EASTHAMPTON — Teachers, firefighters and other city employees lined up at the entrance of the Municipal Building on Wednesday evening to urge city councilors to strike down Mayor Nicole LaChapelle’s proposal to have all municipal employees represented by a single committee when negotiating changes in health coverage.
“We want our voice in health care,” read one of the signs held by a demonstrator. City employees chanted, “Get up, get down, Easthampton is a union town!”
More than 100 people packed into the City Council Chambers after the demonstration with the expectation that the City Council would be voting on adopting a state provision that would create a new public employees committee for health care negotiations.
But that vote never came up. Instead, LaChapelle asked the council to consider the adoption of an additional provision under Massachusetts General Law (Ch. 32b, Section 19). The proposition was sent to the city’s finance subcommittee for further review, and a vote on adopting the state provisions (Ch. 32b, Sections 21 and 22) was postponed to an undetermined date.
“There is merit to looking at Section 19 with 21 and 22,” LaChapelle said during the meeting. Section 19 would force all city employees and retirees to bargain for health insurance collectively.
After the meeting, LaChapelle said she arrived at the decision earlier in the day after speaking with members of the city’s Insurance Advisory Committee. She said the new proposal would bring fairness “across the board.”
Other municipalities have adopted the change, including Belchertown and South Hadley.
Prior to the City Council meeting, Nellie Taylor Donohue, president of the city’s teachers union, said, “This is democracy in action.”
“We have a whole bunch of municipal workers that are standing up for their rights,” Taylor said, standing outside the municipal building.
The move to postpone the vote comes after nearly a month and a half of negotiations between city officials and the city’s bargaining units attempting to stop the adoption of the state law’s provisions, as well as to protect the city from grievances being filed by bargaining units.
“I was really hoping to have a resolution tonight,” Jason Dunham, president of the firefighters union, said. “As long as the city is willing to talk, we really feel like, with open conversation, there is room for negotiation.”
If adopted, Sections 21 and 22 would create a public employees committee, representing all the bargaining units, that would have 30 days to negotiate the mitigation of increases to co-payments for medical services. If an agreement can’t be reached within those 30 days, negotiations would go before a three-person review panel.
Municipal employees of seven departments, including teachers, firefighters, police and public works employees, are members of the Hampshire County Group Insurance Trust, which includes 11,000 active and retired municipal employees in Hampshire, Franklin, Hampden and Worcester counties.
The trust recently announced it will implement higher co-payments for members, effective July 1, that force municipalities to negotiate with employees the impacts of plan changes.
When LaChapelle introduced the proposition to adopt 21 and 22 in mid-January, union leaders argued that the law curtails their rights to collectively bargain around upcoming changes to their health care plans.
“We understand the plan changes are not entirely in the city’s control,” Taylor said. “We have repeatedly sought to work with the mayor to ensure that the most vulnerable and lowest-paid among us are able to afford basic health care.”
LaChapelle said in January she introduced the provisions to allow the city to negotiate with all of the city’s bargaining units, retirees and pay plan employees, who are not unionized and do not have collective bargaining rights, and that the provisions create a more “equitable” process.
An Act Relative to Municipal Health Insurance became state law in July 2011 under then-Gov. Deval Patrick with the intention of saving cities and towns money by creating a new process to expedite negotiations between municipalities and employees around changes to health insurance plans.
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com