Arbitration

Brothers and Sisters,

The last few months have been grueling on myself and our Bargaining Teams. I wanted to take a moment to relay to you where we are at and what to expect moving forward. We have completed all of the interest arbitrations for both the Unit I (Officers and FS 1,2, and 3s) and Unit N (Sgts, FS 4s, and Lts). This process has been a frustrating and exhausting battle with almost zero good faith bargaining by the state of Nevada. We attempted to reason with them, offer them concessions in return for more benefits, and explain the importance of everything you asked us to assert in the CBAs. The state on the other hand entertained the conversations, while their marching orders were clear: "Take back as much as you can from them, and give them nothing in return."

Unit I-

For those of you who are in unit I, there are pluses and minuses to report. First off, everything in the current CBA ('23-'25) will remain exactly the same for the successor CBA('25-'27), with the exception of compensation. The vast majority of you were overly satisfied with the CBA we negotiated last session, so that is the good news. The minuses are that everything we wanted to correct throughout the CBA will not be changed, unless we can arrange for an Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). As unwilling as the state was to negotiate in good faith, this may be a fruitless endeavor. I want to explain the reason why we left everything unchanged. The state made it clear early on that they wished to change many different aspects of the CBA. We made it clear that if they wanted changes, they would give us something we wanted in return. When it became apparent that they were unwilling to give us anything in return, especially on compensation, we decided under the advice of our counsel, that our best strategy to win at arbitration was to keep our CBA as is, "status quo" and just focus on the compensation article for Arbitration. As arbitration neared, the state decided to withdraw their other changes and do the same exact thing. This was clearly a move to counter our strategy and from their side, it was the best tactical thing they could do. What that meant is that they would only focus on the raises and the things they wanted to claw back, like muster pay. So as outlined in the previous post, they want to limit muster pay to the exact amount of time at all facilities besides HDSP and SDCC, but keep those facilities at 45 minutes. They want to only give you whatever the legislature gives you for salary, retention payments, and longevity. Currently, there are no budgeted increases, despite the increase in PERS Compensation. Effectively, they want you to take a pay cut. What this also means is that you will keep holiday pay, uniform allowance, special pay, shift differential, and other provisions of the compensation article. What we are proposing is 8% the first year and 8% the second year, plus the same retention, muster, and longevity pay as the current CBA. Our case largely centers around the argument of pay parody between corrections and police. All of the other agencies in Nevada have it, within 4% or dead even. NHP is currently 5 grades ahead of us and we aimed to cut that down by asking for two grades over the CBA, in addition to the 3% scale increase for both years that they are seeking as well. This was a reasonable approach under the circumstances.

Unit N-

For Unit N, we faced a much different battle as we did not have an existing CBA in place. We had no choice but to work with them on all of the other articles, in order to get something in place for all of our supervisors. Some of the articles that are not compensation or leave will look different than the line officers CBA. Most of the differences are negligible. Where the battle took place was ultimately the leave and compensation articles. We were unwilling to relent on the concept that you as a supervisor should not receive less benefits than an officer you supervise. So for the first CBA(23-25) the only article we did not agree on was leave, which went to arbitrtation. They want you to not carry forward 480 hours or have sell back like the officers do. They want you to not have the 2 personal days like the officers do. The list goes on and that will be decided by the first arbitration that I dealt with at the end of March. The compensation article was not available for negotiation in the first session, but the second negotiation (25-27) it was. That is what we went to arbitration on, at the same time as unit I last week and yesterday. Again, they want you to take less benefits than officers get, like double time for holiday instead of double time and a half. They propose no uniform allowance amount in the CBA at all and expect you to take the same amount you are currently given. The list goes on and we were happy to point them all out to the arbitrator as there is not another agency in Nevada that asks their supervisors to take less. Our offer proposes to give you the same benefits as officers and to increase the "spread" between an officer and Sgt/FS 4, to 20%. We also propose to increase the spread from Sgt to Lt to 20%. If we are successful on both Proposals, supervisors would see sizable increases to their pay and benefits. Moving forward, raises would then be tied into whatever raises an officer gets.

We hope we made you proud and rest assured the fight is not over. If our offers are selected, we still have to fight for them to get approved by the BOE and then funded by the legislature. If our offers are not selected or if one is selected and the other is not, we will be left to the legislatures mercy to offset the PERS increase. I will continue to update you if I hear anything else, but the compensation decision is due May 12th for both bargaining units. The leave arbitration for unit N should be slightly before that, I hope. Thank you all for your patience and understanding as we fight these battles on your behalf.