City of Duluth’s tentative agreement with AFSCME for higher wages

Nearly 500 city of Duluth employees will be working under new three year contracts. The City of Duluth’s tentative agreement with AFSCME focuses on retaining their staff numbers, and recruiting more employees. Another key aspect to the new labor contracts is having competitive wages.

ASFCME Local 66 members and the City negotiated the final agreement for 12 hours. Both parties are satisfied with deal, but Wendy Wohlwend, the AFSCME Local 66 President says it’s frustrating long it took.

“We asked for dates from the employer in February. It took them until July to sit down and negotiate with us. Labor friendly employers and politicians don’t take that long to meet with their largest union,” Wohlwend said. “We call on the city to invest in the people who serve Duluth, so that no worker ever has to fight this hard for fairness again.”

The estimated 500 core service workers for the city included snowplow drivers, water treatment plant employees, even library staff. The new contracts mean they will not be going on strike. AFSCME worked with the City to provide an 8%-12% market adjusted wage increase.

“Our goal has always been for recruitment and retention. We were able to get market adjustments that would make us competitive. Then we also got overarching cost of living adjustments as well,” Wohlwend said. “Having a strike vote not only would have affected our cost of our families and our income it would also potentially have affected the citizens of Duluth.”

Why did it take so long to reach this agreement? Mayor Roger Reinert says it was about balancing the demands of the workers without burdening tax payers. He added it would have been detrimental to not just the city, but also Duluth residents if no deal was reached.

“It would have meant lost wages for the employees. It would have meant interruption of services for our citizens. Frankly, it would probably be an ongoing, tough working environment between employees and the organization,” Mayor Reinert said. “It creates a tension of wanting to do the best we can for employees, while also being responsible to our taxpayers. I think this agreement actually does both of those things. That’s part of why it took a while to get there.”

Union members will get to vote on the tentative agreement next Tuesday. If is passes then the Duluth City Council will have it ratified on January 27th. For more information about the City of Duluth’s tentative agreement with AFSCME, you can read more here.