AEE Bargaining Update
Greetings,
On Monday, November 10, the AEE bargaining team resumed negotiations with the State on a Collective Bargaining Agreement for the 2025-2027 biennium. We were joined by a mediator from the Oregon Employment Relations Board, which we requested after negotiations stalled out on September 17th. We were still unable to come to an agreement.
On September 17th, we came painfully close to reaching an agreement before it became clear that there were, and still are, fundamental disagreements between our respective sides on a proposal from the State that would make broad changes to when DAS performs an Pay Equity Assessment (this is also referred to as an “Internal Assessment”) for a represented employee and how the results are implemented. That day, in a late joint session, the State finally agreed to our request to withdraw their proposed language but expressed their belief that the agreed upon Pay Equity LOA would entitle them to implement those changes without new language in our contract. We requested mediation after the State declined to retract that comment, as we believe it conveys an intent to violate the contract and the spirit of our Agreement.
Under our current contract, the State performs an Internal Assessment to determine compensation in the following specific circumstances:
· Upon request of the employee
· When determining certain, agreed-upon differentials
· When a position is reclassified upward (i.e. moved to classification in a higher salary range)
· When an Agency “identifies a pay inequity between employees in the same classification who perform work of a comparable character”
· A statewide equal pay analysis every 3 years)
Earlier this year, at the end of March, the State proposed new language in Article 11.3 Salary Administration that would compel the State to perform an Pay Equity Assessment following nearly all changes in employment status, including promotions, demotions, lateral transfers, downward reclassifications, and appointments from the layoff list. Their proposal also stated that any related outcomes would not be subject to grievance or arbitration – key legal tools for protecting members’ hard-earned contractual rights – and disputes could be resolved only through a DAS-run appeal process (which does not allow for a final hearing before an arbitrator or other neutral party).
Under Oregon’s Public Employee Collective Bargaining Act (PECBA), wages are a mandatory subject of bargaining – meaning that in unionized workplaces, employers are required to negotiate wages with the union. Our objection to the State’s proposal stems from our belief that even if the process has a use in resolving pay inequities (though we are not necessarily convinced of its efficacy in doing so, as described in the Secretary of State’s report on Equal Pay), implementing it in such a sweeping manner in salary administration and walling it off from the grievance and arbitration procedures severely undermines our ability to bargain for better wages on behalf of all of our members as prescribed in the PECBA. Under a Letter of Agreement (LOA) in our current contract language, members are already free to request an individual Equal Pay/Pay Equity Assessment at any time, and we encourage any member who believes they are being paid inequitably to do so.
The calculator that DAS uses to perform Pay Equity Assessments was developed by a third-party consultant, is owned and maintained by the State, and was not created through the collective bargaining process. We cannot, in good conscience, cede bargaining authority afforded to our Association under the PECBA to a tool that we had no input in creating, have no hand in maintaining, and which might be unilaterally modified by the State at any time.
For example, under the State’s proposed language, there would be nothing to prevent DAS from placing Employee A at Step 7 as a result of their Assessment, changing the formula the very next day, and then placing Employee B at Step 5, despite their qualifications and experience being exactly equal to those of Employee A.
DAS and ODOT’s repeated mishandling of the layoff process during this summer’s funding crisis gives us little confidence that they can be trusted with such broad authority, and years of Workday payroll errors have eroded our membership’s trust in the State’s ability to implement programs of this scale fairly and effectively. If, as the State insists, there is real money for AEE members under this program, we are confident that our members would much rather see it on the table in the form of a COLA than as the contents of a sequestered, State-controlled black box.
In Unity,
AEE