About 2,500 TriMet workers have a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) after union leadership held a re-vote for bus and rail operators.
The new contract will go into effect December 1, said Bruce Hansen, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757. It increases wages 13.6% over four years, adds extra weeks of paid vacation for the most senior employees, and raises TriMet’s contribution to employee retirement savings accounts up from it current 8% of gross wages to 10%.
The ratification vote on August 14 wraps up a back-and-forth that began in late June, when outgoing president Shirley Block reached a deal with TriMet and scheduled a ratification vote to take place just two days before Hansen was sworn in. The vote was postponed after pushback from members.
Hansen rescheduled the vote for August 3. About 60% of the union’s membership approved the agreement, he says. However, that may not have been enough for full ratification: Under the union’s bylaws, the agreement likely needed to be ratified by each of the three units within Local 757: maintenance workers, transportation employees and non-salaried workers such as payroll processors and fare inspectors.
The transportation unit —consisting of about 1,500 bus and rail operators — rejected the agreement by 49 votes, Hansen said. Union leadership scheduled a re-vote for the transportation bloc on Aug. 14. This time, 80% of its members voted to ratify the agreement, even though nothing had changed in the proposal. Hansen expects TriMet’s board of directors to approve the agreement in late August or September.
Hansen said Local 757 officers launched an education campaign to address two concerns about the tentative agreement. First, some members distrusted the agreement because Block had appeared to rush the ratification vote in June.
Meanwhile, confusion swirled throughout the summer about a provision of the new agreement that penalizes transportation employees for skipping shifts without using medical leave or family leave. Under the new policy, if an employee misses 110 hours of work that’s not covered by medical leave or family leave within a year, TriMet management will place them on probation. If the absences continue, TriMet can terminate the employee. Hansen said that’s not stricter than the existing policy, but the change simplifies the process and brings it into alignment with the policy for maintenance employees. It took weeks to explain the policy to members, he said. “Trying to explain time off in TriMet, nobody understands,” he said. “Not even an arbitrator.”
