No one is sure how the contract dispute between Gov. Donald L. Carcieri and the largest state employees union will play out, but one thing is clear: It isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
Last week, Rhode Island Council 94 of the Association of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) filed an unfair labor practices complaint against Carcieri for refusing to negotiate after rank-and-file members overwhelmingly rejected a four-year contract proposal that, among other things, would have increased employees’ share of their health insurance premium and would have saved the state millions of dollars.
Later in the week, Carcieri fired back, issuing an executive order to unilaterally institute those changes to the health benefit coshare despite a lack of a contract. The order also authorized employee coshares for dental coverage and employee copays for medical services and pharmaceuticals.
Carcieri said he would also seek non-binding arbitration.
In issuing the order, Carcieri called balancing the $6.89 billion 2009 state budget his “primary duty.”
A bitter legal battle is almost certain to follow. Before Carcieri’s July 31 announcement, James Cenerini, spokesman and legislative affairs coordinator for Council 94, had warned that there would be repercussions if the administration acted unilaterally.
“We would immediately proceed to court in an attempt to block them,” Cenerini said at the time. Later that day, Council 94 Executive Director Dennis R. Grilli issued a statement calling Carcieri’s executive order “reckless and irresponsible.”
“Today, Governor Carcieri has made a difficult situation worse,” Grilli said. “The governor has chosen a path that will increase the level of tension and acrimony between state employees and this administration.”
No matter how Carcieri and union leaders proceed, it may be a while before state employees represented by Council 94 get a new contract. The previous contract, which expired July 1, had been terminated in anticipation that a new agreement would soon be ratified, Carcieri said.
“We have no intention of offering more than has already been agreed to,” the governor said at a July 31 press conference, referring to the rejected contract proposal. “That was our last and best offer.”
It appeared last week that the matter would move along at least two tracks.
The R.I. Labor Relations Board (RILRB) was ready last week to schedule an informal hearing for the matter, the first step in addressing the unfair labor practice charge. But officials said it could be several weeks before that hearing takes place.
Following that initial proceeding before RILRB Administrator Robyn H. Golden, Golden will submit her preliminary findings to the seven-member labor board, which will determine whether the complaint should proceed.
At issue in the unfair labor practices complaint is whether the Carcieri administration and Council 94 have already negotiated, or whether the two sides conducted only informal discussions.
The administration contends that the rejected proposal was the product of formal negotiations, holding out as evidence a memorandum of settlement signed by union leaders when a tentative agreement was hammered out.
But Council 94 argued last week that union representatives had met with the Carcieri administration only as part of a good-faith effort “to work collaboratively with the administration to identify potential budget savings,” Cenerini said.
If the Labor Relations Board upholds Council 94’s charge, a formal public hearing will be held, after which the board will determine how to resolve the dispute. An RILRB decision can be appealed to R.I. Superior Court.
Meanwhile, late Friday, Carcieri announced he has agreed to defer enforcement of his order in response to a request today by R.I. Superior Court Judge Patricia A. Hurst. (READ MORE) The court has asked Council 94 to file its briefs in the case this Monday, and has scheduled a conference with both sides in the dispute for 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 6.
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Settlement of the state labor union contracts is critical to balancing the $6.89 billion 2009 state budget, which assumed about $60 million in savings from labor negotiations to close a projected $425 million budget shortfall.
According to information provided by the Carcieri administration last week, unions representing about two-thirds of the state’s 15,000 workers had ratified contracts with similar terms.
But Council 94, AFSCME – which represents about 4,200 workers – and four other unions have rejected the terms. The Council 94 vote was 2,870 to 196.
Cenerini said last week that union members were most upset by increases in the amount they would have pay for health insurance, which would partially offset the 8.5-percent raise over the final three years of the contract proposal.
Council 94 said the proposal called for a change in the way a unionized state worker would be assessed for health benefits.
Currently, workers pay 2.5 percent of their salaries to participate in a health plan. Under the rejected proposal, that assessment would have changed to 15 to 25 percent – depending on their salary bracket — of the total cost of health insurance premium.
At the same time, the proposal would have rescinded notices sent to more than 400 state workers last year notifying them that their jobs could be eliminated in fiscal 2009 – the so-called List B notices.
“But [the members] were upset that the governor couldn’t give assurances that there wouldn’t be more layoffs,” Cenerini said.
The labor concessions would have saved the state about $33.5 million, the governor said last week.
Drawn out labor disputes are nothing new in state government.
Guards at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston went without a contract for four years, starting in the late 1990s.
In that case, the state never stopped negotiating, including through nonbinding arbitration, former Gov. Lincoln Almond told Providence Business News. Still, things got ugly at times.
“They were picketing me wherever I went,” Almond recalled last week. “One time when the guards walked out I sent the National Guard in.”
“The correctional guards were a problem from day one because that was a bad contract from the employer’s standpoint,” Almond said. “The union was basically running the ACI. There was no management contract flexibility whatsoever.
“We basically prevailed. The guards got a contract, but they got less than what we originally offered,” he said.
A key difference between that dispute and the current one, however, is that the prison guard contract wasn’t tied to savings already factored into the state budget.
“This action is unprecedented in Rhode Island,” Carcieri said in announcing his executive order. “But these are unprecedented times.” •
