California county taps tech to improve labor negotiations
PeopleImages via Getty Images
Placer County has moved from spreadsheets to a software tool that helps officials conduct cost negotiations with labor groups more effectively.
From Hennepin County, Minnesota, to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, counties across the U.S. have been grappling with rising tensions with labor unions as governments and workers negotiate on issues like better wages and benefits. In California, tech is helping county officials craft data-driven, real-time contract negotiations to streamline the process.
Placer County — where about 80% of the nearly 3,000 county workers are represented by a labor group — has been tapping a software solution from GovInvest to help inform contract negotiations with labor groups, according to Jon Harned, fiscal operations manager for the county.
The deliberations between workers and county officials can create a “strained relationship,” but one “in which you try to build trust,” to balance the needs of workers and the government, he said.
A labor group, for instance, may request a 3% pay increase that they say costs the county $1 million. But government officials may calculate that the cost closer to $2 million once they account for individual workers’ current wages, pensions, benefits and other additional expenses, Harned explained.
Placer County officials previously used Excel spreadsheets for workforce costing, which was formula-driven and included cost assumptions. Officials often used one step increase, or a determined pay increase over a certain amount of time, to inform general cost proposals, Harned said, but that method didn’t always consider cost fluctuations across individual workers that impact the grand total.
Those discrepancies create a “big hurdle” to reaching an agreement, particularly if officials had to redo proposals and further delay negotiations, he said.
The software tool has helped streamline the process, easing the strain on labor negotiations, Harned said. The platform leverages data from the county’s HR system to determine costs associated with each worker’s salary, pension tier, additional pay such as hazard compensation and other metrics.
“A labor union cannot come back and say we disagree with your [cost] assumption because we’re no longer assuming anything,” he said. “This is real data.”
As a result, the tool can produce more accurate cost proposals, Harned said, which reduces the need to spend extra time and resources to recalculate proposals and repeatedly meet with labor groups over discrepancies, particularly as officials can leverage the tool even as they are speaking with labor groups.
The tool has also helped the county pursue more cost effective wage plans, Harned added. In 2019, officials implemented a new salary schedule for public service workers that offered them a 2.5% raise over the course of 10 years amid concerns that a previous plan, in which people were eligible for a 25% pay increase over five years, was too expensive.
Once department leaders started questioning the cost effectiveness of the new pay plan, Harned said the platform helped show them that the new salary schedule would save the county about $3 million.
Ultimately, the platform “has been instrumental and so helpful in starting these discussions off positively,” he said. “Now we’re no longer debating the numbers, we’re debating the impact of those [numbers].”
NEXT STORY: Idaho lawmakers consider requiring employers to verify immigration status of workers