City Hall employee union said to have new deal

Leaders had been negotiating new contract for the better of 22 months

WOONSOCKET — Details are still sketchy, but officials of City Hall’s largest employees union are confirming they’ve ironed out a new contract with the city – nearly two years after their last collective bargaining agreement expired.

“I don’t think a lot of people even knew we’ve been negotiating for 22 months,” said Robin Salome, president of Local 670 of Council 94.

Salome and John Burns, the senior staff representative for Local 670, said workers recently voted to approve a three-year agreement with the city that’s retroactive to July 1, 2017. But neither would say how much workers received in salary hikes – at least until the City Council is briefed on the details.

Councilman James Cournoyer said councilors will hear the details for the first time from City Solicitor John DeSimone during an executive session on Monday at 6:30 p.m.

“We haven’t seen anything yet,” said Cournoyer. “That’s the purpose of Monday’s meeting.”

The union represents about 110 highway laborers, secretaries, clerks, police dispatchers and other workers employed by the city, according to Salome.

In addition to Local 670, another union of mid-level managers – Local 3851 of Council 94, representing about 20 workers – has reached a separate agreement with the city. It

too, will be the subject of Monday’s council briefing.

Though workers in Local 670 ratified their pact, Salome stopped short of saying they were enthusiastic about the deal. After it kicks in, many union members will still be receiving less take-home pay than they were several years ago.

She said the new pact will not make up for dramatic increases in health care costs, particularly for members on the family plan, that date back to a contract Local 670 negotiated with the now-defunct Budget Commission. The state-appointed panel was in place from May 2012 to March 2015.

Health care costs for the family plan used to be about $14 a week. Now they’re $69 a week.

“That’s a lot of money when you’re only bringing home $350 a week,” said Salome. “When you ask if people are happy, it’s hard to say.”

Burns said, “A majority of members

are happy with the agreement.”

Salome said union members began negotiating the new pact with the city in January 2017. She said there were many meetings, but eventually Local 670 declared an impasse, which basically means the two sides were unable to come to terms – at least on their own. A state mediator was later called in to referee the talks, which had been ongoing until recently, according to Salome.

Salome couldn’t say how many negotiating sessions the two sides held before reaching an agreement. There were so many, she said, “I lost track.”

The contract settlements come on the heels of another with Local 404 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, which received a 2.5 percent pay hike in the reopening of talks for the last year of a pre-existing five-year pact.

But talks with the Woonsocket Teachers Guild remain in mediation after the roughly 650-member union – the city’s largest – declared an impasse in August, shortly before school started. Teachers returned to class for the first time in 30 years without a contract – their last expired on June 30.

They’ve since employed a variety of job actions to protest the status of talks – including a series of informational picketing events. They’ve staged rallies outside City Hall for each of the last two weeks. Teachers have also expressed solidarity at School Committee meetings, and once rallied outside a fundraising event in Market Square for Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt. Teachers are also observing work-to-rule guidelines at school, which means they do no more during the school day than what’s required in the letter of their last contract.

Teachers received a wage hike of 2 percent in the last year of the now-expired pact – their first under a five-year agreement that was also the product of talks with the budget commission. The union agreed to a wage freeze for the first four years of the pact to appease the austerity-minded commission, which was demanding sacrifices from employee groups and taxpayers to close a budget shortfall that pushed the city close to bankruptcy.