County Wants Eight-Hour Work Shifts Change Would Increase Efficiency, Officials Say; Union Calls It More Work For Less Pay

Some Spokane County employees will work longer days starting in 1998.

And all full-time county workers eventually will clock eight-hour days if county commissioners get their way in labor negotiations.

About half of the county’s 1,831 employees now work 7-1/2 hours a day, not including unpaid lunch breaks. The others work eight hours.

Commissioners said the change would make the county more efficient and improve customer service. Some offices would open at 8 a.m. rather than 8:30.

The change would add 6.7 percent time to the workday. In exchange, commissioners are offering 2 percent more money and two more vacation days a year.

County officials hope to save enough on overtime to make up for the additional pay. For hourly employees on the short shifts, overtime kicks in after 7-1/2 hours.

Commissioners Kate McCaslin and John Roskelley said they probably will vote within the next several weeks to change the hours for 350 nonunion workers.

More than 200 of those workers earn salaries, rather than hourly wages, said human relations director Ben Duncan, one of the affected employees. They “work until the job’s done” without earning overtime pay, he said.

McCaslin and Roskelley said the county will insist on the same terms when 15 of 19 union contracts come up for renewal this year.

But union representative Bill Keenan said employees aren’t likely to go for the deal. Some of the nonunion workers facing the change already have called his office for information about joining unions, Keenan said.

Computed on an hourly basis, the county’s offer amounts to a 4 percent wage cut, said Keenan.

“There’s probably nobody in Spokane, private or public, who would agree to work 6.7 percent more for 4 percent less,” he said.

The short workday “was the product of years of concessionary bargains” in the 1970s, when the county couldn’t afford to give workers cost-of-living increases, Keenan said.

McCaslin said the change would put public workers on par with those in the private sector, where “most (employees) work more than eight hours.”

The day shift at Hewlett-Packard Co. is eight hours with an unpaid half-hour lunch, said company spokeswoman Liz Cox. Night-shift employees work 7 hours with a half-hour lunch that is paid.

Nonunion workers at Kaiser Aluminum work eight-hour days, not counting lunch, said spokeswoman Susan Ashe.

, DataTimes