State employee unions eyeing arbitration to secure pandemic pay

Unionized state employees just received raises topping 4 percent and will have collected $3,500 in bonuses by mid-July — but that doesn’t mean all compensation issues are settled.

The State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition

notified its members recently it expects to enter arbitration this summer to secure coronavirus pandemic pay for members in high-risk jobs, unless it reaches a deal beforehand with Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration.

Lamont and the legislature set aside $35 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds — $20 million this fiscal year and $15 million starting July 1 —for pandemic pay for state workers. An arbitrator could increase that amount.

“Frontline essential state workers sacrificed their health and safety throughout COVID-19 to ensure that the critical public services our 3.6 million Connecticut residents rely on remained accessible,” the coalition wrote in a memo posted to its website. SEBAC represents most unionized state employees excluding state police troopers.

While the state can never fully repay frontline essential workers,” the statement continues, “the state can certainly take a step to respect these workers. Pandemic pay is that step.”

Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration also has long said the state must acknowledge the risks that public safety, health care, social service and certain other staffers faced, particularly during the first year of the pandemic, when vaccines weren’t readily available and personal protective equipment sometimes was in short supply.

“This funding is specifically for our essential state workers who risked their lives on a daily basis,” Chris Collibee, the spokesman for Lamont’s budget office, said Tuesday. “It is the least we can do.”

Neither the administration nor the unions have said exactly how many staffers might receive special pandemic pay, but roughly one-fifth of the workforce held front-line jobs during the pandemic.

Collibee added that “The administration will engage in thoughtful and collaborative negotiations with SEBAC to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement that recognizes our state employees for their efforts throughout the pandemic.”

Pandemic pay, understandably, took a back seat early in the pandemic, as the administration and unions focused on other priorities.

Not long after COVID-19 struck Connecticut hard in March 2020, the two sides first negotiated rules regarding protective gear, testing, remote work and other safety measures.

By mid-2021, the funding was in place. Congress had committed roughly $3 billion in ARPA assistance to Connecticut’s state government to help fund various recovery measures and had issued the necessary rules and regulations to guide their use.

But Lamont and unions still had one more big issue to resolve before grappling with hazard pay.

The overwhelming bulk of the state’s unionized workforce, more than 40,000 employees spread across nearly three dozen bargaining units, had been working under contracts that had expired July 1, 2021.

The administration and unions agreed on a fouryear package that includes a yearly, 2.5 percent general wage hike, an annual step increase that normally adds about 2 percentage points to each raise, and $3,500 in bonuses paid in two installments between midMay and mid-July of this year.

The package fractured the legislature, which ratified the package in late April.

Lamont and his fellow Democrats in the majority said the raises and bonuses were essential to stem a major surge in worker retirements this spring. And with inflation high and state government’s budget reserves breaking all records, arbitrators likely would have ordered such increases anyway, they added.