 PEF TENTATIVE CONTRACT
Base Raise in Each Year/The Pledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Merit Advance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
COLA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Nurses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
BASE RAISE IN EACH YEAR/THE PLEDGE
Q. One of our priorities was to achieve a raise in each and every year. What happened?
A. We took a high risk strategy in bargaining with the goal being to
raise the bar and impact positively on what would ultimately become the pattern.
While other unions were taking the politically safe path of downplaying
expectations of their membership PEF attempted in every way from scores of
meetings across the state, contract updates, fax pledges to the governor, hand
billing, ads, rallies and building alliances with other unions to raise
expectations. We knew that the higher the expectations the more we would
achieve. The other side of that coin, though, is that the higher the
expectations the greater the disappointment when we don't achieve all of our
demands. We chose the riskier path because the potential reward to our members
would be greater and we are confident that the established pattern would be
weaker if we had not shown leadership in this manner.
The negotiated wage pattern includes an $800 bonus and four base pay increases in a four year contract. It is identical to that established for 130,000 other State employees some of whom make more than PEF members (UUP and MC), some who make less (CSEA) and those that earn equivalent salaries (Court Officers). This pattern was negotiated in the worst financial environment for NYS since 1930. Management is looking at a $17B deficit over the next three years. The last time PEF negotiated a contract with a state deficit (1995), the first base wage increase did not occur until 30 months into the contract. The pattern in this contract provides four base wage increases in four years with the first occurring 12 months in. We believe the difference this time can be directly attributed to PEF’s strategic decision to raise expectations.
Q. What is the Merit Advance and why is it only applicable to
grades 1-18?
A. The merit advance program was a way that PEF could achieve the Convention Delegates’ goal of salary grade parity with the CSEA salary schedules.
For more than 20 years, the job rates of most salary grades up to Grade 25 in
PEF have fallen short of the CSEA counterpart for the same salary grade. This
inequity has been a special source of frustration for our members, many of whom
work side by side with CSEA members in the same salary grade and yet are paid
less. Important to the consideration of the inequity is the fact that CSEA has
very few members (something on the order of 1/10th of a percent) of their
membership in salary grades higher than SG-18 and none in Grades 22-25.
Previous PEF negotiators have on two occasions "bumped up" the job rates of some of the salary grades below Grade 18 in an attempt to mitigate this inequity. Just as with Sick Leave parity, the PEF Delegates passed a resolution making correction of the salary grade disparity with CSEA Grades 1-25 issue a priority for PEF negotiators. Here is the text from the actual Convention Delegate Resolution:
PARITY IN SALARY GRADE PAY SCALES BETWEEN CSEA AND PEF
Whereas, for the same salary grade from grade 7 to grade 25, the yearly salary paid CSEA members is greater than the salary set for PEF members at the same salary grade:
Therefore be it resolved, that PEF continue to make wage parity a major issue; and
Therefore be it further resolved, that PEF will use all its resources to address this issue.
This Negotiation's Team continued the work of our predecessors and on the last day of this contract salary grade parity with CSEA will be achieved for grades 1-18 (53% of our membership). We would have preferred to achieve increases for all of the grades. We also would have preferred not to wait until 2007. After waiting since the 1979-82 Contract we know that on 4/1/07, the wait will be over for many thousands of our members.
Q. One of the top goals for the PEF bargaining team was to address the cost of living differences experienced by those PEF members working and living in high cost areas of the State. We didn’t get it! What happened?
A. COLA was another of PEF’s top goals. Unlike salary grade parity and sick leave parity, two other Convention Delegate goals, we did not achieve a satisfactory result.
COLA was a relatively recent Convention Delegate Resolution (2002). In comparison, sick leave parity and salary grade equity were both long standing organizational goals. Both were, in fact, on negotiating team radar screens as far back as the early and mid 1980’s. In the final analysis, success in both of these cases was the result of long term organizational focus (keeping our eye on the ball) and building upon the arguments, education and fights that were leveled by several predecessor bargaining teams and administrations.
PEF took leadership on the COLA issue. We believe that PEF is the only union to place a serious COLA proposal on the bargaining table in this round. We pressed it, and pressed hard for a significant change and did this knowing that the COLA was inordinately expensive (although we tried many different iterations to get our foot in the door), and the fiscal climate was the worst we faced at the table in the history of PEF. Our fate was further complicated when CSEA and UUP ratified agreements for 100,000 of our co-workers that contained only marginal increases in the downstate adjustments. Our pressing was not limited to the table either.
The Pledge campaign (which included postcards, faxes, petitions and a call for members and activists to contact their legislators) culminated in a rally at the Capital. COLA was one of the prominent goals of the campaign. In addition, PEF crafted and sponsored a Resolution at each of the NYS AFL-CIO Central Labor Councils (CLCs) across NYS gaining broad labor support for our issues including COLA. Press releases were issued by PEF as approximately 10 CLC’s passed the resolution.
It took many years and several negotiations to correct the sick leave disparity and the salary grade disparity through Grade 18 problems. In this round of bargaining, we have laid the foundation upon which to advance the fight for COLA closer to success. One of the bricks in this foundation is the creation of a Joint GOER/PEF COLA Committee. Through this we will continue to press the State on this issue before the next round of bargaining. The COLA committee was one of the LAST issues to be resolved, and the State was wildly unenthusiastic about it. Why? Because they understand what the results are likely to show and those results will only weaken their position in future negotiations.
Q. I represent nurses and they are asking what is in this contract for them? What’s the story?
A. Salary grade parity will impact positively on a significant portion of our thousands of nurses. Grade 16 Nurses who are at the Job Rate and meet some basic criteria will receive a $466 merit advance to base on April 1, 2007, in addition to the $800 payment of April 1, 2007. The increase for qualified specialty nurses in SG-18 positions is $1,413 plus the $800 (a real gain of $2213 on base). And this is not the only benefit advance for our nurses in this agreement.
In the previous contract a GOER/PEF Nurses Committee was established in a side letter. In this negotiation we've established full contractual recognition for a Nursing and Institutional Issues committee in a new Article 44, including a contract right to share in Joint Labor Management funding allotted to Article 14. In addition, President Benson has committed that the three vacancies on this Committee will be filled with PEF Nurses.
Nurses, along with other PEF represented employees, who are receiving stand by/on call pay will now keep their stand by pay in addition to their recall pay when recalled to work. (Under the previous contract recalled employees (most of who were nurses) lost their recall pay when recalled to work!)
Part time employees including nurses will earn additional vacation, sick and personal leave accruals bases on the additional hours worked in excess of their normal part time schedule. Under the old contract they earned accruals based upon their formal payroll percentage and not actual hours worked resulting in nurses working, in effect, full time earning only 1/2 time accruals for example.)
Under the previous contract, if an employee was receiving a $1250 or $2500 longevity award they did not have the award calculated into the promotion salary. Under the new language the award is used in the calculation. Most of our members in this situation will see significantly more base salary in the promotion and, of course, the higher the base the closer one is to getting their next longevity award in the promoted title. Because of the nurse shortage the State hires them at rates above the hiring rate and in many cases directly at the job rate. This fact means that both longevity portability and salary grade parity which occurs at the job rate will mean more to nurses, in general, than other employee groups
Grades 1-17, which includes the majority of our nurses, will be able to cash out 3 days of annual leave for $400 to be used to pay their health insurance premiums.
And all of our health care professionals will be particularly sensitive to the negotiated elimination of the Empire Plan direct provider payment for radiology, pathology and anesthesiology which will save impacted members and their families hundreds if not thousands of dollars in out of pocket expenses.
As in any negotiations there are many proposals we did not achieve. Despite our lack of success, it would be a mistake to assume the issues were ignored by the team. PEF had many contract proposals on the bargaining table that would have benefited our nurses. We had proposals to address mandatory overtime, staffing levels and the right to refuse inappropriate assignments. We also sought to establish a clothing/cleaning allowance for nurses, and attempted to secure additional compensation for obtaining educational degrees that went beyond the minimum qualifications and we pressed the state to establish bonus compensation for those serving as “charge” or “preceptors. At one point, we were discussing a second committee to investigate issues related to patient staffing ratios, and we passed language that would have guaranteed every nurse the right to bid off two weekends out of every four. The frustration of not achieving these things to the side, we did achieve some real gains for our nurses.