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Challenges
Your source on contract negotiations

Lousy economic outlook creates hurdles, despite new administration

Bargaining presents many challenges to the Union in terms of fighting hard for improvements and changes, protecting what we already have won in the past, and maintaining one collective voice.

On the one hand, this round of bargaining is sure to be different than the last eight years of bargaining, which was marked by outright hostility and head-to-head battles with an anti-union administration.

But will sitting down with a new administration change our focus?

In some ways it will, in others it won’t.

A $1.2 billion hole in the state coffers has meant serious budget reductions statewide and will make bargaining equally as tough as in years past. What’s more, the next biennium isn’t looking any better, and already agency heads have been directed to submit budgets at a 10 percent reduction.

The lending and billion dollar bailout crises haven’t helped matters either. The upending of Wall Street will hurt government budgets the same way it hurts family budgets. Governments depend on sales and other taxes. When the economy is stagnant, governments feel the pinch, too.

“Yes, we’re negotiating a contract with a more pro-labor administration, but they are also our bosses and are trying to run a tight ship during hard economic times,” said OCSEA Pres. Eddie L. Parks. “We may be looking at greater cooperation than we’ve experienced in the past, but we’re up against a very tight budget.”

Parks said it’s imperative that the bargaining team continue to fight for those core issues – job security, wages, good benefits – that OCSEA members hold most sacred no matter what the economic forecast.

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