9/24/2003

TABLE TALK

The State’s Chief Negotiator drew a line in the sand yesterday and told PEF that there would be no negotiations on any issues (theirs or ours) until such time as PEF agreed to the State’s health insurance concessions.

Union negotiators responded to the State with charges of bad faith and failure to negotiate and made it clear negotiations are a give and take process and that the Union would not be agreeing to any of the State’s needs without a corresponding meeting of our member’s needs. The Union put management on notice that the State’s line in the sand must be erased.

After 8 months of bargaining the parties have executed 2 tentative settlements – one regarding negotiations’ ground rules and the other identifying the articles neither intended on negotiating. There is apparent agreement between the State and the Union in some articles yet the State now refuses to sign off on them. In dozens of other areas the State refuses to counter propose.

Negotiators next meet on Wednesday, October 1, 2003. The Union will continue pressing for settlements in first our non-economic proposals and then in our economics.

“We need to have health insurance resolved before we can move forward”.

Rebecca Caudle, NYS Chief Negotiator – 9.23.03

Employee pay raises are projected at about 3.6%, according to a September survey of 1,276 companies by human resource consultants Hewitt Associates. Salary increases in 2003 averaged 3.4% and were the smallest in 27 years.

Similarly, in a poll of more than 1,700 companies, Mercer Human Resource Consulting found average pay hikes in 2004 would be about 3.5%. That marks the third consecutive year that annual pay increases have fallen below 4%.

"Companies can't raise prices ... so any salary increases come out of bottom line," says Steven Gross, a compensation consulting leader at Mercer. "It's a lousy proposition for workers."

Pay freezes are thawing, because employers are somewhat more optimistic the economy will turn around. The Hewitt study found only 2% of firms are expected to have a freeze next year, down from 8% in 2003.

Raises are closer to 4% or higher in a number of major cities such as Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington. Amounts can also vary within companies: In order to keep top performers, some companies are giving heftier raises, such as 5%, to stars, while giving nothing to the weakest.

One possible factor behind the cautious approach is that overall compensation costs are climbing. Benefit costs rose 6.3% for the year ending June 2003, according to the Department of Labor, in large part because of the continuing rise in the costs for health insurance.

CSEA, representing 77,000 NYS employees covered by a total of 4 separate contracts, returned to the bargaining table with a flourish after taking the summer off. In an admitted attempt to kick start the process CSEA proposed a three-year agreement retroactive to 4/1/03 with a 5% increase in each year of the agreement payable on April 1 of each year.