City employees are grumbling about raises for their bosses as
management in the latest round of labor talks seeks to keep a lid
on employee medical contributions and salaries.
Gilroy – City employees are grumbling about raises for their bosses as management in the latest round of labor talks seeks to keep a lid on employee medical contributions and salaries.
A green flyer circulating around City Hall captures the frustration of some employees in Gilroy’s largest union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 101.
The flyer, distributed Tuesday at a meeting of the 135-member union, points to the $13,789 annual raise recently given to the city’s human resources director, LeeAnn McPhillips, as well as the $14,980 raise given to City Clerk Rhonda Pellin. It contrasts those wage hikes with the $896 raise a union office assistant would receive under the city’s latest bargaining proposal.
Union representatives would not comment on the flyer, since they have agreed not to publicly discuss negotiations.
“The reaction of union members as a whole was, ‘Hey, if you want to give them what LeeAnn got, great,'” said one union member who asked not to be named. “But they at least want cost-of-living (increases).”
Councilman Peter Arellano said the city aims to treat workers fairly, but must consider a multimillion gap between its annual earnings and spending.
“I would love if the city had deep pockets,” he said. “It would be great to say ‘Here have this.’ But right now we’re kind of running down the savings.”
Union members have asked for yearly raises of 3.9 percent, compared to the 2 percent raises City Hall has offered, according to the flyer. Union members would receive a total 8 percent raise over the life of the three-year contract extending from July 2007 through July 2009.
In exchange, city management wants union members to renew a clause in their current contract capping the city’s share of health-care contributions. Under the proposal, the city would continue to pay up to 5 percent of annual increases in health-care costs, while employees would have to pick up additional increases.
“The city is trying to get some type of handle on the explosion of benefit costs,” City Administrator Jay Baksa said. “As such, this bargaining unit, as well as police and fire, have agreed to a cap on health costs. That’s very important to the city.”
The lower-than-demanded wage and the health-benefit cap are not the only cause of angst among union members.
“The union is pissed off,” the union member said, “because whatever increase we get, basically upper management is going to get on top of those large increases.”
The comment refers to a controversial shift in pay ranges recently approved for the city’s roughly 40 top managers. While only about half of the managers received immediate raises – at an annual cost of $200,000 to the city – the salaries of all managers are now tied to their employees in Gilroy and counterparts in nearby cities.
The new pay system, approved by council in April, calls for supervisors to earn 15 percent more than subordinates and 10 percent more than the average pay earned by peers in nearby cities.
“(That system) was to protect the supervisor from having the employee under them earn more than them,” Baksa said. “There isn’t a government organization that doesn’t have some policy like that, because it’s absolutely crazy for an employee to earn more than his supervisors.”
Russ Valiquette, one of six councilmen to approve the increase in pay ranges for top managers, said employees are free to counter the city’s offer if they feel their bosses received a better deal.
“Not everybody got these big humongous raises,” Valiquette said, referring to McPhillips and Pellin. “If they want to send a list of who they think should get the raises and shouldn’t get them, they can. But we’re trying to work out a way for the whole AFSCME group to get raises. Not just certain individuals.”
AFSCME and city negotiators are scheduled to meet June 22 and 28. The two sides avoided calling in a mediator during the last round of negotiations in 2005. That year, both sides agreed to the less formal recourse of hiring an outside “facilitator” to help hammer out a compromise.
The city lost a labor battle with firefighters last year at the hands of an outside arbitrator.
