By Jim Cline and Kate Kremer
This article continues are series on recent contract settlement trends. It uses city police 2022 settlements as the data source, but these trends seem to apply generally to other public safety occupations. In this article we cover the impact of location on contract settlements.
While bargaining in Eastern Washington, some of the members of our firm have heard employers make claims about that settlements in Eastern Washington and outside the Seattle Metro area are not as high. When we looked closely at the current settlements, using the same city police settlement data that we’ve discussed previously in this series. We found some truth to the claim, but it seems overblown. This is what we found:
This map shows Eastern and Western Washington 25-Year BA Police Officer 2022 settlements averaged by region. We separated out the Central Puget Sound counties from Western Washington, which we believed to be unique outliers that skew the Western Washington settlement data. The Central Puget Sound counties include Snohomish, King, Pierce, and Kitsap Counties. As a result, we found that the Eastern Washington settlements, averaging 4.65%, were only slightly less than the Western Washington settlements outside of the Central region at 4.91%. The Central Puget Sound 2022 average settlements were 0.75% higher.
There does seem to be some additional pressure on employers in King County. When we separate King County from the other Central Puget Sound counties, the impact of King County becomes apparent:
This map adds in Thurston and Island Counties to the Central Western Washington counties as the “Seattle PMSA,” but takes out King County as its own separate category. This highlights the impact of King County on wage settlements for 2022. In this analysis, the remainder of Western Washington outside of the Seattle PMSA is less than two tenths of a percent different from the Eastern Washington settlement percentages. (If this map showed actual wages, you would see a greater difference.) But for the wage settlements, the data shows that it is the Central Puget Sound counties, and in particular King County, that drives the East/West differences. In other words, those employers that our firm members overheard in Eastern Washington didn’t check their facts. There isn’t that much difference between Western Washington and Eastern Washington when the Seattle Metro area is removed.
One likely factor impacting police wages in the Central Puget Sound region and the adjoining counties is that there have been more labor market pressures for police services. Following the political events of 2020 that led to legislation in 2021, some officers working in urban police departments decided to lateral away from urban departments or to leave law enforcement entirely. Some cited indications that they did not have the political support that they’ve had in the past. Others, especially those with college degrees, have had other job options in other fields where they could make more money, without relocating, and have decided to leave mid-career. Accordingly, all of the departures put wage pressures on the urban departments.
However, there is another theory about the higher wage settlements in Central Puget Sound Departments.
In the I-5 corridor cities, more groups are represented by police guilds and police associations. As such, we recognize that these groups tend to be much more sophisticated and knowledgeable about how they approach bargaining. In some of the Eastern and outlying areas, there is still a greater tendency to be represented by some of the national labor organizations – like the Teamsters. In these areas, we were seeing low settlements that were entered into early. These settlements didn’t seem to contemplate that inflation was going up and that rising inflation would affect the settlement trends.
We’ve often said that “knowledge is power.” While the surge in inflation caught many by surprise, that isn’t an excuse for not applying those inflation developments into bargaining when the likely surge was becoming more apparent.
