Employees of New Ipswich voted last week to join the State Employees Association of New Hampshire.
The workers joined the union after they grew distrustful of town selectmen.
New Hampshire Public Radio�s David Darman has more.
Thirteen New Ipswich employees voted unanimously to join the union.
The group objected to the selectmen�s decision to have employees pay 25 percent of their own health insurance premiums.
Carol Billings is secretary to the Board of Selectmen.
Billings says the policemen, firemen and office workers who objected were not so much troubled by paying a share of the premiums.
But Billings says they were troubled by how the selectmen arrived at their decisions.
04 345 ..It was almost, I really don�t want to say sneaky, but trying to make the changes before we got wind of them, sort of, and I think that that scared a lot of the employees, that they were not going to be informed of any of the changes they were considering. And it was almost like they were trying to hide what they were doing. 04 424
Selectmen say they considered making changes to employee benefits as they examined the town�s budget.
Selectman Lance dePlante says they conducted a review during public meetings.
Any citizen was welcome to attend, but few did.
DePlante says he and his colleagues found it difficult to ignore the 140,000 dollars the town spends on employee health insurance costs.
04 255 �what triggered it, we were going through the employee handbook, and we realized we came to that one item, we realized that that is the single, largest item in the town budget, exclusive of salaries. 04 312
A similar scenario played out in Bristol last year.
Employees there voted to join the State Employees Association after selectmen began considering changes to their benefits.
Susan Duncan joined the selectman after the union vote.
But as a member of the town�s budget committee in 2002, she says she remembers how employees chafed under the tone adopted by selectmen then.
32 07 one thing that happened was the employees manual was rewritten in such a manner it was just handed to them, and said, �this is it, take it or leave it�. The health insurance was changed. Again, the same type of presentation was done with the employees. You know, �this is it. If you don�t like it you can go work somewhere else� kind of thing. It was just an unfortunate lack of communications and they were very angry and I can understand that. ..32 41
The Bristol employees never got to form a union.
The town contested their petition, and the state labor relations board dismissed their case.
Organizer Brad Asbury still smarts over the loss for Bristol employees.
Asbury is with the State Employees Association of New Hampshire, or S-E-I-U Local 1984.
He also handled the organizing in New Ipswich.
Asbury says the union can improve situations for municipal employees, who are worried about their benefits.
03 636 with the union contract, obviously, depending on the length of the contract, you have your raises, your step increases, health insurance, working conditions, those types of things are all worked out in writing. Its mutually agreed upon, its not just union�s demands. Its actually mutually agreed upon. So, its actually good for both sides when there�s stuff in black and white. 03 658
Employees in many small towns have longed worked without unions.
Don Jutton says New Ipswich and Bristol offer examples of changes that are happening in the state�s small towns.
He has worked as a town manager in several New Hampshire communities.
Jutton says towns typically offered perks to employees, but no longer.
Budgets have become too tight.
25 517 you had a situation where days off, and vacation accrual and health benefits were added in many instances were added in many instances in lieu of financial compensation. And as public employees became more and more aggressive about comparability of wages, then the focus began to shift away from that kind of paternalistic view more to a competitive marketplace.25 552
Tom Jurovich is a professor of Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He says unions can probably preserve employee benefits and pay for the near future.
But he says even the union�s power is limited.
22 35 What unions can�t provide is better state budgets, better country budgets, and so on, and so forth. So, unions can go a ways toward rationalizing that, but they can�t solve the budget crisis we�ve been facing on a state, county and municipal level. 22 48
New Ipswich selectman say they expect to work out a contract with the union in the next few months.
Bristol selectmen have met with town employees, and say they have worked out the most contentious issues.
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