By ADAM SWIFT
PEABODY — It’s been more than two decades since the elected members of the Peabody Municipal Light Commission have gotten a raise, but for some Peabody Municipal Light Plant union members, two decades is still not long enough.
On Thursday night, the City Council’s finance committee will consider a request from the light commissioners for a raise to $5,100 per year. The five-member, elected board last saw its pay upped to $4,000 per year in 1996.
The process to approve a raise starts with the council, and then moves onto the state legislature and approval by the governor. The money for the salary increase would come from the Peabody Municipal Light Plant (PMLP) budget, according to a letter the light commissioners sent to the City Council.
While a raise of $5,500 per year total for the entire commission might not seem huge, it has drawn the ire of some union members, according to an e-mail sent to the council by AFSCME Local 364 president Kevin Collins, which he signed as coming from the employees of PMLP. The union represents approximately 42 union employees at the PMLP. At the heart of the opposition to the pay hike are bitter contract negotiations that took place last year among the union, the light commissioners and the plant manager.
“The employees of PMLP are outraged at the thought of the commissioners even asking for this raise on the heels of our last contract negotiations,” Collins stated in the e-mail. “Our last contract was not mutually agreed upon between the union and management/commissioners. Instead, management’s ‘last best offer’ was implemented and forced upon us, something which has only happened a few times in the history of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
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According to Collins, the union members made several concessions to proposals that “fell on deaf ears of the manager and the commissioners, and we were forced into a contract we don’t agree with, including a 4 percent raise over three years. During this same time frame, the rest of the city received almost 6 percent over three years, and some departments fared much better than that.”
In a response to Collins’ email, PMLP plant manager Glenn Trueira sent a letter to the council contesting the union president’s claims.
“As is usually the case, some of the information in Mr. Collins’ e-mail is incorrect and/or misleading,” wrote Trueira. He noted that while Collins is the highest ranking union steward at the plant, he does not represent all the employees at the plant.
“Mr. Collins does not represent the approximate 27 non-union employees at the PMLP in any way,” Trueira stated. “I am also not sure if he discussed his e-mail with all of the union employees prior to sending it to the Council, and if they are truly ‘outraged’ as he claims. Some of the non-union employees who read the e-mail last week have expressed their ‘outrage’ to me that Mr. Collins had the audacity to claim that he represents them in any way.”
