By Jim Cline
Long overdue good news for Washington Dispatchers. The Governor has signed SB 5808, extending binding interest arbitration rights to E911 centers. The law includes emergency telecommunicators in the definition of “uniform employees” under the PECBA interest arbitration provisions.
Not all E911 center employees are conferred these arbitration rights. Support personnel and technical personnel who do not perform the telecommunication functions would be excluded. Supervisors are included. Both dispatchers and “call receivers” and others performing telecommunication functions would be included. To be explicit, the scope of the law extends the binding arbitration rights to employees
of the state, a local public agency, or an independent governmental agency whose primary responsibility is to receive, process, transmit, or dispatch 911 emergency and nonemergency calls for law enforcement, fire, emergency medical, and other public safety services by telephone, radio, or other communication devices and includes an individual who promoted from this position and supervises individuals who perform these functions.
These provisions are overdue because other vital public safety occupations have long had these protections. And Fire Department employees have had these protections for over a decade.
The inclusion in the “uniformed personnel” definition which covers police, fire and corrections creates some very specific standards for how such arbitration hearings are to be conducted and determined. In our next article on this topic, we’ll discuss those standards and the issues of how they might apply to dispatch centers in particular.
For more information on how Washington interest arbitration works visit the Cline Premium website. The online Washington Public Safety Representative’s Manual contains a detailed discussion of arbitration principles with links to additional resources including arbitration decisions.
