The Somerville Municipal Employees Union ratified a new contract with the city of Somerville on Jan. 9. Mayor Katjana Ballantyne and union leadership signed a tentative agreement that includes wage increases across the board and family leave, among other benefits.
The union’s president, Ed Halloran, said a contract like this has been a long time coming.
“On the financial end of it, we waited a long time, and we didn’t want to ratify the contract until we felt that we had exhausted every single avenue, all of our efforts for all of our members,” he told the Daily. “And we did that, and we were very methodical with all of it.”
According to a press release from Somerville’s City Hall, the new contract adjusts salaries by 14% to 17% on average. Wage adjustments were made for “practically every single job that we have,” according to Halloran, to ensure comparable employee wages across departments.
Denise Taylor, Somerville’s director of communications and community engagement, called the new agreement a “landmark contract” in an email to the Daily. The contract includes raises for all Unit B members, in particular, “positions whose wages have historically been lower despite advanced degrees or training and difficult working conditions.”
According to Halloran, the contract addresses several issues which can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis.
“We had layoffs for four years in a row under Mayor Joseph Curtatone. And things just never got better for us financially, it just seemed like we kept hitting these roadblocks…” he said. “We never really recovered from that.”
Low salaries that did not grow by much caused a high rate of turnover among city employees. “We weren’t keeping up with the other cities, the other municipalities. … The city was having a really, really hard time,” Halloran added.
The election of a new mayor in 2021 presented an opportunity. “When [Ballantyne] came in, we were anxious to get a contract done and we didn’t want to wait,” Halloran said.
Upon assuming office, Ballantyne initiated the Wage and Compensation study, which examined pay disparities across city departments.
“Through the Wage and Compensation Study and its implementation, we found at times that tradespeople were being compensated at the same or similar levels to general laborers and those without certain licenses (such as plumbing or electrical),” Taylor wrote. “Similarly, for certain clerical positions, which typically do not require advanced degrees, we found workers in some cases were performing complex financial and accounting tasks that warranted higher compensation.”
The city hired a consultant to perform market research on how other communities were compensating their employees. Eventually, the consultant recommended new ways to classify employees in different departments based on the characteristics of each position, such as “physical demands, workplace hazards, supervisory responsibility, scope and nature of constituent interactions, credential and educational requirements, etc.,” according to Taylor.
Meg Ragland, the head of technical services at Somerville Library, joined the union bargaining committee in 2022. She noted that, before contract negotiations, the Somerville Library had some of the lowest salaries among regional libraries.
“We were consistently falling towards the bottom of pay while we live in one of the most expensive communities in our particular network,” Ragland said. With the new contract, Ragland now says city salaries are on par with Cambridge and Boston.
“The goal was to pay people equitably by drilling down on each position and identifying positions that are doing similar work even if, on the surface, the position’s job duties are very different,” Richards wrote. “This was the Mayor’s vision for pay equity and what we strove to achieve through this new contract.”
The new contract also includes benefits such as up to eight weeks of paid family and medical leave, an additional week of vacation for most employees and a tripled reimbursement rate for employees who drive on behalf of the city.
“If you have a baby … you have to use up all of your leave time for the birth,” Ragland said. “When the kid is a little bit older, and you don’t have any sick time left, and they start to get sick, then you’re kind of screwed. So this [paid family and medical leave] really addressed that.”
Taylor said that the new medical leave policy “ensures employees can take care of themselves and their family and maintain a rewarding and stable professional life.”
“Paid family medical leave is a benefit all employees deserve, and the Mayor is proud to make Somervile one of the first municipalities in the Commonwealth to implement this type of program for most City employees,” she wrote.
Halloran emphasized that the union is agreeable to the contract in good faith. “It’s never going to be a perfect contract, but this is probably one of the best contracts I’ve seen in my 32 years working for the city,” he said.
Ragland praised the work of those who fought on behalf of the union for better salaries and benefits.
“People worked really hard. We slogged it out for three long years,” she said. “I’m just really proud of the team and the effort and the dedication and the persistence. We just kept persevering … and it paid off.”
Though City Hall and the union have agreed to the contract, the City Council still must approve funding for the contract — something Halloran anticipates will happen in the coming weeks.
The union is relatively small with only 250 people, and is not affiliated with any national unions. Unit B, which had its contract renegotiated, is the largest unit in the union and includes the Department of Public Works, the Somerville Public Library, and more. Units A and D, which are comprised of supervisory and inspection workers, respectively, will have their contracts renegotiated next.
