Public Employee Press

Wage talks to open Dec. 5

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The union and city are scheduled to meet Dec. 5 to begin negotiating a new economic agreement covering nearly 95,000 DC 37 members.

“We are going to roll up our sleeves, get down to work and press the city for the best deal possible,” said District Council 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts.

“We expect to win a new contract that protects our benefits and provides our members with the fair and decent raises that they deserve for their hard work.”

At the opening session, the union will present the list of demands the DC 37 Negotiating Committee hammered out at its Nov. 3 meeting.

The committee, which is made up of the union’s 56 local presidents, followed up on a process they initiated at a meeting in September. At that meeting, as they began crafting the demands, they decided to seek input from the membership by publishing a survey form in the Public Employee Press.

Survey helps committee
More than 2,200 members returned the survey to the Research and Negotiations Dept., which compiled and analyzed the responses.

The survey asked members about their expectations for pay raises, the length of the contract, union health and welfare fund benefits and other economic and non-economic items.

Dennis Sullivan, director of research and negotiations, described the survey as a useful barometer of members’ feelings. Combined with unmet demands from the last round of bargaining and new demands based upon input from union locals, the survey will help the committee determine its priorities as bargaining proceeds.

Range of demands
In addition to salaries and benefits, the union’s demands cover a wide range of items, ranging from civil service and personnel issues to retirement concerns.

Historically, DC 37 and the city do not publicly discuss their demands before sitting down at the negotiating table. So as not to tip off the city about its bottom line, the union doesn’t plan to release the results of the survey.

Besides discussing concrete demands, committee members debated the union’s negotiating strategy and the economic climate for negotiations. They also considered how recent contract settlements and current negotiations of other municipal unions might affect DC 37’s negotiations with the city.

“We have an inflationary period coming in,” said Victor Emanuelson, president of Prevailing Rate Employees Local 1087. “We need to be looking at that.”

“Outdated” salaries
“In our case, the salaries are outdated,” said Claude Fort, president of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375. “There is a big gap between the private sector and what the city is paying our members. A lot of qualified people are leaving city agencies.”

“We need to look at career ladders,” said Juan Fernandez, president of Amalgamated Employees Local 154. “People get stuck at the minimum level and can’t move up.”

Kyle Simmons, president of Laborers Local 924, urged the committee to keep members informed about the bargaining process.

Wildlife Conservation Society Local 1501 President Anthony Bigone said his members want substantial wage increases.

The union’s latest economic agreement with the city expired in June. The terms of the old contract remain in effect while negotiations occur. The economic agreement affects about 95,000 DC 37 members at city agencies including the Dept. of Education, cultural institutions, the Health and Hospitals Corp. and the Housing, Transit and the Metropolitan Transportation authorities. About 20,000 other members, primarily court, state and City University employees, are covered by other contracts.

The committee was scheduled to present the demands for approval by the DC 37 Delegates Council, the union’s highest decision-making body, on Nov. 22, as PEP went to press.

“We represent 1,000 job titles,” Roberts told the Negotiating Committee Nov. 3. “We are going to be negotiating hard for everyone.”