State employees ratify one-year labor deal with Wolf Administration

Members of Pennsylvania state government's largest public employees union have ratified a one-year contract covering them through the 2015-16 budget year.

The deal contains no base pay increase, but does grant most state employees moving through the seniority scale a 2.25 percent step increase effective Jan. 1, 2016.

Workers already at the top of the 20-step scale would not get that raise, but will receive the equivalent in a lump-sum bonus.

The terms also carry forward the state's existing health care benefits package through the new year.

Costs of the new terms have been estimated at $23 million, according to the Wolf Administration.

"These are fair agreements. They are fair to the employees and fair to the taxpayers," said Gov. Tom Wolf's Secretary of Administration, Sharon Minnich, in confirming the ratification vote.

The pact will cover 41,000 members of District Council 13 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees across state government.

The same terms have also been ratified for the much smaller segment of the United Food and Commercial Workers that represents clerks at the state-owned liquor stores.

A one-year contract is relatively unusual in state government, but officials from both sides of this negotiation said it made sense for them.

For the Wolf Administration, just finishing its first four months in office, it takes a major administrative issue off the table as the governor is about to plunge into his first round of state budget negotiations with legislative leaders.

Union leaders, meanwhile, get to see how those same negotiations - with the possibility of significant new increases in state revenues as proposed by Wolf - play out before they lock into a long-term agreement.

AFSCME District Council 13 Executive Director David Fillman said Tuesday the terms were approved by nearly 85 percent of his dues-paying members.

According to the Office of Administration, the average AFSCME worker currently earns a salary of $41,896. The mid-year increase would take that person's salary to $42,839 as of January.

The possibility of a one-year deal was apparently first broached by AFSCME negotiators in preliminary discussions with former Gov. Tom Corbett's negotiating team in late 2014, Fillman said.

Corbett didn't want to make commitments before the November 2014 election.

But the idea of a one-year pact had strong appeal to Wolf's team, which gets immediate labor peace at a time when the governor is striving for a battery of major tax and policy changes.

With the ratification, the AFSCME contract will now likely become the template for a series of other pacts with smaller unions representing about 15,000 other state workers.

All the contracts on that cycle would then come up for a new round of negotiations in 2016.

Source: PennLive