County contract talks held up by numbers

Friday, May 12, 2006 | 7:20 a.m.

Forget pay increases or other contract issues.

Clark County and the union that represents its rank-and-file employees can't even agree on how many people should be at the negotiating table.

The county's contract with its workers expires June 30, but negotiations have yet to begin. The union wants at least 160 members present.

"We're envisioning a meeting room large enough to hold several hundred people," said Stan Welch, an investigator in the county's public defender's office and a steward with the Service Employees International Union 1107, which represents about 8,300 county staffers.

The county says no, and says by contract only 10 representatives per side are allowed at the bargaining table. The union says the contract does not preclude more union members from attending.

The jockeying for bargaining manpower has already delayed the timetable for reaching an agreement. State law requires unions to ask for negotiations to begin by Feb. 1. County and union officials usually meet face to face by March.

They have yet to meet.

In March the union filed a complaint with the Nevada Employee-Management Relations Board, accusing the county of unfair labor practices for refusing to negotiate.

The county, in turn, filed a countercomplaint last month asking the labor board to restrict the union's bargaining team to 10 members.

The board will accept prehearing filings through Monday and is then likely to schedule a hearing.

Pushing for the change is Jane McAlevey, the union's executive director who took over less than two years ago.

She acknowledges that small negotiating committees have been the norm in the past, but says it's time for a change.

"A small committee that meets in secret under a gag rule - I've never agreed to those terms in my life," she said.

Union members say their numbers need to be large because county employees vary from road maintenance workers to computer techs to animal control officers.

"It's going to be much more efficient and effective to have those people at the negotiating table," Welch said.

But the county contends that close to 200 union members sitting on one side of the negotiating table might intimidate the county's negotiators and pressure the union's own negotiators to refuse compromises that are crucial to any collective bargaining process.

In filings with the labor board, Mark Ricciardi, an attorney for Clark County, said the union's move "is a transparent attempt to undermine the negotiating process."

"The presence of massive numbers of persons will distract the parties and lead to grandstanding rather than candid discussion," he said.

The union has been emboldened by recent successes in other collective bargaining sessions with several local hospitals and the Southern Nevada Health District. More than 100 union members participated in some of those negotiations.

"We've had 100 people in the room and you could hear a pin drop," McAlevey said.

Welch said those negotiations, which ended late last year, "worked really well."

But Angus MacEachern, human resources administrator for the Health District, disagreed about the benefits of negotiating with more than 100 union members.

"That issue and others made the negotiations very challenging," he said, declining to elaborate beyond saying, "They did not go smoothly."

For now, county commissioners are steering clear of the debate. Most either declined to comment or did not return phone calls from the Sun about the dispute. Some were attending a closed-door union candidate forum Thursday night.

Despite the prenegotiating breakdown, Ricciardi said the negotiations are not off to an especially contentious start.

"To be contentious you have to have some yelling and screaming," he said. "We haven't even gotten to that point yet."