On April 14, 2009, an arbitrator ruled that “The Public Defender Salary Schedule shall be modified to provide an additional 1% increase for Public Defenders at Step 3 or above effective June 1, 2008…”
In the last contract negotiations, AFSCME proposed an additional step and a 2% increase for all assistant public defenders at Step 3 and above in addition to negotiated wage increases. The County flatly rejected the proposed additional step, but made a counter proposal offering a 1% increase. In response, the Union dropped it’s request for another step and proposed a 1.5% increase. The 1% counter proposal was never retracted during the negotiations. On June 1, 2008, the County started paying the additional 1%. But a few weeks later, the County claimed that the parties had never agreed to the 1% increase and reduced paychecks accordingly.
The Negotiation Ground Rules state that “All Tentative Agreements will be reduced to writing, initialed and dated by the Spokesperson of each Party.” No tentative agreement prepared by either party referenced mutual assent to the 1% increase. For this reason, the County argued that the additional 1% proposal inadvertently “fell of the table” without mutual agreement. However, Tentative Agreements were formalized and jointly signed off during the negotiation process onlywhen there were structural changes in a pay plan. Other contractual changes were adopted without a sign off The 1% increase is not a structural change in the plan such as adding a new step to the pay grid. Further, the 1% appeared in the salary schedule prepared by the County during negotiations. Both parties reviewed the salary schedule and made corrections, but the 1% increase was never changed. Thus the parties reached a binding, mutual agreement and the 1% increase is a part of the contract.
M.S.
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