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Three Scenarios, Three Different Impacts: Your Choice
You’ll soon have the chance to vote on the Coalition’s Tentative Agreement to protect against layoffs and furlough days. Ratification ballots and summaries have been mailed to your home, or meetings set for units that vote together.
Click here to see how your vote will impact your paycheck.
No matter how you vote there will be an immediate impact.
If you vote NO, then according to the CAO on October 5 it could mean up to 43 furlough days of Coalition members this year in combination with up to 3,000 layoffs. This would mean a 20.9% cut in your paycheck for the rest of the year.
If you vote NO the City is moving forward with layoff lists and furlough plans for the Mayor’s previously announced immediate implementation of 26 furlough days and 926 layoffs. Even under this plan your paycheck for the rest of the year would be cut by 10.4%.
If you vote YES to the Coalition Agreement, your paycheck would be cut only 4.4% for the rest of the year (or only a 2.9% cut from your annual salary).
Click here to see the effect on your paycheck for the rest of the fiscal year or for the whole year, whether you’re on top step, a lower step, or in a job class without steps.
Your SEIU 721 Bargaining Team and all the Coalition Bargaining Teams urge you to vote Yes to protect City services and your family’s paycheck for this year and the future.
Look at the bottom-line and see for yourself: http://action.seiu721.org/calculator
Download the documents that will prepare you to vote:
- Ratification Summary explaining the Agreement in detail
- The final language of the full agreement
- Presentation that walks through the full agreement with all the changes, the full budget situation and how we got here
- The final ERIP Letter of Agreement
- The final ERIP Ordinance
“If you vote NO, then according to the CAO on October 5 it COULD mean up to 43 furlough days of Coalition members this year in combination with up to 3,000 layoffs. This would mean a 20.9% cut in your paycheck for the rest of the year.”
“If you vote NO the City is moving forward with layoff lists and furlough plans for the Mayor’s previously announced immediate implementation of 26 furlough days and 926 layoffs. Even under this plan your paycheck for the rest of the year would be cut by 10.4%.”
Isn’t this illegal since we currently have a BINDING contract in place that prevents this? Layoffs are allowed, but furlough time is not. OR does this crisis somehow over-ride that contract? If so, how?
If this is such a good plan, why do you feel the need to keep shoving this at us as though you KNOW the majority of the members are going to vote NO? And they will do so because the majority of the members are safe from layoffs, and furloughs are illegal. They have said they don’t want to pay for people to retire who are already eligible. The INCENTIVES are weak for those not quite eligible. And giving back 1% is JUST NOT RIGHT!!
If furoughs and layoffs were legal and within the Mayor’s power at this time, he would have used that power long ago, thinking it would help with his mismanagement of City Funds and reduce the deficit, right??
I hate to sound like a broken record;
REMIND ALL OF US AGAIN JUST WHAT THE CITY IS GIVING UP IN ALL OF THIS. WHAT EXACTLY ARE THEIR CONCESSIONS??? Please provide this information IMMEDIATELY and not in a pdf file that some people can’t open. I just may help get the votes you want!!
“MUTUAL GAINS” is supposed to be a WIN-WIN situation.
“Mutual Commitment to LA’s Furture” is not supposed to rest SOLELY on the backs of the workers!!
Vote NO! This deal destroys the career City employee. It unfairly targets employees who have devoted their lives to the City, raising pension contributions 5% or more and putting off 3% COLAs plus another 3.75% in longevity steps that were promised just 2 years ago! Then the Unions want employees to voluntarily furlough for another 5% reduction, and risk having to pay even more to the pension fund when not enough people take the ERIP and put our Pension Fund in jeopardy! If you vote NO, you get your 3% COLA back, with interest, plus your longevity steps, and don’t have to pay 1% or more for 15 years (a more than 15% reduction in pay that increases over time). The Pension Fund stays secure. Make the City be responsible for its own actions and make the Mayor and Council make the hard decisions and fix the City now – not put things off for next year when conditions will then be worse! The career employee knows how to serve the people of this City. How about its elected officials?
VOTE YES! This is the last chance to stay employed.RHETORIC IS JUST THAT;RHETORIC!The fact of the matter is we need to survive before we can fight back.
As to layoffs and or furloughs being legal, why would you even want to take a chance? Maybe we could ask our friends over in the EAA if they”re legal. They have been enduring both since July, as have our brothers and sisters working for the State! Consider this, even if they furlough us and we challenge them in court. It would take at least months and probably years to get a decision. (State employees have been making legal motions since they started getting furloughed, and there is still no end in sight.) And even if we win in court, we don’t get any money back from the city. Because we won’t be working that time in the first place. Then the City has to layoff that many more people to make up the difference from the lost furloughs! As for us “feeling the need to keep shoving this at you, that’s only because you “Einsteins” keep shoving your bogus information at us. I don’t know who it is that you are talking to, but the majority of the people that I’m talking with (and that is dozens of people each day in many different departments) are in favor of this proposal, especially when they see the numbers for themselves. Again, why would you want to take a chance on thousands of layoffs and losing an additional 12% or more, when there is an alternative available?
Vote NO! ERIP-OFF = GTE, Grand Theft Employee. Employees should never pay for other employee’s benefits, no way, no how, never! I would never tell other employees when to retire, that’s a personal decision for each individual. At the very least, I don’t want other employees stealing money out of my pocket! I don’t care if 99.99% vote in favor, as for those who agree with the ERIP-OFF, let them pay for other people’s severance pay. 15 bitter years of garnishment is intolerable! Your mother did not raise you to steal, especially not from working people trying to make ends meet. Reduced pay from furloughs, rising costs of living, and some people advocate taking more money out of our pockets? Insane, immoral, totally not in solidarity.
Vote NO!
Two items:
1. As predicted, civilian employees throughout the City, be it Coalition or EAA members, are paying for the LAPD contract of no loss in pay. The worst part of their deal is no raise for two years. That’s not a favor on the part of LAPD; no public agency in the country (including LADWP where IBEW has accepted a contract extension of one year with zero COLA) has taken COLA.
2. The spreadsheet for the calculator wrongly depicts the impact of the Mayor’s plan (option 3). It spreads the 208 hours of furlough over the reminder of the fiscal year (nine months) instead of 12 months. Thereby, it shows the impact as 15% reduction instead of the well known 10% (that’s what we at EAA are getting). If you factor that, the coalition members would have been better off taking the furlough; not to mention the COLA and the step increase would have raised the base salary.
On Wednesday October 21, 2009, members of the Los Angeles Professional Managers’ Association held general membership meeetings to discuss and vote on the ERIP and on the contract (MOU) changes. Over 68% of the members voted to approve ERIP and the changes in our MOU and 32% voted no to these proposals. Managers in the City of Los Angeles support our fellow workeres at the entry level many of whom would be layed off if ERIP and the contract changes were to be voted down. We are one union and believe that an injury to one is an injury to all. We await the counting of the mail in ballots from the other bargaining units in SEIU Local 721, in AFSCME, in the Building Trades, the Teamsters, LIUNA, and the Operating Engineers. Good luck to us all.
Charley,
Let me see if I understood you correctly: City Managers are supporting entry level employees by pushing and waiting for a golden handshake that will be paid for by those employees for the next 15 years, and that those same City Managers have been paying only 2% into the retirement system for their entire career. Did I get it right?? The only reason 68% voted for ERIP is for personal gain. If City managers really care about those of us who will stay behind, they should retire immediately without any golden handshake.
Dear EAA supporter,
Unlike you, City managers know that we are all in this together. Out of the 600 City managers represented by the Los Angeles Professional Managers’ Association, SEIU Local 721, over 80 percent will still be working for the City next year and paying into the retirement system. Those of us hired before 1983 will be paying over twice as much. To analyse your invitation for managers to quit, even if all 600 managers quit the City, that would still not provide the savings needed to fix the cash flow problem the City is currently in, let alone the structural imbalance between revenues and expenditures. If you and the other EAA supporters spent half the time trying to help us find a fix as you do attacking your fellow workers, maybe you could have helped us all solve this problem.
To those who are asking themselves why should I pay for someone else to retire. I say this: I’m a new city employee and will probably be laid off if the ERIP doesnt pass. What we have now is a bad deal for the employees. But we belong in a union. It has its advantages and disadvantages which means you have to take the good with the bad. From what I’ve observed so far, I think the bigger injustice is it matters not how hard I work the person next to me will get the same pay as I do even if he or she does half the work I do. This will be the case for my entire career. So please consider where you work and vote YES. If it passes and I dont end up in the unemployment, I will say this you “When your time with the city is up, I will not forget the sacrifice you did for me, if I have to, I will do the same for you”.
The tail doesn’t wag the dog. The problem with how the City spends/wastes its money I’m sure is not all that easily traced. But seeing the misuse of funds that the public finds out about through the news is only the tip! I’m sure they are getting away with murder. I’m not a political guy by any means, but I’m sure that a simple AUDIT of the City Budget by a totally independent company would FORCE the City to be accountable. And sure, HEADS WILL ROLL. Time to clean house!
I know the City paid something like $1.5 million back in the 1980’s to a “David M. Griffith” company to audit HOW the City does things and how they could save money and operate more efficiently. They came up with lots of “suggestions.” None of their suggestions were to furlough and lay off employees!
And true golden handshake should be just that and nothing more! Not having other employees pay more for it, or for retirees to have to pay BACK into it!
This whole problem is not a problem that should in anyway be solved on the backs of the workers. More people need to blow the whistle on the waste they see going on downtown. Suggestions can always be made on how the City can save money, but WHO is going to implement those suggestions? Who’s gonna rat someone out?
An injury to all is not an injury to ALL (except Union members) because NO ONE has cited CONCESSIONS the CITY is making throughout this entire ordeal. Mismanagement of City funds is NOT the fault of labor!
There is already suspicious activity surrounding the distribution and returning of the ballots. This just adds to the bad taste of the whole proposal.
how many managers are in lapma?
% don’t mean crap when 40 members total and 18 voted ?
Let’s have some real numbers !
Local 347 never had a spine and now that we are part of the giant 721 (Jabba the
Hutt)….an odious mass of greasy, insect-ridden flesh with a insatiable appetite for union dues and frogs.Just try to find a spine here.
Everyone new the real estate bubble would ultimately burst and the revenue the city was glutting itself on would go away.This was a predicable emergency and I think the Superior court would rule that the renegotiation of our binding contract was illegal.
Thank you for leading us SEIU ….as good men were led into the Battle of the Little Big Horn….and I guess we will all still be ill fated in your representation and leadership as we rehash this at the end of each fiscal year ending in 2014.