County Labor Relations Bargaining Update - June 2025

County Labor Relations Bargaining Update - June 2025

Author: Human Resources
Date: 6/16/2025 3:42 PM

Please see below for a brief update on the current County Labor Relations Bargaining process as of June 16, 2025.

We are providing this update to be transparent about our goals (all of which are positive!), the bargaining process, the agreements that have been reached, ongoing negotiations, and upcoming plans for unrepresented staff. We hope you find this summary-and links to details-both informative and useful.

For more information about the bargaining process, follow this

COMPENSATION GOALS AND OUR PROGRESS TO DATE
As you are aware, the County is facing a significant financial shortfall. In financial planning for 2025-26 and beyond, the County determined to rebalance its budget priorities;however, as conveyed and repeated to you by our County Administrative Officer, our Board of Supervisors and County leadership team, the County values its employees and continues to prioritize providing competitive wages and benefits.

A high priority is improving employee compensation-both to remain competitive with comparable employers and to fairly reward valued employees for their contributions, while also helping to offset inflation and other cost-of-living increases. This has been made possible through a detailed focus on efficiencies - while minimizing impacts to employees - and on a strategy for increasing wage rates over the next three years.

As part of this strategy, the County arrived at a plan to help ensure competitive compensation. The County conducted an in-depth analysis of other California Counties and local employers, resulting in a revised list of comparable employers (our labor market). By using this revised labor market, the County falls about an additional 3.5 percent further behind market in wages. Our agreements with employee organizations have aimed to reduce this gap as much as is fiscally prudent.

For the agreements we've reached recently , restructuring pay steps was an essential component to increasing pay rates substantially over three years to be market competitive. The two step restructuring mechanisms are adding a step (an additional 5 percent on top of the pay range), and "add step/drop step" (an additional 5 percent increase to the bottom and top step of the pay range). Attaining market wage competitiveness for SLOCEA remains a key priority and topic of the current negotiations.

The agreements reached with employee organizations to attain market competitiveness differ to some degree. We are currently in negotiations with SLOCEA. While the County's general priorities are as outlined above, the final agreement with SLOCEA will necessarily reflect the goals and priorities the parties determined in their negotiations.

An example of how this process works:

1. "Add step": Addition of a seventh step
2. "Add step/drop step": (a) the current first step is eliminated. Employees on that step automatically move to step 2. (b) a new top step is added, so employees at the top step with a year or more at the top step move up to a new top step that is 5% higher than the prior top step. (c) The result of this process is a seven-step range with 5% increases at bottom and top steps
3. Employees who are not at the top or bottom step would receive their 5% step adjustment at their regular evaluation (per current practice)

This is an example of how the step restructuring works. Whether and how it applies in any particular bargaining unit is subject to negotiations between the County and each employee organization.

IMPORTANT UPDATES

Pension Contribution Changes

Click here to see the details of the pension increase for each employee association and tier.

Healthcare Premium Increases

Our most recent agreements with all employee organizations to date dramatically reduce the impact of premium increases for employees in employee plus one and employee plus two categories. While the overall premium rate increase is 14 percent, the County's cafeteria contribution will increase by 12 percent for employee plus one and employee plus two. For most employee associations, the employee only cafeteria amount will cover 100 percent or more of the cost of the Tandem PPO plan.

We hope to achieve similar results in the negotiations that are now in process with SLOCEA, with DSA later this summer, and with unrepresented employees.

Negotiations Summary

Conclusion