AMHERST — Members of the Amherst DPW Associations will be staging a rally outside Town Hall Monday night, an action coming in advance of a special Town Council meeting that is expected to be held mostly behind closed doors to discuss collective bargaining.
About 60 Amherst DPW workers are part of the union whose contract expired last July 1, with mediation beginning early last fall on a new three-year deal. The action will start at 6 p.m., an hour before the in-person meeting begins.
The public works union contends that it has been in ongoing negotiations for over a year, since November 2024, without reaching a fair contract.
“The DPW Associations would like the new contract to reflect the town’s stated values and provide its employees with a living wage and better working conditions, with proper staffing and retention,” said Andrew Brace, the union president and division director for the wastewater treatment plant.
The issues facing the workers, he said, include low wages, with many earning salaries below a living wage, high turnover and low retention rates and frequent understaffing. In public comment at the Town Council’s Feb. 2 meeting, Brace also noted the low morale this causes.
Previously, Town Manager Paul Bockelman said money is tight, but that all municipal employees are valued.
“DPW workers do some of the most important jobs in town,” Bockelman said. “The town has been bargaining in good faith with our DPW union representatives, and we will continue to do so.”
In an earlier interview, Brace said DPW employees do the best for the town amid these challenges, with 46% of the employees working for the department for less than three years. This lack of experience causes stress for others.
“We’re trying to train people from the ground up,” Brace said. “That’s a lot of time for current staff to do this training and to do their jobs on top of that.”
The department divisions are wastewater, water, highway, trees and grounds, solid waste and recycling, mechanical and vehicle maintenance, electrical and engineering.
With 12 employees a full staff at the wastewater treatment plant, Brace said 18 workers have left the wastewater treatment over the past 10 years, not including those who have retired.
The highway department has had 12 departures in the past decade, mostly from retirements. The electrical department has two employees, yet saw three departures in the last five years.
“And we lost a lot of knowledge from those people who have retired,” Brace said.
He explained that all of this affects operations, such as during the winter when new employees have to learn the plowing routes and during the summer when they have to figure out the inner workings of the splash pad at Groff Park and the War Memorial and Mill River swimming pools.
“Productivity goes into training people, and institutional knowledge is lost,” Brace said.
Michael Strahan, another DPW employee, said the union worries that Town Council passes a budget before settling a contract, and that there is still a push to add new parks, new landscaping, new facilities and various other services, even when there isn’t the money to replace old pipes or fill potholes.
“The town wants services for residents, but they don’t want to negotiate and give wages that we think we deserve,” Strahan said.
Brace said the union also has asked that a wage study be completed by a third party, with speculation that many are departing for better pay and less stress.
From his observations at the wastewater treatment plant, many of those leaving end up in Northampton , where the city pays almost as much for operators as for the director, even though it has just seven pump stations, compared to 22 in Amherst. And Amherst has lower sewer rates, despite having triple the number of pump stations, meaning a smaller enterprise fund to support the operations.
This concern of low wages was also illustrated when an Amherst DPW employee, and Amherst native, with more than 20 years of experience left last summer to work for the Hatfield DPW.
The DPW union is expected to be joined at the rally by other union members, community supporters and the Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation.