Pay Raise No Way

An effort by the state correctional officers union to short-circuit the collective bargaining process and get the Legislature to give them a pay raise failed early Wednesday in the final press of legislative business.
Amid early-morning confusion over the contents of the bill, both houses adjourned after 3 a.m. Without approving a newly crafted measure that sought to give the CCPOA's 31,000 members a 3.5 percent raise retroactive to April 1 and another 6.1 percent increase that goes back to July 1.
CCPOA officials said the bill would have cost $327 million through July 2008.

Schwarzenegger had vowed Tuesday to veto the legislation if it made its way through the Assembly and Senate.
"There's a lot of ifs, but let me just tell you, I am against the unions going around the process after they have not gotten what they wanted," Schwarzenegger said. "To go around the process directly to the legislators and in the dark of night to go and start brewing up some bill, I think that is the wrong way to go."
CCPOA members have been working without a contract since July 2006. The state has offered a 15 percent salary boost over three years, plus benefits and differentials that would bring the package to around 20 percent.
The union has rejected the offer, saying union members will lose ground to CHP officers over the life of the deal and that givebacks demanded by managers would curtail their ability to grieve job changes, cut back senior officers' power to set their job assignments and drastically reduce their sick leave benefits.