As the unions representing thousands of state workers continue voting on a revised concession agreement, their leaders are spotlighting the impact of the job cuts that could come if the pact is not ratified.
Officials from the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, or SEBAC, an umbrella group consisting of representatives from the state employee unions, will hold an event at Southbury Training School today with workers who are slated to lose their jobs.
About 140 workers at the facility have received layoff notices thus far, said SEBAC spokesman Matt O'Connor. Among the units set to be cut, he said, is the school's fire department, which also responds to municipal fire calls (the state receives a reimbursement from the town of Southbury for those services, O'Connor added.)
Tomorrow SEBAC will hold a similar event with workers at a vocational-technical school in Bridgeport.
Meanwhile, individual unions representing state employees are continuing to vote on the revised pact. It is the second time the agreement has come up for a vote in the past few months: earlier this summer the pact was shot down when not enough rank-and-file workers voted 'yes' to met the threshold for approval. SEBAC has since changed its rules lowering the threshold for passage. The new round of voting is expected to be completed by Aug. 18.
At least two unions affiliated with the American Association of University Professors have publicly announced their endorsements of the agreement. One affiliate represents 1,150 faculty members at the state university system; another represents more than 2,000 teachers at the UConn flagship in Storrs and its satellite campuses.
In both cases, the agreement was endorsed by solely by union officials; rank-and-file members, who approved the deal the first time around, did not get the chance to re-vote on the plan.
SEBAC and the individual unions are keeping a tight lid on information surrounding the re-voting process.
"Right now our number one objective is to communicate with our members,'' SEBAC's O'Connor said. "We don't have a schedule [of when each union is voting] to release.''
The agreement with state workers is designed to save the state $1.6 billion over the next two years. If it is not ratified, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has said he has not choice but to cut services and layoff thousands of state workers,
Many of those layoff notices have already gone out. Last week union officials sought and received a memo from the state Office of Policy and Management affirming that a four-year, no layoff clause that is part of the agreement will supersede any layoff notices that have already been delivered.
"[R]egardless of the wording of their layoff notice/letter (e.g., lack of work, organization, etc.), the employee will be returned to work if they have been laid off prior to ratification OR their layoff notice will be rescinded, as applicable, subject to the exceptions outlined in the 2011 SEBAC Agreement,'' states the memo signed by Linda J. Yelmini, state director of labor relations.