Last week, the City delivered its “Last, Best, and Final Offer” to the Union, and so on Monday, the Union officially declared an impasse and notified the City that we cannot accept their offer under the current terms. You can read the full Declaration of Impasse here, which contains the Union’s final offer and a summary of the Union’s position, including where our differences exist with the City’s position on several topics.
On Wednesday, your bargaining team met with the City for what appears to be the last time. The City gave the Union its “Last, Best and Final” offer. It is a three-year agreement that would increase wages by 5%, 4%, and 3% each year. It contains no provision for the return of the 5% non-pensionable increase, no agreement on eight weeks of paid family leave, and no agreement to count PTO towards the calculation of overtime even when the OT is mandated. There was also no agreement on special increases for classifications despite earlier statements from the City that they wanted to focus on classifications with more than a 10% vacancy rate.
Over a seven-day period, more than 1,000 City workers showed up on their lunch breaks to rally together to demand that the City fill its more than 1,000 vacancies. “Rally Week” began on Tuesday, June 6th, at San Jose City Hall. Over 600 city hall staff turned out for a quick demonstration and marched around Civic Plaza, including marching around the back of the campus so the City Council – who was in chambers – could hear the chants and calls from city workers to “Staff Up San Jose!” and restore vital public services to our community.
On Wednesday, the City gave the Union’s bargaining team a counter proposal that included a quarter of a percent (0.25%) movement from their last proposal for a 3-year contract at 3.5%, 3.25%, and 3%. The City also rejected outright almost all of the remaining issues the Union had on the table. Things like real paid family leave, return of the 5% non-pensionable, PTO being counted towards overtime when mandated to work OT, retention pay, and so much more.
For the last few weeks, the City has been a broken record about how “disappointed they were” in city employees for not reducing our wage proposal. If you’ll recall, the City even attempted to strong-arm the Union using an illegal bargaining stunt and let us know they would refuse to have meaningful discussions on other topics until we showed movement on wages. In a good-faith effort to restart negotiations and get the City back to good-faith bargaining, the Union made some significant movement in our wage proposal to the City on Wednesday. We reduced our offer and proposed a three-year agreement with yearly wage increases of 8.5%, 8%, and 6.5%.
In an insulting, tone-deaf, but entirely predictable move…
It is clear to members of your Union bargaining team that logic, and doing the right thing don’t matter at the bargaining table or to the City’s management team. The City is taking what the Union is proposing and trying to achieve and then misrepresenting it to our City's leaders. That, or the City Council is truly not understanding the scope of the City’s staffing crisis and its effects on the public services.
At times like these, the only thing we have left to do is take power into our own hands, show that we have strength in numbers, and let the public know what’s going on so we can get them behind us too. Our jobs and communities depend on it. See our MEF events page for more information or RSVP now to sign up for a rally or two.
