photo by: City of Lawrence

Members of the Lawrence City Commission meet Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at City Hall.

City leaders will continue their discussion of changes to the local resolution governing city employee unions with the hope that city and union representatives can come to more agreement on certain items.

As part of its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission voted unanimously to defer adopting a resolution and asked that city staff and union leaders further discuss some measures and hopefully come to some consensus. Teamsters Local 696 requested changes in December to the resolution that union representatives say will ensure employees’ rights to organize and join a union. The city proposed a new version of the resolution, which union leaders said included measures that were anti-worker.

“I just want to get it right,” Commissioner Lisa Larsen said. “It’s not kicking the can, it’s just wanting to get it right.”

City staff is recommending some changes, though not as extensive as the Teamsters requested. Some of the key changes deal with the division of employee groups for the purposes of unionization and the voting process for unionization, among other changes.

The current resolution divides city employees into four groups that could potentially unionize, which union representatives have said lumps together employees with duties that are too varied for organizational purposes. The union proposed that there be eight groups, and city staff has proposed that there be six. Commissioners generally agreed that they favored having six groups, but they asked city staff and union representations to further discuss which employees should belong to which groups with the goal of ensuring employees with similar jobs are grouped together.

Regarding voting, the current resolution requires that 50% of all the employees in any one of the employee groups — not 50% of those employees who choose to vote — must agree to the union representation. The union has proposed that the requirement be 50% of the employees who vote, arguing that the current framework counts those who don’t vote as “no” votes.

Commissioners confirmed with legal staff that the city’s standard differs from state and national labor laws, which only require 50% of the votes. Commissioners did not have a consensus on the standard for the election and asked that the topic be discussed further. Mayor Jennifer Ananda suggested a compromise in which unionization could be achieved with 50% of the votes cast as long as 50% of the employees in any group cast a ballot.

Following the Teamsters’ proposal, the local firefighters union also proposed changes to the resolution. The Lawrence firefighters have proposed that their union contract should also cover fire captains, who union representatives say work alongside other union employees but don’t receive all the same benefits of the union contract with the city. Commissioners generally said they wanted to stick to the city’s resolution that does not include employees with supervisory roles within unions, but they said they wanted to address equity issues between union and nonunion employees that the firefighters union brought up.

Commissioners directed city staff to bring the item back to them for a vote within 60 days. There were several other issues, including negotiation impasse procedures and election timelines, that the commission did not have a general consensus on, which will be discussed when the topic comes back to the commission.

City Commission Meeting 03/03/20