Cayetano changed how state bargained
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Capitol Bureau Chief
With negotiations now completed with the state's four major public worker unions, Gov. Ben Cayetano has successfully introduced a new style of collective bargaining that extracted concessions from public employees in exchange for pay increases.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
Before he would agree to raises for university professors, he wanted a new system of merit pay established.
Nu'uanu Elementary School students, from left, Michelle Togami, Quinn Chock, Taryn Chock, Tyler Terai, David Togami and Garrick Chock, work on "Welcome Back" posters.
Blue- and white-collar workers agreed to reduced vacation and sick leave benefits for new hires.
For the teachers, the new contract will include incentives that grant teachers raises if they continue their education and obtain professional certification.
Traditionally, negotiations under past governors focused mostly on how much of a pay increase each administration would hand out without asking anything in return. At a minimum, Cayetano was successful in introducing into bargaining a new system of tradeoffs — pay increases in exchange for increased efficiency — that wasn't there before.
"We don't want the contract with the teachers to be just a labor contract. It has to provide something in there that will make the teachers get better," Cayetano said last week.
Mixed reviews
The reviews of Cayetano's approach are mixed. Gary Rodrigues, state director of the United Public Workers, said he liked the way the negotiations played out this year for his union, but others are more critical.
UPW agreed late last year to 11 percent raises over the next two years. In exchange, the union agreed that new employees hired starting July 2 would receive reduced sick leave and vacation benefits.
The union also agreed to a "two strikes" policy on drug testing for commercial drivers and probationary employees that would allow the employer to fire a worker who twice tests positive for drug use.
Cayetano has a tentative agreement to grant raises averaging 14.5 percent to members of the Hawaii Government Employees Association, and in exchange HGEA agreed to the same drug testing and vacation and sick leave changes.
"It's OK, because we got what we wanted and the state got what they wanted, so it's a fair deal," Rodrigues said.
Cayetano offered UPW a choice, Rodrigues said. The governor was willing to grant 9 percent raises outright, or grant 11 percent raises if the union would agree to the vacation and sick leave reductions and the two-strikes drug testing.
"For us, the settlement and his position on changing benefits for new people permitted us to get into bargaining and say, 'OK, we want to get into this, because we want some more than would be the normal (pay) increase,'" Rodrigues said. "So it actually gave us an opening to get more raises."
How used to be
This isn't how the state used to bargain. James Takushi, who led state negotiating teams during the administration of Gov. John Burns and for many years afterward, said he prepared for bargainingÊby calculating how much in public worker raises the state could afford.
Takushi said he would assess bargaining trends on the Mainland, scrutinize the state's finances and other factors, and propose aÊpercentage raise to Burns. Takushi contends it is a mistake to negotiate efficiency issues with the unions because he believes management already has a right to demand "efficiency" from public employees. The state has evaluation and disciplinary processes to make sure those demands are met, he said.
Katherine V. Stone, professor of industrial relations at Cornell University, said the kinds of demands Cayetano made on the public worker unions have been commonplace in negotiations between private companies and their unions for the last decade.
Private employers these days often bargain to amend or eliminate union work rules and to improve efficiency in other ways, Stone said.
Private sector
One link between that private sector mindset and the Cayetano administration is the state's chief negotiator Davis Yogi, who represented C. Brewer & Co. in negotiations with its unions. Yogi bargained for incentive pay and other changes to increase efficiency for C. Brewer.
Two-tier benefit structures of the type Cayetano negotiated with UPW and HGEA were common in the 1980s, but private employers are moving away from that approach now, Stone said.
"It creates terrible ill will between incumbent employees and new employees, and existing employees often believe that the employer hopes to get rid of them to replace them with cheaper labor," Stone said.
Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs for the Cornell University New York City Extension, said Cayetano's approach to public worker negotiations has been tried elsewhere. Margolies warned that "It's not always real. Sometimes it's more rhetoric than real."
"The elected officials, to seem responsible and tough, say we've got to get more efficiency, playing on the public's feeling that government is not efficient," Margolies said. "Often when it comes right down to it...my impression is the actual savings that are supposedly in these agreements is not so great, that it's more symbolic than real."
Future negotiations could also limit any savings or efficiencies the state won in this round of bargaining. Rodrigues noted the changes in sick leave and vacation that UPW agreed to this year could be scrapped or modified in future rounds of contract negotiations.
Celia Lose, spokeswoman for American Federation of Teachers, said teachers strikes are often over "reform issues" rather than simply money.
"More and more we're seeing that some of the issues at the bargaining table involve class size or access to professional development," she said. "So, you really could say that there's a positive effect on reform efforts when strikes are resolved by addressing these concerns."
State Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, a labor lawyer, said she isn't surprised that the collective bargaining process for public worker unions has evolved to include more than just wages and salaries.
"If the governor has set as a priority this concept of government efficiency ... and if he feels that legislatively we haven't addressed those specific issues, if it's not prohibited from being addressed in the collective bargaining agreement, it's fair game," she said.
Hanabusa, D-21st (Kalaeloa, Makaha), said unions should also be credited for this change in negotiations.
"When (people) see the governor say, 'Well, this is what I got,' yes, credit is due for half of it," she said. "But the bulk of it would not come to pass if not for the union and its membership also saying, 'Okay, it's time to change.'"
'Bad idea'
Dick Pratt, director of the Public Administration Program at University of Hawai'i at Manoa, said he agrees government must become more productive, but contends the UH contract negotiations were the wrong place to introduce new demands for "efficiency."
"I think that's a bad idea, because reform itself is a difficult activity, and the people at the table can't do it in the environment of negotiating for money," said Pratt, who joined in faculty strike.
The University of Hawai'i Professional Assembly agreed to a flat raise of $2,325 for all faculty in the first year of the contract amounting to 4 percent for those who make more than $57,000. In the second year, the raise is 6 percent and additional merit pay of up to 2 percent more.
Pratt said it will be "terribly difficult" to pick and choose who will receive merit pay when the faculty have done without pay increases for the last two years. "They're going to all be thinking they deserve something," Pratt said, but awarding merit raises to everyone would "look pretty silly."
Advertiser staff writers Lynda Arakawa and Alice Keesing contributed to this report.
