2010-12-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. NICHOLSON: We had put on the agenda -Topics will include, but not limited to: overview of union contracts and negotiations, possibilities of changes to hours of work and overtime provisions, what is involved in consolidation of divisions and movement of personnel between divisions, etc. Do you have any sort of overall remarks that you would like to, an overview that you’d like to provide us? MR. TAKAHASHI: The collective bargaining agreements or union contracts are generally done for two-year cycles on odd number years. We have contractsfor the blue collar, United Public Workers; white collar and blue collar supervisors, and white collar employee with the HGEA. We have the police and fire contracts. Those are the four major unions in collective bargaining that we deal with. Hawai‘i County is a small player, one of seven players in the collective bargaining system. The employer group is made up of the State, the governor, who heads that group. The DOE, the university also is part of, considered the state employer. And we have the four counties that are involved. What happens is the employer group acts as a whole in collective bargaining when negotiating contracts with the various unions. Where there are employees in bargaining units and I’m not going to go into all that, there are 13 bargaining units that are set up. Hawai‘i County has six of those bargaining units. Where there are employees from the counties in the bargaining unit, the governor, who essentially has six votes in collective bargaining needs to have one mayor or one county vote with the governor in order to get a proposal across to the union. So, Hawai‘i County couldn’t just go in and say I want to change this original contract. We would have to go and get essentially the governor to agree to get that proposal to even be put across to the union. So to change a provision in the contract is not quite that simple, let’s put it that way. We couldn’t just go in and change it or even ask to change it just because we wanted to. I would have to go in, or we would have to go in and at least convince the governor that we would want to do that. In general that’s the concept. And similar to like the governor, the governor couldn’t just want to implement the change. The governor would need one mayor to vote to get even that proposal to be put across the table. The process is collective bargaining as set up by the collective bargaining law in Chapter 89 of the Hawai‘i Revised Statutes which requires the parties, which is the employer group and the union to get together to negotiate wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment. That’s just the general overview. I guess you were talking about how to make changes to certain provisions on overtime. Again, we would have to submit a proposal to the employer group. The employer group would have to discuss it, essentially agree amongst themselves to pass that proposal on to the union. That’s just the general overview of the collective bargaining law. I know there are a whole lot of questions,I could take hours to discuss the whole thing, but I’m here to answer any specific questions you have. MS. NICHOLSON: Do you see any trends? Since all of the counties and the state as a whole are facing some financial challenges, do you see any trends or because we have a brand new governor, we don’t know what the trends may be in making changes to some of the contracts? MR. TAKAHASHI: As was, I guess you could read about it in the paper let’s put it that way. The trend over the last few years was to try maintain a status quo or even make take backs of the employee benefits. We have furloughs this year, which is the first 3