As the state’s massive prison and parole department begins a historic downsizing to cut costs and comply with court orders, it’s getting a hand from organized labor.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association and five other unions have signed contract amendments for Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation employees that set aside some job protections, drastically cut employees’ state-paid moving allowances and aim to reduce prison officer overtime costs. Report by The Sacramento Bee.
The state estimates the deals will save about $13 million in this fiscal year, compared with the traditional layoff process.
In exchange, unions hope fewer workers will lose their jobs as the department shifts some of its responsibilities to local government. That process started Oct. 1, aiming to cut the state’s prison and parole costs over several years.
By September, the state’s 63,000-employee prison and parole agency had issued more than 2,100 warning notices, the first wave of several to come.
Although the state and the unions say the agreements are a plus for both sides, some employees are unhappy that they may have to uproot.
CCPOA spokesman JeVaughn Baker said Tuesday that the concessions aren’t “ideal” and acknowledged that some union members are upset at the prospect of moving to remote facilities around the state.
“However, we also understand that CDCR is downsizing,” Baker said, “and it is better for our members to relocate than to be jobless in this struggling economy.”
Ron Yank, who heads Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Personnel Administration, said the agreements are a “win-win” for the government and its employees.
“We – the state – will save millions of dollars by moving people from places we don’t need them to places where we’re understaffed,” Yank said Tuesday. “The employees get certainty in uncertain economic times.”
Of the 21 bargaining units that negotiate contracts for state employees, 18 represent workers in prisons and parole offices, from correctional officers and parole officers to cooks and custodians. Bargaining units representing state attorneys, engineers and scientists haven’t yet signed new agreements.
Yank said he expects they will ink deals “soon.”
Benefits vs. jobs
Potentially thousands of jobs are in play. Lawmakers, in response to court orders to reduce the prison population and California’s budget woes, signed off this year on a realignment plan that shifts some state penal and parole responsibilities to local governments.
California houses 144,000 inmates in its 33 adult institutions, but the corrections department estimates it will shed 20,000 of those individuals by next summer and another 14,000 by July 2013.
The department also is shifting its adult parole responsibilities to local governments, making obsolete approximately 900 state parole agent and parole support staff jobs.
“The unions had no choice but to play ball,” said Joshua Page, a University of Minnesota sociology professor who has studied the history of California’s penal system. “It came down to keeping benefits and protections or keeping jobs.”
The new union arrangements vary somewhat by union and job classification, but they share broad contours.
Correctional officers who worked at an overstaffed facility, for example, had until this week to volunteer to move to one of five understaffed prisons, including California State Prison, Sacramento, in Folsom, Pelican Bay State Prison near Crescent City and High Desert State Prison near Susanville.
About 200 CCPOA members had volunteered as of Tuesday, Yank said. They’ll get $3,750 to $7,500 to defray moving costs. The state also will give them one day to three days of time off. Employees who want more time can draw up to 10 days from their own accumulated leave credits.
That’s a huge savings for the state, which can wind up paying an average of $30,000 per employee to assist with moving costs, Yank said. Much of that money usually goes to help with employee housing expenses.
Officers in danger of losing their jobs but who don’t want to move voluntarily can bid to join an “overtime avoidance” pool or become “permanent-intermittent” employees. Those groups will be tapped to fill open shifts that would otherwise be covered by overtime.
Cuts to play out in waves
Once those two groups are in place, the corrections department will post which facilities remain overstaffed and understaffed, and which jobs are open. Officers and other department employees can bid for jobs statewide based on seniority.
It’s a significant change, since CDCR layoffs usually happen on a county-by-county basis. That meant that an employee in, say, Riverside County with seven years of service couldn’t displace an employee with less time on the job doing the same work in another county.
The new arrangement “honors the principle of seniority on a statewide basis,” Yank said, by allowing the longest-serving employees under threat of layoff to bump less-senior colleagues anywhere in California.
Employees who don’t go for any of the first three options could be forced to transfer anyway with a reduced moving allowance while they let the standard layoff process play out, which will take four months.
All the new union agreements allow transferring regular employees to fill positions currently occupied by retirees who have returned to the workforce. The deals also quicken the pace of grievance procedures and arbitration when an employee alleges the state violated the new agreements.
“Our members will have many more opportunities and protections than they would have under any previous layoff process,” said SEIU Local 1000 vice president for bargaining Margarita Maldonado in a message to union members.
The layoffs won’t all happen at once. Corrections officials will monitor the prison population, and as it shrinks, the department will issue more notices that employees need to transfer or risk layoff.
“This will be done in waves,” said Ken Murch, chief negotiator and lobbyist for the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians, which represents 7,000 state workers. “In the end, there may be no alternative but to lay people off.”
Murch said his group agreed to a deal much like CCPOA’s, even though relatively few of the association’s members work for the corrections department.
“The state isn’t really sure what the impact will be right now to our members,” Murch said. “We just wanted to get the documents in place in case they start needing to relocate.”