CAPE members’ salary and working conditions contracts with Los Angeles County will expire September 30, 2015. Since early April, the CAPE Bargaining Teams have conducted more than a dozen formal negotiating sessions with management representatives over terms for successor contracts. Although the CAPE Teams have made good progress toward achieving a fair cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) pay increase for CAPE-represented employees, there is still much work to do.
The CAPE Teams entered these negotiations determined to achieve a fair across-the-board COLA increase package for employees, one that helps restore members’ purchasing power after the Great Recession. As previously reported, the County is proposing a 9% total COLA package for a three-year term expiring September 30, 2018. Although a 9% pay raise offer is significant compared to past negotiating cycles, it is not enough to restore what members lost and keep up with the high cost of living in southern California. CAPE is proposing a shorter term contract, earlier COLA implementation dates, and an extra three percent COLA which is strongly supported by cost-of-living analyses and growth-in-CPI forecasts.
In addition to fair COLA pay increases, some of the major issues still under discussion include reducing DPW management’s use of contract employees, restoring CAPE-represented staffing to pre-Great Recession levels, gaining more influence for employees over proposed changes to their work schedules, improving special pay practices, and expanding training and/or professional development opportunities for CAPE members.
On the issue of DPW management increasingly using contract employees to perform CAPE members’ work, County management representatives at the contract bargaining table recently provided another example for why it is so important for CAPE members to challenge the contracting out of our jobs. On August 17th, representatives from the CEO’s office denied the requests of several CAPE-represented employee groups at DPW to fix the salary inequities in their ranks. According to management, despite the shrinking staffing levels and comparably low salaries in some groups, DPW is able to get the work done “by other means”. In other words, they can allow staff levels to dwindle, cutoff our career paths and promotional opportunities, and pay us poorly because they can simply contract out our work to private companies. To management, as long as the work gets done, they don’t believe they have a problem.
The CAPE Bargaining Teams have reached tentative agreements on some minor provisions of the contracts. On all of the important issues mentioned above, our side has conceded nothing and continues to press to achieve progress.