The Bangor Daily News reported, “Certain employees within the correctional, agricultural and marine resources, administrative services and public health departments received $5 an hour in hazard pay, while some staff at the Riverview and Dorothea Dix psychiatric centers received an hourly increase of between $3 to $5.” This extra pay added up to about $1.5 million a month.
If this work was truly hazardous and deserving of an increase in pay, it would seem, as the spread of the virus in Maine is much worse now than when the pay was awarded last March, that the workers would be continuing to work in hazardous-duty positions and deserving of the additional pay.
MPBP does not agree that bumping state employee salaries for hazard pay was an appropriate use of either state or federal funds—especially increases as much as $5 an hour.
State employees have excellent health insurance and significant job security, which many front-line workers in grocery stores, hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities do not have. At the end of last month, state employees also received a 4 percent raise, negotiated under the 2019 collective bargaining agreements.
Unlike thousands of private-sector workers, state employees have not experienced layoffs or pay cuts due to the Coronavirus pandemic. They have not lost their entire business as others have.
However, once the decision is made—especially for workers under collective bargaining agreements where consistent treatment and precedents play into labor-relations decisions—ending hazard pay without a change in working conditions could be deemed arbitrary.
Working conditions make a job hazardous, not the availability of extra federal cash.
Governor Mills did not think through the consequences of using the time-limited federal funds to boost some state workers’ pay. She’s made no provision to continue the hazard pay in either the supplemental or biennial budgets.
The Commissioner of the Department of Administrative and Financial Affairs wrote to the Maine Service Employees Union to let them know that the extra hazard pay would stop at the end of 2020.
She told them in the letter that continuing the hazard pay would require “significant” layoffs or cuts that would hamper the state’s ability to respond to the pandemic, according to the Bangor Daily News.
The state employee unions could file grievances as a result. The Maine Service Employees Union has already filed a complaint seeking more information about how and where employees are working and their exposure to COVID-19.
The findings of that complaint could set the stage for the state employee unions to request back-hazard pay for other workers and to request hazard pay for all affected workers going forward, which would have to be paid using state funds.
In her letter to the union, the Commissioner wrote: “No one expected the civil emergency would last longer than the federal funding necessary to provide hazard pay.”