More progress in King County negotiations

Another week of contract negotiations is in the books between our Coalition of Unions and King County.

We've made steady progress toward reaching tentative agreement on our bilingual pay premium proposal as well as the wage study MOU for the administrative support classifications, which we believe has the potential to positively impact roughly 800 members of the coalition.

We have more work to do in terms of bargaining over the details, but we've seen incredible work by our team on both topics. We want to especially recognize our subcommittee members who spoke powerfully about the challenges facing frontline positions, which are often hourly and in the direct line of public engagement, as well as our members who talked about their use of multiple languages in their service to the public.

We believe these discussions will ultimately result in hallmark agreements for County employees that could become a model for public employees across the state.

We are still looking for more movement from the County on our economic proposal, which will become the focus of coming bargaining sessions. Later this month, we will be meeting to evaluate the fund that governs our healthcare benefits, which should help inform those discussions.

While this is certainly a tenuous time for public employees across the country, we feel good about our ability to bargain as a coalition and support the interests of the 6,000 hardworking coalition members at the County.

You can view a short video update from one of the members of our bargaining team - Amy Duncan, a Shop Steward and Project Manager in the Finance and Business Operations Division at the County: