By Jim Cline
In the last newsletter, we discussed that the Washington legislature has extended binding interest arbitration rights to emergency dispatchers. In this article, we discuss some practical questions about how interest arbitration would work, specifically for E911 employees.
In our online Washington Public Safety Representatives Manual we provide a detailed discussion of interest arbitration principles and procedures. (Hard copies accessible here.) The detailed mechanics are technical and detailed and beyond the scope of this article. The main points to take away include:
- Negotiations and arbitration for eligible groups are to be based on certain statutory factors
- Appropriate “Comparables” are chief among those factors.
- Comparability includes “a comparison of the wages, hours, and conditions of employment of personnel involved in the proceedings with the wages, hours, and conditions of employment of like personnel of like employers of similar size on the west coast of the United States.”
- In practice and by arbitration precedent, the “West Coast” factor is not considered where an adequate number of comparables are available inside the state of Washington.
- Population and Assessed Valuation are the most commonly applied factors by arbitrators for selecting comparables.
- Next in line after Population and AV is geographic location.
- Geographic location is especially important where there is a definable “labor market” in a given location.
- Sales tax Revenues have also often been considered in important factor in selecting comparables.
These are the general and most relied upon factors by law and arbitration precedent. How will these factors be applied to E911 bargaining units? There is lots of nuance in the answer to that question due to some idiosyncrasies in E911 government structures and we’ll address that in the next article in this series.
