Secretary of State: Bargaining Update

The contract negotiation has been long and tedious and your bargaining team fought long and hard to secure a wage increase and to keep additional benefits. The complete memorandum of contractual changes and ratification schedule are available here.

The failure of both the governor and the legislature to reach a budget has greatly impacted the Secretary of State (SOS). In this budget, upon analysis, we determined that the SOS had about 5-7 million dollars available for raises for all of the various unions under SOS. No money was given for previous years without a budget.

SEIU Local 73 represents about 2300 members at SOS. We know that for every 1% of raises we receive, it costs approximately 1.2 million dollars. Your bargaining team secured a 4% raise for the 2 years and a $1,000 bonus which averages out to about 1.1%. Overall, that’s about 5% or about 5.5 million dollars.

The Committee fought to keep the birthday holiday, to improve the working out of class pay, and improve bereavement and travel pay along with some other changes that can be found in the summary.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. We need to start planning and building power to determine who we want to elect as our next governor in 2018. We are hard working employees that serve the public every day and provide good customer service. We don’t deserve to be under attack by politicians who try to increase the cost of health insurance, reduce pension benefits, remove bargaining rights, and provide no raises.

We all need to stand together and commit to the Union by signing membership applications, making our voices heard through completing our survey, and helping build political power through contribution to our political fund, COPE.

A conference call was held on Tuesday, September 5 with members. You may hear the complete call below: