Township OKs Emergency Appropriation to Pay Back Local Unions

The Township Committee authorized an emergency appropriation Thursday for $218,250 to reimburse municipal employees for furlough days.

The payments will reimburse two employee labor unions that filed grievances over the policy of furlough days that was imposed on Lacey workers in 2010.

Township employees, with the exception of the police department, were served 22 furlough days from July 16, 2010, until the end of the year. Employees took a 20 percent cut in their salaries by not working on Fridays, which saved the township $450,000.

“In 2010, we were faced with some really, really difficult economic times…Things were very gloomy at that time,” Mayor Gary Quinn said.

Quinn said the furlough plan complied with the Civil Service Commission’s guidelines and was submitted and approved by the state.

“I, myself, still believe it was something we had to do to close the budget gap that we had,” Quinn said. “The governing body took every step that they had to take during that calendar year to get approval from the Civil Service Commission.”

Teamsters Union Local 97 and Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1088 . While the Teamsters won through arbitration, the CWA reached a settlement with the township.

The township has to pay back $135,000 to the Teamster employees and $83,250 to the CWA workers.

The unions argued that the furlough plan should have been negotiated, contending the move was a violation of the employees' contracts by preventing them from working, Teamsters attorney Kevin P. McGovern of the law firm Mets, Schiro & McGovern told Patch in October.

During the summer of 2010, the Teamsters union, which represents 29 township employees, offered to suspend longevity payments, McGovern said. The offer represented $250,000 in savings over the course of two-and-a-half years.

“The township told us they weren’t interested. They had no principal,” McGovern said. “In all fairness, [the offer] wouldn’t have saved as much money as quickly but it would have saved more money over time,”

Quinn said the offer “didn’t amount to anything substantial.”

“We took zeros,” said Ellen Vidal, president of the CWA Local 1088. “After furloughs hit, we settled our contract. It’s been two years. We’ve been fighting ever since trying to get it back.”

The furlough plan caused an “extreme hardship” for township employees, Vidal said.

“It should have never happened,” she said. “We gave alternatives. It wouldn’t have even had to come to that.”

In the end, it cost the township more through the grievances than the savings in furloughs, Vidal said.

“We’re always willing to work with the town, even going forward,” she said. “We know it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

But the paybacks won’t make up for what some employees lost during that time, she said.

“I think it’s going to take some time,” she said. “How do you recover from that? We all live paycheck to paycheck. People were scrambling. We got through it but that’s not the way to do it.”

While some Teamster employees accepted the payout in the form of time off, others took a lump sum. The township is still waiting on a written agreement with the CWA but Vidal said the payback varied for each employee.

“We’re taking and minimizing what we have to do but it’s based on arbitration that we have no control over,” Quinn said.