Malloy, Unions: It's a Deal! [VIDEO]

Dozens and dozens of unionized state employees crowded into a stuffy union hall in Hartford Thursday afternoon to announce an agreement with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on a concession package to plug a $1.6 billion budget deficit and avoid massive layoffs and facility closings, which they said would also protect the state’s middle class workforce and preserve collective bargaining rights.

“Today’s vote is a victory for all of us. We as state employees stood together to maintain our collective bargaining rights,” said Roland Bishop, a teacher at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic and a member of the Connecticut State Employees Association, a union that represents a wide range of public servants. “This was a much bigger fight and a larger picture than people thought in the beginning.”

Less than an hour later at a press conference at the state capitol, Malloy said the agreement “puts our relationship with state employees on a sustainable level” and would lead to $21.5 billion in additional savings over the next 20 years.

“But for this agreement, come 2017 there would have been hell to pay,” Malloy said of the situation that would have resulted if the state employees did not agree to the concession package, he was instead forced to resort to thousands of layoffs and facility closings to plug the budget gap, and the economy continued to deteriorate.

The agreement provides the state’s more than 46,000 employees with the guarantee of no layoffs over each of the next four years in exchange for a salary freeze under the first two years of the deal and a restructuring of employee health care and pension benefits.

For all state employees, the agreement will increase the state’s eligible retirement age, raise the penalty for early retirement, increase the years of service necessary to be eligible for retiree health care benefits, and increase state workers mandatory contribution to the health care trust fund.

For new workers hired after July 1 of this year, the agreement will also increase the early retirement age, as well as the years of service needed to be eligible for “hazardous duty” retirement from 20 years to 25 years. It will further increase the years of service for eligibility for retiree health benefits from 10 years to 15 years, and base a retired employee’s pension on the average of their final five years of service instead of the current three.

Kathy Fischer, the associate director of the University of Connecticut’s Women’s Center and a member of UConn’s Professional Employees Association, said that the agreement was her third wage freeze or giveback in the past eight years.

But even though it had taken a toll on her family, Fischer said as a single mother she is still grateful to have a secure job at a decent wage with affordable health care.  

“It’s taken a toll, but collective bargaining is a basic civil right that is extremely important,” Fischer said. “Individuals don’t have the same power, and so preserving that and preserving jobs, having health care, is the priority.”

In a statement released immediately after state unions announced the outcome of the vote, Malloy said the long-awaited agreement would lead to considerable savings over an extended period of time.

“Those extra months are a small price to pay for the billions of dollars that extra time will save taxpayers, the critical services that time will preserve, and the peace of mind that comes from understanding the state now has a sustainable relationship with its employee base,” Malloy said.

“…We have achieved something the skeptics said was unachievable: we’ve made the relationship between the state and its workforce sustainable. And, unlike in most other states, we did it without going to war with public employees.”

, which took effect July 1, contained a $1.6 billion hole stemming from a failed attempt to wrest that amount in concessions from unionized state employees already under contract. When the unions initially rejected the agreement in late June, Malloy announced that he would push forward with a budget balancing plan that would have seen , and leave as many as 1,000 vacant state positions unfilled. It also would further reduce most state agencies’ budgets and , in order to plug the gap.

Union leaders then voted to  on July 18, to lower the threshold for passage of an agreement to a simple majority. Previous approval required at least 80 percent of all union employees and 14 or more of the state’s 15 unions; 57 percent of state employees and 11 of state’s 15 member unions voted in favor of the agreement the first time around.

But both Malloy and union members noted Thursday that the new vote totals would have been enough to approve the agreement under the previous bylaws. With voting concluded for 14 of the state’s 15 unions – members of the Connecticut State Police Union voted by mail and had not completed their vote – all 14 of the unions that voted endorsed the agreement. With about 35,000 state employees voting, only one individual bargaining unit, the state’s Correction Supervisors, which represents about 400 employees, rejected the deal.

“They don’t have job security,” said Matt O’Connor, a spokesman for the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, the umbrella organization for the 15 state employee unions.

O’Connor said that it was a condition of the agreement that all layoff notices received by state employees, which was over 3,000, be rescinded and any workers who had already lost their jobs as a result of the notices be rehired immediately.

“They’re all coming back,” he said. 

Malloy told reporters at the capitol that he wanted to “rescind the layoff notices as soon as possible, hopefully by Monday.” He said the Office of Policy and Management Secretary Benjamin Barnes would hold a press conference Friday morning to outline the details of implementing the new agreement and rescinding the layoff notices.