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City Council approves raises for police detectives but says public-safety workers can't keep getting higher raises than other city workers
By adamg on Wed, 02/24/2016 - 12:49pm
The Boston City Council today approved a total 28.7% pay increase for police detectives, retroactive to 2011 - but also voted to ask the city's public-safety unions to talk about future contract talks.
Councilor Mark Ciommo, who chairs the council's ways and means committee, said detectives deserve the raises, which an arbitrator awarded last fall. The total city cost will be $9 million.
But Ciommo cautioned that the city cannot continue to dole out raises with increases like that when civilian city workers were averaging 12 to 14% over the same period.
The council voted unanimously to ask the city's police and fire unions for a meeting at which councilors would ask for contracts to be negotiated at the bargaining table, rather than going to arbitration and to look at ways to keep the gap between public-safety and other salaries from growing larger.
Council President Michelle Wu, who co-authored the letter with Ciommo, said she is concerned about the growing income disparity. She and Ciommo said that it's not fair that janitors and other workers deserve to be treated as fairly as police and firefighters.
Ciommo said that even with the unanimous vote for the increases, the city fund for contracts will still have roughly $12 million in it - which he said the city will need as it negotiates with other unions, including school-bus drivers.
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Comments
28% is a hell of a raise.
28% is a hell of a raise. Only other thing raising that quickly is the cost of a T pass.
5 years of back raises!?
Good lord retroactive to 2011!? That's insane.
Was it unanimous? The only
Was it unanimous? The only time I recall any City Councilor voting against a raise was Chuck Turner's vote against the FF contract in 2010.
Yes, it was unanimous
They really didn't have much choice, though, not after the arbitrator ruled for the union.
Not at all. In 2013 (then
Not at all. In 2013 (then-candidate for mayor) Walsh pushed a bill in the statehouse that would have stripped the City Council of authority to approve/deny union contracts that went through binding arbitration, but the bill didn't go anywhere
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/11/walsh-backed-arbitration-bi...
Good lord
I have friends who are police and respect and admire the tough and dangerous job but this is insane! 28%. Let that soak in folks. For the 3rd year in a row at my current job I received a 3% raise, more typical in the private sector. Wait, whats that sound? Oh its tax payers being fleeced by the public sector again... and people wonder why cities like Detroit and Stockon, CA went bankrupt...
Yup
This is the part that really kills me: "when civilian city workers were averaging 12 to 14% over the same period."
I can't remember the last time my employer gave more than 3% as a top raise.
If you've gotten 3%
every year since 2011, that's means you're making 16% more now than you were then.
You need to learn that you
You need to learn that you don't just add .03+.03+.03+.03+.03. Its percentages. So its .03 x.03 x.03 x.03 x.03 to get how much more you are making in 2016 vs 2011 when you get 3% increases. Do the math and you'll see it's no way near 16% more.
You mean. 1.03*1.03... etc
You mean. 1.03*1.03... etc
If, 5 years ago, you were
If, 5 years ago, you were making $50,000 and got a 3% increase every year, after 5 years you'd be making $57,963 which is a 15.93% increase. Nowhere near 16% you say?
50,000 x 1.03 = 51,500
51,500 x 1.03 = 53,045
53,045 x 1.03 = 54,636
54,636 x 1.03 = 56,275
56,275 x 1.03 = 57,963
Math
The math is 1.03^5 (which is just 1.03x1.03x1.03x1.03x1.03), which is equal to 1.159, or a 16% raise. Did you do the math before telling someone else to?
au contraire. what you need to learn:
"<em>Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt</em>."
Yeah
Learn math before you lecture someone else on it. If you're making $100 in year one, you're making $103 in year 2. $106.9 in year 2, etc, etc.
If I recall correctly....
... over the course of this (entire) period, federal government employees got about a 3 percent raise (total).
you need to relax
and stop citing things like police budgets as a reason why a city like detroit, who is massively understaffed in their PD, are bankrupt.
when i was 19 or 20 detroit offered to make me an officer as long as i signed a 4 year contract with wayne county. they'd pay for schooling and the academy.
Consider performance
How many hundreds of millions of dollars has NYC paid out this year for police officers misbehaving?
The BPD has been setting the pace for appropriate use of force. I would tend to believe that is saving the city a lot of money right now.
Paying the current staff isn
Paying the current staff isn't the problem. It's the cost of the pensions paid out to all the people no longer doing something useful for the city which are.
It's why government needs to move to a defined contribution plans and why most businesses moved away from pension plans. Entities wind up paying all their cash to retirees and not having enough to pay current employees thanks to pensions. And should a company or government entity go bankrupt, the pensioners are left with NOTHING.
A lot of people were very happy with their pensions right up until their parent company went bankrupt. Too many government employees think their overgenerous underfunded pensions will be paid when it isn't fiscally possible. There will be a reckoning and it will be fugly.
Almost
I believe you meant:
Entities wind up paying all their cash to retirees and not having enough to pay current employees thanks to management's failure to accrue adequately for the pension promises they had made, thereby kicking the can down the road to the next generation of management.
3% per year is a standard COL increase in the public sector
at least at the state level for non-public safety jobs. I don't think that anyone is being fleeced by a number like that.
Good lord, this country is f
Good lord, this country is f'ed. This is the best educated state in the union, and 15-20 of us right here don't understand the tenets of compound interest.
Hell, I work public sector
Hell, I work public sector (but fed, not municipal) and we got 1.5%....
civilian city workers were
Forgive my ignorance, but that would seem to be pretty good too.
im not seeing
when was the last time detectives had their wages raised? i understand its retroactive to 2011, is that when the last raise was? and if so, when was the last raise before that, and for how much?
without context theres really no point in getting all mad about this. frankly, i don't see the point in getting mad about it anyway. let them get their money. we always clamor about wanting 100% no slipups and demand the best performance out of our police. you need to make our pay something that will attract decent employees, not garbage tier assholes that we despise.
There is always some sort of raise.
I think it was 1% in 2012 and 2013, and 2% or 3% the other retro years (2011, 2014 and 2015). Then 4.7% a year for the rest of the contract.
i guess i just cant be bothered
to be mad about people getting a raise. the only thing that sucks and is more disgusting than a "eff you, got mine" attitude is "eff you for getting yours, i dont think you deserve it, poor me" attitude. people that sign up to be public employees shouldn't feel like theyre sacrificing to do so. nobody should have to struggle.
eff the police, but not because they got a raise
Yeah but
The issue is whether this raise, which must be paid by the taxpayers of Boston, is appropriate. Using the data in the comments, (risky, I know,) I see that other Boston city employees got a 12 to 14% raise over this time period, and the frequently cited 3% figure for privately employed citizens compounds to 16%. So the 28% does seem to be an outlier. It's fair to ask why an outlier is appropriate.
I dont see
A ton of asking. Mostly it appears to be contempt or incredulity
Invisible
You've got to read between the lines. Shockingly, not all discussion in here follows a strict Q & A format.
yeah
take your own advice, i was pretty much telling you to f yourself
Stay Classy
San Diego
28% raise! The working people
28% raise! The working people in Boston are lucky to get 2-3% cost of living increases. Their salaries make the MBTA employees underpaid.
Um ...
That's a total of 28% for the entire six-year period, not 28% a year.
Yea, its 4.7% a year
Not including the retro, which was less.
What a disgrace! Internal
What a disgrace! Internal Affairs can't even get their job done for years and you want to give them raises! Don't they get enough perks by getting away without receiving speeding tickets for them and their families and by getting into sporting events and other places for free!
You don't get into sporting events for free, thats a myth.
And I'll take a .02% raise over a get out of a speeding ticket perk.
Not a myth
I see it happen all the time. Detail is working the door at a bar or at a sporting event, more often that not they will have friends coming into that establishment/stadium for free. Used to see it all the time working at a door for a bar. Same thing happens at sox games.
So...
you worked as a doorman and saw cops come in FOR FREE??? What was cover, $5?
Hasn't been true in a long time.
And I used to be a bouncer and I always let my friends in, what's the big deal there.
Red Sox staff used to allow cops off duty to come in for standing room you are right, but that practice ended about 10 years ago.
i wonder
if the cops shooting a fan in the face and killing her had anything to do with that
No it doesnt
It was when the new head of security took over (a retired boston cop ironically)
The solution is for a
The solution is for a majority of the city property owners to contest all their property assessments and then vote ppl in who actually stand up for the residents not unions.
Theres no need to fear the union, a good portion of the union doesn't even live in the city so their votes are minimized.
Once the source of money is shut off, the money grab stops, cuz there isn't any.
The police commissioner was
The police commissioner was on Boston public radio earlier today, and he said he could not say anything bad about the raises because the cops put their lives on the line each and every day.
Meanwhile, I received a 2% raise this year (after not getting one last year).
So does flight attendants!
So does flight attendants! Give me a break Their job isn't that dangerous. They react to incidents that already happened most of the time!
So do EMS, who have a much
So do EMS, who have a much nastier job. So do people in human services trying to avoid getting attacked by crazies while also giving therapeutic care. So do bus drivers, who'll get punched in the face and worse over a 2 dollar fare, but the world loves crucifying them....
I don't begrudge BPD a raise, because they are relatively good compared to the PDs of many other metro areas, but good lord I hate the WELL THEIR LIVES ARE ON THE LINE
EMS at least is covered by
EMS at least is covered by the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association union and contract.
Pay Raise
What a joke local government is. People like Michelle Wu spouting BS about income equality and then voting yes (spineless!).
Why doesn't the globe or any other news outlet do a pole of the constituents in various districts to see how many would have voted yes. I guarantee it will be overwhelmingly no! This is a demonstration of how broken government is.
Who the hell are these arbitrators? How is that large a pay raise reasonable. I work in private sector and a retroactive pay raise is completely unheard of.
If you vote these individuals back into office, you are directly supporting this behavior.
Well ...
Since the city agreed to arbitration, it didn't have much choice once the arbitrator came down on the union's side. That's why one of the council's points yesterday was that they don't want to go to arbitration again but instead work out contracts "over the table" with the unions.
There wasn't a huge difference between the city and union
I'm pretty sure the numbers were pretty close, something like a half a percent a year.
They still had complete power
They still had complete power to override the abitrator. The city council must approve all spending. The councilors just don't want to be put on the spot where they have to vote against unions, especially police and firefighter unions..