Members of UE Local 642 have ratified a new 40-month contract with their employer, Harborcreek Youth Services. The new contract will bring workers six wage increases of two percent each, twice a year starting in September 2007. They will get a two percent raise each September and each March, through March 2010. Employees recently received a four percent raise on September 23, 2006.
The employer agreed to contribute four percent of each employee’s base pay to the employee’s retirement savings account. Previously the employer contribution was three percent. The new contract makes minor changes in health insurance coverage, with no increase in employees’ costs.
Employees’ entitlement to weekly overtime premium pay will no longer be reduced, as it has been in the past, by holiday premium pay earned when the employee works on a holiday. Jury duty hours will also now be counted as hours worked for overtime purposes.
Local 642 achieved a major breakthrough by gaining, for the first time, benefit coverage for its part-time members. Regular part-time employees will be eligible for one day of sick leave, and one day of personal leave, per fiscal year. Part-time employees will also begin to accrue vacation beginning on the employee’s tenth anniversary, based on the workers’ average weekly hours, up to a maximum of forty hours.
Job openings will be posted at each of the two main locations and in the memo book for all units. Previously grandfathered child care counselors will now be able to bid on vacant CCC positions agency-wide. In the old contract, such employees could not do this until they had eight years of service.
Child care counselors on a shift that regularly starts at noon or 1:00 p.m. will have the opportunity to transfer into other noon or 1:00 p.m. shift vacancies that arise within the employee’s program unit, prior to the positions being posted for bidding agency-wide.
If an entire program unit is closed, an affected employees will have the option to bump the least senior employee in another unit with the same shift and schedule, or to bump the least senior employee overall.
The local will supply packets of information about the union, which will be distributed by the agency to new hires during orientation. Chief Steward Mike Hardner’s assessment of the negotiations is that the local “got a little more than we expected, and we kept what we had. It was a good process on both sides – we did a good job.”
Local 642 was represented at the bargaining table by President Rob Matz, Chief Steward Hardner, and Financial Secretary Sharon McDevitt, assisted by International Representative Deb Gornall.