3/19 UB Time Followup
Hi all,
This is a followup email to the original union release time email I sent out on 3/4/25. I have provided additional details regarding the topics people wanted more information on - if there are additional questions that you still have after this email, feel free to reach out. If you need a reminder of the previous content, please reference my prior email. Please note our survey looking for member feedback on the issue is still open.
I would like more information on what other employee groups are doing/how they'll be impacted
Okay, bad news first. All union groups will be impacted by this but the Police and Fire associations will likely be least impacted. Both groups represent about 100% of the employees they cover - as such, they have tremendous support and can get whatever time they need from their members. They also have the benefit of covering only one workgroup - as such, many of the meetings they hold, documents they produce, and research they do on behalf of employees is treated as city business - often it is directly at the request of their director. This is not inherently a good thing for a union - the interests of both groups are often closely aligned with management in a way UAEA and TSA’s interests are not.
UAEA has spoken to TSA about likely changes they will need to make to their organization. TSA has about 140 members (out of about 300 people covered by their MOU). In order to maintain a fulltime president role they would need to get, at minimum, 15 hours of time donated per member. They currently believe they will not be able to get this time - they don’t know for certain but they are already preparing for their President Shaun Yunt to switch to a part time role, splitting his normal job and TSA responsibilities.
I would like more information on how UAEA will be impacted if it does not receive enough hours
This is a complicated question that I’ll try to break down in a few ways. The short answer is effectively everything - the amount of time we could dedicate to disciplines, grievances, department meetings, question-answering, and strategic planning as an organization would be greatly decreased. There would be significantly less communication from me and far fewer opportunities for long-term projects to change City policy outside of the MOU process. I currently respond to every phone call and email within 24 hours - I could not guarantee that if I was working part-time in my prior role. Even within the MOU process we would be impacted - we would not have nearly enough time to do the research needed to make the case for certain benefits. We also will have significant difficulty attracting talent to the board moving forward - I don’t have any doubt that we’ll always have a group of people willing to dedicate time to our organization but there’s a significant difference between needing someone to do work for a few hours every week (like our current board members) versus a few hours every quarter or 6 months.
There is some good news - some of the work we currently do is covered under “city business” time. Any meeting that a department director invites us to is “city business” and will not require us to use “union business” time to attend. Disciplinary meetings are also covered by this - we will still be able to attend part one and part three meetings if you need us. That said, any time UAEA takes to help an employee draft a part one is not covered by city business time and has to be taken as union release time. If we can’t get that time covered we will have less time to help you draft a comprehensive response, contest violations of your due process rights, or help you appeal an unfair suspension or termination. For reference, the average UAEA discipline case has 2 to 3 members of our board spend 2-5 hours apiece reviewing case documentation, comparing the facts to prior disciplinary cases, and providing feedback on Part 2 responses. For a more complicated discipline, such as one where termination is very likely, each person might spend 5-10 hours, and that only increases if the appeals process is invoked, something which is happening with increasing frequency.
There’s also a lot of behind-the-scenes work that needs to be done every year. UAEA is a 501c5 organization - this requires extensive tax paperwork and documentation to the state and federal government on a monthly and quarterly basis. We have had extreme difficulty staffing our Treasurer position in recent years - if they can no longer take UB time to work on tax preparation materials we will probably have to hire an outside accountant at a much higher cost, which will lead to cuts elsewhere. The UAEA Executive Team meets monthly as a board to discuss our ongoing projects - these meetings are not city business and require the use of union release time. The President can make a lot of decisions for our organization by themselves but our board meetings are a great opportunity for people from every department to weigh in about City developments using the knowledge of their specific work area. I personally spend a lot of my days dealing with minor member concerns, directing people to employee benefits and speaking to their supervisor or manager about concerns in their workplace. These meetings (and any research or interviews done prior to them) require the use of union business time. I also spend time each week working on ongoing projects like drafting changes to the City disciplinary process, researching the feasibility of spinning off some of our existing UAEA programs into a non-profit form, and examining exit interview data concerning trends across departments. Some of these projects are quick and some of them can take weeks - the exit interview data, for instance, came from a public records request I filed and is currently in the form of a 297 page pdf that I am slowly converting to an excel table. I have to do this before I can even start analyzing the trends by department. It’s not the most important project I’m working on but has the potential to be the basis of our next MOU negotiations - if I can say definitively that 40% of people left the City for a specific reason, that is an incredibly powerful argument in negotiations.
I would like more information on the legal decisions that have shaped this issue
There is a century of legal precedent that has led to this decision but there are really only three main cases that are relevant to understand this issue. I’m not a legal expert and I may have mixed up a few details, but these explanations come from multiple conversations with our attorney Kathryn Bailie.
Cheatham v. DiCiccio
In 2016 the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in a 3-2 decision that union release time granted by a public sector entity served a public purpose and did not violate the First Amendment rights of non-members. In this case, citizens had sued the Phoenix Police Department for their use of release time. After a series of lower court battles, the Supreme Court disagreed. This was a rare win for unions in Arizona - it established that cities could continue granting union release time to unions in exchange for public benefits - those benefits included even slightly intangible things like smooth contract negotiations and disciplinary representation. That said, the two dissenters in the case argued that even if there were clear benefits to the City there were still concerns about possible violations of the Arizona Constitution’s Gift Clause, which bans gifts from public sector entities to private organizations without receiving a clear benefit.
Several people have asked about the last part and whether we can do anything clever to get around the “gifts” language. The answer right now is no. The court did not provide a way that unions could prove they offer a clear benefit to the public - UAEA believes we improve worker morale and retention, but the same arguments were made by the City of Phoenix and the Court didn’t consider those relevant. Cities cannot reword what they currently offer us to avoid violation of the Gift Clause - “gifts” has a clear legal standard and they will be targeted if they’re obviously offering the same prior benefits under a different name. This standard also does not change if we change our legal structure - the same rules about gift-giving apply to non-profits. The only way we could get around this is by working directly as an extension of the City, but then we’re essentially just HR and we would lack all of the independence we currently possess, which completely defeats the purpose of a labor union.
Janus v. AFSCME.
In 2018 the US Supreme Court (not the Arizona Supreme Court) ruled in a 5-4 decision that labor unions in the public sector could not compel non-union employees to pay dues. The majority’s argument was essentially that compelling employees to pay union dues is a violation of their First Amendment rights to free association. This overturned the 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education case which established that as long as union dues collected from non-members were used only for bargaining and contract enforcement it was not a violation of their First Amendment rights. Prior to Janus, it was only a violation of First Amendment rights if unions collected funds from non-members and then used them for political activity. Now, any attempt to collect funds from non-members was a violation even if that money only went towards negotiating better contracts. Please also note that public sector unions are legally compelled to offer their contractual benefits to everyone in a work area, regardless of whether they are a member or not.
Gilmore v. Gallego
This is the case currently impacting Arizona unions. In 2024 the Arizona Supreme Court reversed some provisions of the Cheatham ruling and decided that union release time was in fact illegal since it violated the provisions of the Arizona Constitution's Gift Clause. Possible violations of the Janus standard were brought up in this case but were ultimately irrelevant to the final outcome. Cheatham was not completely overturned but all of the language about release time not violating non-member’s First Amendment rights doesn’t really matter if release time is illegal for other reasons. This isn’t a completely accurate summary since a lower court is still deciding how to interpret some aspects of the case, but the general expectation in the union and legal communities is that any use of public sector release time will be illegal moving forward or regulated in incredibly strict or difficult ways.
Hopefully these summaries help clarify some of the difficulties we’re currently facing. The voluntary donation model is great because there’s really no way someone could argue we’re violating the Gift Clause or non-member’s rights of free speech and free association. Tempe will be giving a benefit to employees and employees can choose for themselves how to use it - this is effectively no different than an employee taking part of their paycheck and making a donation to a charity or political campaign. That’s not to say there will be no more attacks on organized labor in the next few years, but this solution shuts down a lot of the possible arguments.
I would like more information on how many additional hours UAEA can secure for us
Let’s make something clear - Tempe does not owe us anything for the hours that were promised to us in our prior contract. If a benefit is dubbed illegal by a state court that means that the City cannot continue providing it and (arguably) they should not have provided it to begin with. The UAEA team has fought to get something back from the City in exchange for losing out on 6000 hours of UB time a year but we did not have a lot of room to argue - as such, we’re happy that it appears we have been able to get any additional time from them.
UAEA believes we can secure an additional 8 hours of holiday leave in our MOU negotiations. We are trying to make this time floating so it can be used throughout the year but it is still possible the City will push for it to be used within a certain time period, like WHL. Our current contract grants us 6000 hours of union release time a year that was formerly reserved for UAEA’s use. This new contract would give every represented employee (about 800) an extra 8 hours of holiday leave time, for a total of about 6400 hours. Please note that this number will fluctuate based on vacancies.
Will members still pay dues if this donated leave model goes into effect?
Yes. We believe we can negotiate an extra 8 hours of leave for every member - if members donated all this time back to us they will not have lost anything - if they donate only a portion, they will have actually gained something directly due to our organization negotiating with the City. Our hope is that we can build up a bank of extra hours and eventually reduce the amount needed each year - we will not gather extra time for the sake of gathering extra time. The board is not opposed to considering the idea of members being able to substitute time for dues in the future, but we would need to make sure that we have enough money coming in to allow this to happen.
Please note that our dues are fairly low when compared to other unions. Many unions charge an average of $400/year in dues. We charge $12/paycheck across 26 paychecks, or $288/year, 72% of the national average. The cost of living in Arizona is also 6% higher than the national average right now, meaning our dues would by $424/year ($16.5/paycheck) if they were reflective of the national average.
Why do the leaders of the union get union pay if they are getting city pay? Wouldn't the union save money this way?
UAEA has a set of bylaws that govern how our organization operates. Article 5, Section 9 explains the reason for union stipends - it is a way to attract high-quality talent and compensate for the union business that board members do off the clock. This is pretty standard for labor organizations. While it's true that some union work has historically been done during the work week (as UB time), much of it is done by our board after normal work hours and on the weekend. The exception is the President role, which does union work full time during the week (and then also on weekends as needed). Regardless, the bylaws of UAEA would need to be changed in order to modify executive officer pay and that would almost certainly lead to additional difficulties in staffing our board moving forward.
Please note that this structure is quite clever - by basing stipends on member count it encourages UAEA leadership to try and expand our membership as much as possible. If this was structured so that every officer received a set amount every month there would be far less of an incentive to do so.
To the point about cost savings - most of our annual budget goes towards legal fees. About 40% of member dues go towards legal coverage - this gives us comprehensive access to attorney feedback, assistance in drafting legal memos and language for our MOUs, and coverage in difficult cases. About 25% goes towards board stipends, followed by about 15% for member meetings, 10% for subscriptions to our software, printing, and office supplies, and 10% for outreach (providing support for workgroup holiday parties, running our scholarship, attending events like the benefits fair, etc).
Stipend levels were set in 2013 and have not been adjusted for inflation. If we had done so they would be 36% higher than they are in our current bylaws. UAEA has asked for a dues increase only once in our history and none of that money went to the board. For reference, at our current member count of 320, a citywide representative makes about $120/month after taxes - at just 10 hours of after-hours union work a month (2.5 hours/week), that’s $12/hour.
This is less of a direct followup, but I wanted to add one final piece of context. The UAEA board is filled with people who care about negotiating higher wages, maximizing benefits, and ensuring a fair and safe work environment. They’re passionate about these things but passion also doesn’t pay the bills - paying them a few extra dollars each month is a great way to keep them engaged and focused on doing a great job. This is Joel’s hot take of the email - organized labor will never be successful if it is seen as a voluntary gig and not a valid part or full time job. Voluntary roles are those with far lower degrees of accountability and much looser timeframes to accomplish key tasks.
Can we also donate sick time? Or is it just vacation time and holiday leave?
The union groups were told that sick time cannot be donated. This is due both to IRS rules about how sick leave should be handled and Arizona law requiring that medical leave be used only for…medical leave. That’s why you are allowed to donate medical leave to other people right now, but only so they can take additional medical leave.
Theoretically most forms of leave like vacation and holiday time could be donated - the big restrictions will be seeing what the City’s payroll processor currently tracks and how easily certain leave (like CT time) could be transferred.
Be honest with us. Is this the start of a death spiral for UAEA?
Emphatically no. Absolutely not. Not a chance in heck. We cannot predict the future but we anticipate this solution will prevent future lawsuits against public sector employees for a few years. This system of voluntary donations has been practiced across the country for years and has yet to be challenged.
Predicting that this is the end of a union is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We would certainly love to not be in this situation but this is by no means a death blow - it is a minor roadblock to our organization. The board is already planning what our organization will be tackling in the next year - things may change but we’re seriously looking into spearheading changes to the disciplinary rules which will make the process both easier to understand and more objectively fair, creating a sister nonprofit which could administer our outreach work (like the scholarship program) and UAEA member support programs (similar to the ERF), and creating comprehensive union-specific resources on things like the interview process, total retirement benefits, and possible career paths through the City. We would not be doing these things if we thought this was the end, but, to be clear, we will need time and resources to tackle those projects. Your support means a lot and every extra hour will provide us the independence and flexibility we need to continue building a better organization for our members.
What are the next steps?
UAEA needs to finalize our negotiation language with HR. We need to finalize both the hours granted and how this system will be administered, then have our members ratify it. We are not yet certain if a voluntary donation system will require a bylaws modification - we are consulting with our attorney.
We will be sending additional updates as we have them. As of now, these extra 8 hours of Holiday Leave would be added to employee’s accounts during fiscal year 2025 (starting in July), but we have not yet determined if the time would be added immediately. We received some good suggestions from members about the need to educate non-members about this time - we will do some messaging to them and likely request they give us some of the time back to support future negotiations as well.