Health Insurance Bargaining: In order to properly analyze the mountains of data that the Union Coalition received from the State negotiating team, dates set for Health Insurance Bargaining in December were cancelled. Once that information had been processed and understood, the Coalition met again to bargain with the State on January 11, 2012. The State is still seeking to have all employees contribute to the single health insurance premium (currently the State is proposing employees pay 10% of the cost of single health insurance) and wants to increase the amount employees pay out of pocket for their care. MMA has been and will continue to be an active participant with the Coalition.
Master Bargaining: MMA opened bargaining with the State on December 15th and 16th and now have met again on January 12, 2012. One of the dates scheduled for bargaining in January was cancelled so the day could be used for joint health insurance bargaining, involving all the Unions and the State. As is common in bargaining, the parties have presented and discussed many proposals to change the contract, but have not yet discussed wages. As MMA’s initial proposals are written in fairly understandable terms, we have posted the actual proposals on the website. The State has presented their proposals in legislative form, which is difficult to understand and over 60 pages in length, so we have taken the liberty of summarizing them below.
The major changes the State is currently proposing:
Holidays
- Eliminate the floating holiday.
Overtime
- Eliminate OT or comp time payments for all exempt supervisors, who comprise most of the supervisors in our unit, and also restrict OT calculations for nonexempt supervisors to hours worked (not counting vacations or sick time).
Probation
- Lengthen supervisory probationary periods.
Reassignment and Layoff
- Expand the radius from 35 miles to 60 miles where the State is allowed to reassign supervisors to comparable positions and within which all layoff and bumping rights are initially exercised.
Travel and Relocation Reimbursements
- Reduce eligibility for meal, travel reimbursements and make payment of relocation reimbursements discretionary.
Corrections Early Retirement
- Eliminate the Corrections Early Retirement Incentive for new hires and seriously reduce the benefit for current employees, as of January 1, 2013.
Wages and Steps
- No proposal yet from the State.
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