By Jason Stein
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MADISON, Wis. — Union guards in Wisconsin prisons shouldn’t have to wait any longer to get the 1% raise given to all other state workers a year ago, a labor leader argues in a letter to Gov. Scott Walker.
In the letter sent this week to Walker, Marty Beil, a frequent critic of the GOP governor and head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, called on Walker to approve for corrections officers the raise that most other state employees received on June 29, 2013.
“You have often said that you value state employees and the jobs that they do. Here is an opportunity to back the words with action,” Beil wrote in a letter to Walker.
But a spokeswoman for the Walker administration responded that the raise won’t be provided for now because the workers’ union status is currently under dispute. There is a separate process for giving raises to union and nonunion state employees.
Stephanie Marquis, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration and its Office of Employment Relations, said that workers could receive back pay once the issue of the union status is resolved.
If the workers are found not to belong to a union, “then those employees would get a lump-sum payment back to June 29 because the employees would now be covered under the compensation plan, which gives the 1% general wage adjustment,” Marquis said in an email.
The backdrop for the latest dispute is Walker’s 2011 legislation strictly limiting bargaining power for most public employee unions. That law, known as Act 10, also requires difficult to meet annual certification elections on whether such unions retain their official status.
Union employees can still bargain as a group with the state over their wage increases, but any salary hike is normally capped at the rate of inflation. They cannot negotiate over working conditions, overtime, sick leave or a host of other matters, as they could before Act 10 was approved.
Last year, a union for corrections officers broke off from the larger state employees union headed by Beil to form the separate Wisconsin Association for Correctional Law Enforcement. The latter union, known as WACLE, won state recognition in July 2014, only to lose their certification election less than four months ago.
Voters supported the WACLE union 813-43, but the prison guards union still lost the vote because Act 10 requires that the union receive a majority of votes from the 5,400 workers eligible to be in the union. Most of those workers didn’t vote, so WACLE lost.
Even before the voting, the new guards union sued in Dane County Circuit Court to block the certification election from taking place.
Separately, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission is also considering a request from WACLE to void the election results and order another. In the meantime, the prison guards union retains its official status with the state as the workers’ representative, said Peter Davis, chief legal counsel of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
In an interview with a reporter and in an email Monday to Beil, Davis said that he expects his agency to move quickly on the issue next month once it receives more information from the Walker administration on the election.