By Andrew Wellner
Anchorage Daily News (Alaska)
Copyright 2006 Anchorage Daily News
All Rights Reserved
WASILLA, Alaska — The Matanuska-Susitna Borough has asked its labor relations board to reconsider part of a July 21 decision that certain borough emergency responders be represented by the borough employee’s union.
Thomas Daniel, the attorney representing the borough, filed a motion Friday asking that the board set aside the part of its ruling which said responders who work more than 1,000 hours in a year be part of the Mat-Su Borough Employee Association’s collective bargaining unit.
“Historically the on-call responders have never been treated as part of the collective bargaining agreement,” Daniel said.
Dennis Geary, assistant business manager for the employees’ association disagreed. He said the agreement as originally signed stated that on-call employees be excluded from the agreement until they reach 1,000 hours, at which point they need to be hired as full-time employees and represented by the employee’s association.
It was the bargaining agreement, Geary argued, which created the on-call category in the first place and he pointed to language in the agreement that addressed on-call responders.
Daniel counters that, though on-call employees are addressed in the agreement, the borough has different types of on-call employees. Some fill in at election time when needed or during periods where special projects demand more employees. These were the types of on-call employees addressed in the contract, he said, not the emergency responders.
Although the agreement may look like it addresses the issue, “in labor relations law you don’t just look at what the language says, you look at what was the negotiation at the bargaining table,” Daniel said.
What Geary said he wants is for the borough to sit down with the employees’ association and figure out what, exactly, to do about the responders. The borough position is that it does not need to go into arbitration with the employees’ association since the responders aren’t addressed in the collective bargaining agreement.
Whether the two sides meet for talks is an open question while the motion to reconsider is before the board. But come December the question could be moot. At the end of this year the agreement with the employee’s association comes up for renewal. The issue of responders will likely be hashed out then.
Still, some Valley fire chiefs are worried about what this could mean for their departments. Both Central Mat-Su Fire Chief Jack Krill and Big Lake Fire Chief Bill Gamble said they’re unsure what it will mean for the departments. Gamble said he’s guessing they are years from seeing any effects.
Still, that doesn’t keep them from worrying.
On the one hand, if departments have to start hiring full-time employees, “the vast majority of our budgets instead of being spent on equipment is going to be wages and benefits and once we start down that road it’s just going to be a snowball,” Gamble said.
On the other hand, if employees have to quit responding at 1,000 hours, Krill said, it’s unlikely after their hiatus they will return to the department.
“This is part of their wages they earn to make a living,” Krill said. If they had to forgo hours over 1,000, “they’ll have to find something else to do and that would discourage them from coming back.”
Geary said his main concern is with adequate compensation for first-responders. He said he realizes that the paid on-call responders do very good work covering a large, busy area.
“We applaud that, we want them to do it,” he said. But, “if they’re really employees then they need to be paid like they’re employees.”