After nearly two years of fierce negotiations, the City Council on Tuesday announced it finally struck a tentative contract with the union representing roughly 382 council staffers, giving the covered legislative employees long-sought raises and workplace protections.
The yet-to-be approved deal between the council and the Association of Legislative Employees (ALE), which was formally recognized in 2021, covers council member aides — who perform a variety of duties from communications to legislative work — as well as analysts and senior analysts within the Council Finance Division.
The agreement is retroactive, beginning in January and August 2021 for financial division staff and Council member aides, respectively, and ending in January 2027 for all members.
Should the ALE approves the contract in a ratification vote later this month, it will become one of the first legislative unions with a collective bargaining agreement in the country, according to the council.
“Since the start of this bargaining process, we sought to come to a meaningful and thoughtful agreement for a first contract to support these workers within a legislative body,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in an April 2 statement. “This achievement honors the generations of public service provided by Council staff for decades.”
The contract increases minimum starting salaries for aides from $30,000 to $55,000-a-year and raises yearly wages by a combined 16.21% over 5 and half years. It also includes a lump sum $3,000 bonus for all members as of the date of ratification.
The deal also grants staffers new workplace protections such as the end of “at will” employment status, where staffers could be fired without notice or recourse, and replaces it with a new “just cause” disciplinary process. Furthermore, the contract establishes a new compensatory overtime policy,
“We are overjoyed to deliver to our members a first contract with wins on wages, benefits, and job protections,” ALE President Daniel Kroop said, in a statement. “ALE members overcame enormous obstacles and achieved an industry-leading contract following almost a decade of organizing. Incredibly, we did it as a new, independent union, led and powered by volunteers.”
Matthew Malloy, ALE’s stewards’ representative and constituent services director for Council Member Shahana Hanif (D-Brooklyn) said the biggest achievement of the contract is establishing clear rules by which all council members must treat their unionized employees. Until now, he said, the city’s 51 council members have had nearly complete control over how they run their offices, leading to vastly different and often exploitative working conditions for staffers.
“For the most part, these offices, they’re almost run like small businesses in some ways, where your chief of staff or council member, they really have a great deal of flexibility in deciding what the priorities are, what the office policies are” Malloy said. “I think what we’re hoping is that this union contract is going to create some structure and some rules that are going to be enforced.”
Besides raising wages, ending council staffers’ at-will employment status was one of the union’s top priorities, Malloy said.
Prior to the agreement, he said, staffers could be fired by council members at any time, for any reason with no explanation. Now, there will be a formal disciplinary process and employees will have the ability to contest their firing.
“Management’s really going to have to go on the record as to why this person is being fired,” he said.
The other major win in the contract, Malloy said, is its creation of the council’s first-ever compensatory time policy, which will remedy the common practice of staffers often working well over their regular hours without getting paid.
“This is not a 9 to 5, leave the office at 5 o’clock, ‘see ya Monday’ type of job,” he said. “This is a job where staffers are going to community meetings, they’re going to block parties on the weekends, they’re working on holidays … Most of our members are working at least 50-to-55 hours-a-week.”
The compensatory time policy will see employees get an hour of paid time off for each hour they put in on top of their regular work schedule.
While it may seem like two years is a long time to negotiate a contract, Malloy said the timeline was due to the “unprecedented” nature of hashing out a new legislative employees’ contract.
“We’re an independent union, we’re the first new municipal union in decades, in 50 years, so I think there were some real challenges,” he said. “And then obviously, I think just with any union, any first contract is going to take a few years.”
