NYC Reaches Tentative Deal With Eight Unions

The city has reached contract agreements with a coalition of eight unions representing almost 12,000 city employees who are supervisors in the police, fire, correction and sanitation departments, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced late Tuesday.

The agreements are for seven-year contacts that include a 1 percent salary increase in the first year. That’s different from the other union agreements the de Blasio administration has negotiated such as with the teachers’ union, which didn’t have increases in the first year.

Additional 1 percent raises take hold in each of the next three years, followed by raises of 1.5 percent, 2.5 percent and 3 percent in the last year. The contracts are retroactive to the end of the prior contacts, which range from March 2011 to July 2012.

“We couldn’t have life in the city as we know it without them,” de Blasio said. “The work they do, by definition it is difficult, it is complex, it is dangerous, it is sensitive.”

The contracts have to be ratified by the unions’ memberships. City officials said that after health care savings, the new contracts would cost the city $413.7 million through 2018. If these contracts are approved, de Blasio said, 71 percent of the city’s workforce would have agreements. None of the unions had current contracts when he took office in January.

This article appeared in print on page 6 of the December 11th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.