3/4/25 UB Time Update

Hi all, 

I’ve mentioned our struggle with release time in a few emails over the last several months. If you need a reminder, the general problem that the AZ Supreme Court said last year that cities cannot legally give release time in their contract to private organizations like UAEA. Release time or “union business” time (UB) is how UAEA does the majority of our work so the loss of this time would be a major blow to our union. Up until now we have been guaranteed a bank of 6,000 hours of UB time each year - we also received an additional 2080 hours of time to cover a full time President position. 

All employee associations in Arizona have been impacted by this decision, including Tempe’s Police, Fire, and TSA unions. We are thankful that Tempe admin has taken the last 6 months to work with us and identify possible solutions that comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, but we have slowly realized that there may be only one legally-viable path forward. That path would be running our union operations with hours donated by our members. 

I’m writing this about a week before I’ll send this out but I can already hear the collective gasp queueing up from you all reading this email. I want to stop for a second and make something clear - our intention is that members will not lose a second of their current accrued leave time. We know you’ve worked hard for your vacation time and the UAEA board has no intention of forcing you to give that time up. I also want to make clear that we and the other Tempe employee groups have looked at half a dozen alternative options and none of them are as legally bulletproof as a donated time model. This is not a new concept - employee groups and unions across America have been running this way for decades. 

I can’t go into too much detail as we’re in the middle of negotiations over the specifics of this issue but we believe we can win an extra 8 hours of holiday or vacation leave. That means every UAEA member could receive 8 hours of extra time each year on top of their current vacation, sick, and holiday leave time. If every UAEA member (we currently have about 320) then donates this time back to the board we would have 2,560 hours of UB time to work with each year, enough to cover a full-time release role for the UAEA President and most of our associations’ current activities. Ideally we would like more time to work with (3,500 hours would be ideal) so we can both continue the work we’re doing now and start some new projects like member-run committees and community outreach, but 2,560 hours would keep us afloat. We are trying to figure out the logistics of donation and whether members and non-members!) could opt in to donate additional time - if, for instance, you had above 450 vacation hours and you were going to lose the excess at the end of the year we would like to set up a voluntary method to donate those hours to us. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are other options that don’t involve this arrangement, but all of them are much worse. The most obvious is that we become self-funded and rely completely on member dues to finance our operations. While that sounds doable on paper, the math doesn’t work out - at our current member count of 320 people we estimate dues would have to go up at least 100% (from $12 to $24/paycheck) and maybe as high as 300% (from $12 to $48/paycheck). The board doesn’t think that’s remotely viable and we know we’d lose a lot of members if we tried to implement that, which would push dues even higher. This solution keeps all of your current benefits the same, which is why we prefer it. 

As a little bit of context, the UAEA board wants donation of leave to be truly voluntary and don’t want to compel anyone to give up time. We think nearly everyone should be able to donate those extra 8 hours and we would appreciate anything you could give beyond that to further our mission. That said, we also understand that if we don’t get the hours we need voluntarily donated we will be unable to operate at the same capacity we’ve been able to operate at historically, which will both cripple our current operations and make it extremely hard for future growth. If only 50% of our members donated those 8 hours back (a total of 1,280 hours) we would not have enough time for a full-time release President position. Both myself and any future President would have to split their time between their original role with the City and their Presidential responsibilities. That’s 50% less time to keep members in the loop, respond to emails and phone calls, plan events, prep MOU negotiation materials, address workplace concerns, and meet with workgroups. One other detail - as Tempe’s largest employee association, we are getting off easy compared to the other groups. Nothing is final but if each group wants to support a full-time Presidential position the members will need to donate more than 8 hours to do so. 

So now that you understand the background, here’s the reason for this email. The UAEA Board wants to know how our members would like us to implement this policy if this is the path we have to go down moving forward. I’ve put together a brief anonymous survey so that members can let us know their preferences. I’ve also changed the settings so everyone who takes it can see the results in real time, and I plan to discuss the results in more detail in a few weeks when we have clear data indicating the preference of our membership. 

Thank you for your continued support as we deal with this issue. If any part of this email was unclear please feel free as always to reach out - I’m more than happy to discuss this further.