Oregon: Unions Push for Pay Raise
According to The Register-Guard:
SALEM — One of the state’s largest public employees unions is trying to force Gov. Ted Kulongoski to renegotiate its labor contract after seeing the governor deliver pay increases of as much as five times what its own members were getting.
About three quarters of Oregon’s 29,000 unionized state government workers already had ratified their unions’ contracts for cost-of-living raises in each of the next two years that add up to 6.3 percent.
But those ratification votes came to a halt late last month, when Kulongoski announced that all 4,800 state managers were getting bigger raises. For about 4,200 low- and mid-level managers, pay will increase from 9.4 percent to 20.2 percent over two years. And for the state’s 61 agency heads, salaries will grow from 20.3 percent to 32.2 percent by 2009.
“I’ve been doing this work for 33 years and I’ve never had such a huge bomb dropped in the middle of what we were doing to get our contracts ratified,” said Ken Allen, executive director of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 75. It represents about 6,300 state employees...click to continue.
