Monterey rejects proposal by part-time workers to organize, accepts exec group

Even while it’s waiting for a major renovation, the Monterey Conference Center serves as a de facto museum, home to rotating photography and fine art exhibitions. Behind those shows is Chalet Booker, a part-time employee in the city’s museum and cultural arts division.

When the economy crashed, the city cut Booker’s 30-hour-a-week job to 20 hours. After waiting more than four years for her schedule to get restored, it didn’t: She took on a second job doing part-time consulting. “I was hoping things would turn around a lot sooner,” Booker says.

She signed a petition last October being circulated by Monterey’s 39 part-time staffers, seeking recognition as a bargaining unit. The city had just approved the executive team as a bargaining unit, meaning all city workers – except the 39 part-timers and seasonal employees – have a seat at the bargaining table.

City staff rejected the part-timers’ request to organize.

“We can reject it based on proliferation of bargaining groups,” Interim City Manager Mike McCarthy explains. “This would create an eighth bargaining group, which is quite a few.” (Police officers, firefighters, full-time employees, and executives are all represented in various bargaining groups for management and non-management-level positions.)

That didn’t stop City Council from approving the most recently formed bargaining group of six top executives on Oct. 1. After City Council members made comments attacking executive compensation packages, the group circulated its own petition and got approved as a unit.

“We felt in order to continue to have a voice in our own future at the city, we had to formally organize,” says Community Services and Library Director Kim Bui-Burton, president of the executive bargaining unit.

She hasn’t actually sat down to negotiate yet; the City Council was scheduled to consider who would be appointed as a negotiator with the executives at a Feb. 4 meeting in closed session, after the Weekly’s deadline. At that same meeting, they were also planning to consider some concessions to part-time staffers.

According to emails circulated by part-time employees, those offers include days off in exchange for regular exercise; a flexible spending account for health care; and a floating holiday, all available to full-time staff.

McCarthy thinks it would make more sense for the 39 part-timers to join the existing full-time bargaining unit. That would mean automatically joining a union too, since full-time workers are unionized as United Public Employees of California Local 792.

But part-time workers don’t necessarily want to join a union. “When you look at joining the union there are dues, and I already don’t bring home enough,” Booker says. (The newest bargaining unit, the executives, aren’t unionized and have no plans to unionize.)

Even if the city doesn’t make part-timers a good offer, Booker’s not sure it’s worth continuing the organizing effort. “I don’t really have the time, because I’m just trying to survive pretty much,” she says. “I [don’t want to] start fighting, because I love the city of Monterey. I love my job, I love what I do.”