UAEA stands for United Arizona Employee Association. It is an employee association representing 800 members of the City of Tempe in contract negotiations, disciplinary actions, and selection of benefits.

An employee association is effectively a union. Our primary purpose is to negotiate a fair contract for employees that guarantees certain wages and benefits and then hold the City accountable to deliver upon those guarantees. That said, some experts argue that there is a difference - employee associations frequently represent public sector employees and these rarely have the same labor protections as private-sector employees, in Arizona especially. This may be a distinction without a difference though - while our overall tactics may differ from private sector unions, our purpose is ultimately the same.

Yes. UAEA is one of 4 employee associations in the City of Tempe. “Sworn” police officers (members of Tempe PD who carry firearms/badges and have arrest power) are represented by TOA, the Tempe Officer’s Association. Members of the fire department (who are not office staff) are represented by Local 493, which also represents Fire employees in Phoenix and Chandler. Supervisory employees are represented by TSA, Tempe Supervisor’s Association. There also are employees who work in HR and City Hall who hold “classified” jobs - they do not have a formal group representing them but can send a representative to weigh-in on proposed City changes.

There’s not an easy way to accurately answer that. The short answer is that we represent all non-supervisory employees…but that statement comes with some qualifications. For reference, you can identify these jobs by them having “NSU” in their job description. But we don’t represent employees who are classified employees and we don’t represent employees who are sworn police officers and we don’t represent fire fighters. But we do represent members of the Fire Department who are office staff and we do represent “non-sworn” members of the Police Department like Court Services staff, Forensics Specialists, and Detention Officers. So while we are not a Police union, we do represent the Police department and while we’re not a Fire union we do represent the Fire department. It also gets a little murky when one digs into job responsibilities - there are UAEA employees who supervise employees and TSA employees who supervise no one. The lines are a little arbitrary and probably made more sense when the group were initially divided - a longterm project after the JDQ is complete is re-evaluating whether jobs are appropriately categorized. Again, if you’re ever confused just check if a job description is marked as “NSU.”

Yes. The 5 employee groups (UAEA, TSA, TOA, Fire, Classified employees) and HR meet on a quarterly basis in a group called the 6-Sided Partnership. This group discusses changes to the City that impact at least 2 of the groups, things like how overtime pay is calculated or how the healthcare points system could be improved. Any group may bring business to the group but frequently these conversations are led by HR. They will often discuss things like changes in state or federal labor law and how it will impact City operations.

Yes. The employee groups do not always get everything we want but we frequently find that topics we bring up manifest in some form within the next few years. We also can play a direct role in how the City approaches things like the Segal Market study. The employee groups expressed some concerns about the original cities that were selected by Segal in the JDQ and proposed including some additional cities that they felt were more comparable in terms of size and population. We also proposed adding Maricopa County as a comparable employer since a decent number of Tempe employees leave for roles with them. This feedback was incorporated and Segal ended up analyzing 11 different employers in the JDQ study, which we feel will be a far better representation of alternative employers in the area.

UAEA currently has about 320 members. This is up significantly from 240, which was our member count about 2 years ago. We are still seeing consistent growth every month but it's been balanced in the last 6 months with a lot of retirements/resignations and members promoting to TSA positions. The UAEA board really likes when UAEA members are promoted to TSA - it usually means that the supervisor already has a grasp of union policy and will understand or empathize with our perspective if we need to discuss workplace issues.

Arizona is a right-to-work state. This means employee associations and unions cannot compel employees to join a union even if the negotiated benefits directly help non-members. To counterbalance this, UAEA has a number of member-exclusive perks like our legal services, our Employee of our Quarter program, our member meetings, and our annual scholarship. We hope the value of the work we do can continue to bring in new members - the greater the share of City employees that we represent, the harder it is for the City to not seriously consider our requests.

A MOU is a “Memorandum of Understanding.” It is essentially a legal contract between the City of Tempe and UAEA, promising certain rights and privileges to the Tempe staff we represent. The Tempe Personnel Rules offer similar protections but many of the policies within it are suggestions and not requirements. A MOU has actual legal weight - it offers us a process for resolving potential breaches of employee rights and getting restitution if needed. You can find the most recent copy of our MOU on this page.

Different employee groups have different needs and focus on different things in negotiations. Certain employee groups also have greater negotiation power - Police and Fire, for instance, are groups that have 98-100% membership among the employees they represent. For comparison, TSA has about 33% membership and UAEA has about 40% membership. If the Tempe Officer Association’s negotiators say their employees want a particular perk, it is coming from the entire Police department - in comparison, UAEA is often asking for perks and benefits that only a percentage of the City may feel strongly about.

Yes. There is a comprehensive process for MOU modification outlined in the Tempe City Charter. This is known as the “MOU Negotiations” and it is an opportunity for UAEA to make the case to Tempe HR and Management that certain changes to pay, cost-of-living adjustments, employee rights, and benefits are needed. While we rarely get everything we want, this is an opportunity to highlight employee priorities - we often find that the City tries to create new initiatives down the road after we discuss them in a formal negotiation.

We would love the ability to open the MOU whenever we want to, but our contract language (and the City Charter) specifies that it can only be reopened between September and November of each year. Even then, certain topics like pay are locked in every 5 years so the City can properly budget longterm. UAEA might be able to secure shorter negotiation terms in the future but the likeliest scenario is that we might not be able to secure as high of an annual COLA or couldn’t guarantee it for our members past a year. We’re not opposed to changing the existing process, but we would need a good reason to disrupt what, until now, has been a process with guaranteed outcomes.

A Grievance is a formal accusation by an employee or an employee association that there has been some violation of employee rights by a supervisor, manager, department, or HR. These violations may be of state or federal law, the City's Personnel Rules, or the MOUs of different employee associations. Individual employees may file Grievances by themselves but UAEA members can get the assistance of both our board and our attorney to write Grievances.

It depends. In the last few years UAEA has averaged between 6 and 10 Grievances per year. We usually reserve Grievances for serious cases - a Grievance is a specialized tool and should be utilized only when necessary. Most violations of policy are not malicious and don’t need to be addressed with Grievances. The vast majority of contract violations are mistakes or misunderstandings of the contract language and can be addressed with a simple conversation. Using Grievances to address these would both prolong the time it takes to resolve the issue and unnecessarily harm our working relationships. That said, we’re more than happy to use Grievances if there is a longterm issue we’ve been unable to resolve through normal means or if there appears to be a contract violation that needs to be immediately resolved.