Washington Public Sector Labor Negotiations Blog
Trends and Developments Concerning Washington Public Labor Contracts
By Jim Cline and Kate Kremer
Despite the pandemic and the associated recession, inflation has not completely disappeared, especially in the Seattle metropolitan area. This chart shows the month to month changes in the Seattle and All Cities “W” index from October 2019 to October 2020:
By: Jim Cine and Kate Kremer
If you are in or soon entering bargaining, right now it is critical to be reviewing the month to month sales tax numbers, in a way that is has never been seen before.
Two immediate takeaways: First, sales tax revenues have dramatically declined, and second, the drop is not nearly as sharp as many local budget officers have been projecting. You can’t take your budget department’s dramatic announcements of dire circumstances to be accurate without doing your own work.
[Read more…]
By: Jim Cline and Kate Kremer
Pushed down by the COVID Recession, the important June to June CPI number showed a dramatic, though expected, drop. We say “important” because many Washington public safety labor contracts are tied, directly or indirectly, to the June CPI numbers. As indicated in the recently released Guidebook on “Negotiation in Turbulent Times”, regardless of the CPI, we anticipate challenging bargaining in 2020 and into 2021. We are expecting most employers will at least start with 0% as their base wage proposal, and we’ve already seen one proposal for a -3%. [Read more…]
