STATE: All state workers pay same health care rates

T he letter of May 7th responding to state Sen. Karen Keiser is just flat out wrong. The unions cannot and have not negotiated health care rates that are different for union and non-union employees. Perhaps the writer should read the state budget adopted by the Legislature on April 25. It mandates that any changes to premiums or benefit plans must be the same for all state employees, union and non-union alike.

Raises in sight for some

More than 21,000 state employees could get pay raises of up to 5 percent in the next year, despite Gov. Chris Gregoire’s proposal to cut $1.7 billion from public schools, health care and other programs to solve a budget shortfall.

The $83 million worth of raises represents the “step” or longevity-pay increase that almost one-third of the state’s general-government workers are entitled to earn in yearly increments, typically over their first six years in a job.

The step pay is separate from cost-of-living raises, which state lawmakers this year agreed to suspend for two years for state workers, and college and public school employees. After the session ended in April without new state employee contracts, Gregoire and state employee labor unions struck agreements on pay and medical benefits that left intact pay arrangements from the 2007-09 contract, which legislators had ratified.

Fund child care, skip the middleman

After scuttling the Worker Privacy Act, a high priority of organized labor, the Legislature’s Democrats don’t want to go home without giving their union supporters something.

A bill designed to crowd child care workers into the Service Employees International Union is the wrong thing to give them.

This idea has been kicking around Olympia for years, and it hasn’t improved with age. House Bill 1329 and its Senate companion measure would define many child care providers in private centers as public employees. Although the bill doesn’t name names, they would wind up being represented by the SEIU, the union that has been hungrily pressing lawmakers to pass the measure.

Union to picket at Lourdes over lab

PASCO -- Members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 are planning a picket in front of Lourdes Medical Center from 9 to 11 a.m. today to draw attention to the union's ongoing negotiations with Tri-Cities Laboratory.

The union and Tri-Cities Laboratory management have been negotiating for more than a year and a half, but reached an impasse over union members' desire for a wage scale.

Other sticking points have been a part of the contract that would require new employees to join the union, and a medical benefits proposal that would require employees to spend more for health care.

Tri-Cities Laboratory, union to resume negotiations

Negotiators from Tri-Cities Laboratory and a union representing lab workers will resume talks Wednesday in an attempt to reach an agreement on wages and other work conditions.

The union and lab have been in talks off and on since the summer of 2008, a few months after lab employees voted to join United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21.

Union negotiator David Fleishman said attempts to mediate an agreement failed earlier this summer when the lab's management refused to offer any new proposals the union found acceptable.