Nearly one hundred corrections officers in Merrimack County's new jail have been working for more than a year without a contract.
And tomorrow, some of them are planning to demonstrate outside the County complex in Concord, to call attention to stalled negotiations.
The union representing the officers accuses the county of trying to roll back hard won worker rights.
But county officials have said the union is out of line in making their complaints public.
New Hampshire Public Radio's David Darman has more.
The union has many complaints about working conditions in Merrimack County's new jail, which opened last summer.
Jeffrey Brown of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU 1984, says one of the big ones involves overtime.
employees shouldn't be forced to work overtime at a moment's notice and to double shift and to not be able to leave the facility and go pick up their children from daycare, or to go home and get a decent night's sleep, with no warning that they were going to have to work sixteen hours versus eight hours.
Brown says the overtime issue is emblematic of the kind of changes management has been trying to make to decades old work rules.
For years, the union agreement with the county prohibited the hiring of part timers to do work normally performed by full time employees.
Jeffrey Brown says the SEIU is willing to give ground on this issue, but not as much as they've been asked to concede.
the county wants to have free reign on hiring part timers to come into the facility and we fear, based on what we see of the operation up there, to replace full time employees. to create non benefitted employees in some respects.
Since employees have worked without a contract for fifteen months, corrections employees have missed two raises.
And during the long period of negotiations, the union says the county has never mentioned big issues, such as wage increases or health care costs.
No one from the county would talk publicly about this issue or any other involving the contract negotiation.
They say they're not talking because of ground rules both sides agreed to many months ago.
Union officials have said they're talking to the press because the negotiations have hit an "impasse".
Jeffrey Brown of the SEIU says the union has already demonstrated in front of the jail to air grievances about issues like overtime and the use of part timers.
And he says the union has done that to try and get talks back on track.
...and we've asked management to come back to the table to issue mediation and to go back to collective bargaining to negotiate with one another face to face.
No one from either side is willing to guess how long the negotiations might take when they get restarted.
Fifteen months is a long time, but it's certainly not the longest labor negotiation currently underway in New Hampshire.
Workers at the Hillsborough County Nursing Home have gone nearly four years without a contract.
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