Eliminates 15-month salary-step delay
New pact pushes PEF educators’ pay ahead
By SHERRY HALBROOK
Are you one of PEF’s 1,600 teachers, vocational instructors or other educators working a 10-month academic year?
If the answer is yes, then you probably received some extra pay in June thanks to a new agreement between PEF and the state aimed to end an old inequity.
Under the agreement, 10-month employees will no
longer have to wait 15 months after they finish a school
year in June to move up to the next annual salary step
for that year. Instead, they’ll move up when the
next academic year begins the following September.“I am very pleased to announce this important change for our teachers and other educators,” says PEF President Roger Benson. “Their state pay still is not fair or competitive, and we continue to work for their upgrades. But this agreement removes one inequity and puts some additional pay in their pockets this summer.”
The state Department of Audit and Control has ordered this change retroactive to the 1999-2000 school year, giving many teachers a retroactive pay adjustment in late June.
Teachers will get another increment step this September for the school year that ended this June.
If you were already at the job rate, you will not see a benefit from the agreement, unless you are promoted to another 10-month position.
But those below the job rate, as of Sept. '99, will now progress more quickly through the salary steps and reach the job rate 15 months sooner and qualify for longevity bonuses (performance awards) that much sooner too.
“This was an issue of fairness, that brings these members onto the same cycle of timely pay as the 12-month members in the PS&T unit,” Benson says.
These negotiations between PEF and the state began during bargaining on the 1999-2003 contract and were recently completed.
The president thanked PS&T Contract Chair Eric Miller and PEF Region 4 Coordinator David Stallone, who is also PEF’s labor-management chair at the state Department of Correctional Services, for their leadership and advocacy in negotiating the change.
State trims parking fee demand
PEF’s campaign to preserve Capital District-area members’ terms and conditions of employment bore some fruit in June, as the state backed off on all but one of the sites on which it wanted to begin charging employees to park.
“The Governor’s Office of Employee Relations has removed from the bargaining table its proposal to impose parking fees on employees at 44 and 84 Holland Avenue, 50 Wolf Road, and at the new Department of Transportation Offices in Schenectady,” said PEF Labor Relations Director Roger Scales.
“Negotiations on parking fees are now limited to the Harriman State Office Building Campus.”
The state proposed charging employees $3 bi-weekly for parking on lots that had been free for more than 40 years. The union has been aggressively mobilizing its members to defeat the proposal, and distributing leaflets and stickers to co-workers who would be affected by the contract change. PEF is urging members to call the governor’s office at 474-1041 or 1-877-255-9417 to voice their opposition to the parking fee plan.
PEF Region 8 Coordinator Jeff Satz applauded the progress, but said members must accelerate the pressure on the governor’s office until the threat is completely removed — especially since the state has plans to move so many employees.
“This fight is about protecting our members’ terms and conditions of employment,” said Satz.
“We believe the state’s true agenda here is to change our contract, and implement a modest parking fee now so it can charge employees whatever the market will bear whenever employees are relocated.” — Denyce Duncan Lacy
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PEF members at Lockport Memorial Hospital near Buffalo have ratified a new three-year contract with the hospital. The agreement affects approximately 100 employees.
“Our members voted 52-18 in favor of accepting this agreement,” says PEF field representative Art Munson, who was the union’s chief negotiator. “The key features are: a 3 percent pay raise in the third year, no concessions, and no change in medical benefits.
“We knew at the onset of negotiations they were going after our retiree health-care benefit, as well as our medical-insurance premium payment,” Munson says. “But we held the line, and now we are the only one of the four unions at the hospital that does not pay into their medical.”
The union and the hospital were both working hard to keep a delicate financial balance in these talks, Munson says, because the community hospital was $7 million in the red when it began the negotiations.
“John Villella and Mary Kiner, who head PEF Division 505 at the hospital, and I have worked with the hospital on many initiatives to save it money,” Munson says.
Those efforts and others have combined to help the hospital reduce its debt by approximately $1.5 million over the last year, according to Munson. And, he says, the hospital expects to get out of debt in about three years if it can continue to hold down costs.
That’s why PEF agreed to no across-the-board raises in the first two years of the pact, followed by a 3 percent raise in the final year of the contract.
The agreement is retroactive to October 1, 2000 and will expire Sept. 30, 2003.
— Sherry Halbrook