By Central Table Bargaining Co-Chairs Ibrahim Coulibaly and Austin Folnagy
We’d like to share with our fellow members our experience as bargaining team members after reaching a Tentative Agreement (TA) for the next state worker contract. We must begin by thanking all of you for being members. The higher our membership, the stronger our bargaining power. And a thank you to everyone who filled out a bargaining survey, signed the bargaining petition or a strike pledge, shared a personal story, participated in a bargaining update, contacted the state, or took any other action to get us to this point. Together, we completed 7,000 bargaining surveys and 10,000 bargaining petitions, turned out 75 people to the Capitol for our lobby day and 1,500 people for our rally, signed nearly 3,000 strike pledges, and held informational pickets at more than 70 worksites!
Let’s start with the biggest item, our Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs). We won a 6.5% COLA starting December 1st and a 6.55% COLA in early 2025. We believe that these are the best COLAs our members have won since the 1970s. We also want to lift up how this TA raises the lowest pay for any state worker to more than $21 in the next 18 months. And all state workers will receive a one-time $1,500 COLA payment in their September 1st paycheck. Our 13.05% COLA over two years is the highest of any recent state employee contract we could find in the country!
Bargaining with the state is somewhat different than a more traditional employer. While we’re only at the table with management for about six months before the contract expires, the process actually starts long before that. This is because our contract is funded in a unique way via a “salary pot,” or a set amount of money that pays for COLAs, steps, healthcare cost increases, and any other economic items we agree to in our contract. This money pays for every single state employee, not just SEIU-represented workers (SEIU represents about 22,000 of the 45,000 state workers in Oregon). The salary pot is first set by the governor and then finalized by the legislature through the regular budgeting process.
We were able to secure these COLAs because members built a powerful bargaining campaign that pushed management to spend every penny of the record $450 million the Oregon Legislature authorized for bargaining. To put this money into perspective, when we bargained our last contract in 2021, we fought hard to win a $190 million salary pot. More than doubling the amount of money going directly to our members took a tremendous amount of political power. If Tina Kotek was not our Governor and pro-worker majorities weren’t in both the House and the Senate, things would look very different. As Chair of CAPE, our union’s Political Action Committee, Ibrahim is proud of the work our members did to create the political climate where this type of funding for our contracts was possible.
The TA helps to make workplaces safer and more equitable by strengthening the ability to use grievances to address workplace discrimination, further empowering stewards, and improving telework language. We maintained health insurance premiums for the duration of the contract, guaranteed steps for both years of the contract, and stopped the move to biweekly pay.
We’re still not done. In the coming weeks, SEIU 503 members will vote on whether to ratify the TA and finalize our contract. We will be voting YES and encourage you to do so as well. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to your organizer. It was our honor to work on your and all of our collective behalf to secure the best TA possible.
Ibrahim Coulibaly is a Civil Rights Investigator at the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industry. Austin Folnagy is a Business Employment Specialist at the Employment Department