Members of the state employees union met with officials and held a town hall-style forum Tuesday to discuss their legislative priorities for the 2014 session.
Staffing issues topped the list presented by the Vermont State Employees Association. Among other goals, the VSEA advocates reducing the state’s reliance on temporary employees, addressing chronic understaffing in several state agencies and giving state employees a way to compete with private contractors who bid for public jobs.
About 20 percent of state employees are currently classified as “temporary,” meaning they are not eligible for benefits or union membership, according to VSEA legislative committee chair Leslie Matthews.
She said temporary work yields lower retention rates than permanent full-time work, and the resulting high turnover costs more in training and lost efficiency. Many temporary employees also work less time, nine months out of the year, for example. Temp workers may then collect unemployment compensation the rest of the year, Matthews said. And the whole time, they may be receiving state assistance such as Catamount health care because their temporary employment doesn’t offer benefits.
Matthews said curbing the state’s reliance on temporary workers is also a matter of transparency in budgeting: The administration can claim a small-sized government by not including temporary workers in its ranks, she said.
Chronic understaffing is also a problem to fix, the VSEA claims. Matthews described some instances in which state employees have come under fire for poor performance — including at the Vermont Veterans’ Home and the Department for Children and Family’s high error rate for allocating benefits to low-income Vermonters.
Employees deflect responsibility for problems by pointing to management decisions about workflow, and say they’re under the gun with inadequate staffing levels to do their jobs well. Private contractors, meanwhile, often say they can do the public’s work faster, better and cheaper, Matthews said. This year, the VSEA is suggesting a way for state employees to challenge their competitors.
A bill regarding privatization of state services would require contractors to pay their employees a rate equivalent to what comparable state employees would earn. That way, private contractors would be less able to offer savings “on the backs of their employees,” Matthews said. The legislation also would allow state employees the resources they need to assemble competitive bids to essentially keep their work.
The association has also added a new item to its wish list: negotiating for prescription drug benefits. A bill proposing to change the prescription program took members by surprise, Matthews said. She indicated it’s still unclear what the switch would mean for state employees, but members are miffed by the nature of the proposal.
“We felt this should be a subject of bargaining, not legislation,” she said.
On the retirement front, the VSEA is looking to “enhance” early retirement options for state employees, especially those whose line of duty involves high stress levels, physical demands and risks of injury. They’re looking to allow early retirement for nurses and caregivers at the Vermont Veterans’ Home and Department of Public Safety dispatchers and to reduce early retirement penalties for workers at the Woodside Juvenile Facility in Essex.
The union also hopes to loop state’s attorneys into their collective bargaining agreements, and establish anonymity for state employee whistleblowers.
Matthews said she’s proud of the VSEA’s stance this year in solidarity with the state’s private employees. The union supports the creation of earned sick leave and universal health care — as long as the latter does not interfere with the health care benefits state employees have already negotiated, she added.
“We believe that increased public investments are essential for ensuring our basic human rights to health care, housing, food, education, jobs and a dignified standard of living,” the VSEA states in a document outlining the association’s 2014 legislative priorities. “VSEA supports a budget that addresses needs, advances equity and dignity, and enables people’s participation. We support increasing state revenues to make this budget a reality.”
