Contracting Incentives

The council spent some time Tuesday night picking away at the police contract, and there was some grousing about the incentives and perks in the deal. Which are the same as the old perks and incentives.

Look, some of these perks are silly and need to get gone one of these day. I'm thinking the "no accident" clause is one. Some concerns are completely valid, and need to be addressed. I'm thinking about Dave Clark's long-standing effort to get new employees to pay a larger portion of health insurance costs.

Here's the thing, though. There wasn't a lot of wiggle room here. In some way, this is an emergency settlement.

Wong needs to get the unions to the table on the health insurance. Has to happen at some point. But isn't settling contracts that are two years expired top priority? Considering there's a whole different process on that, it could take some time.

More pressing are incentives. But really, how far could Wong go? And how far could the union go? The union set aside retroactive raises. The 4 and 2 percent bumps in January and July only go so far in curing that. The union left thousands of dollars per member on the table. You gotta give a little to get a little. The union left money on the table, it kept its perks.

Hopefully we can include "for now." It's easy to make political hay on incentives and perks. But getting them negotiated out is a whole different ballgame. You have to give a little to get a little (yeah, I'm repetitive), so what does the city have to give to get the incentives eliminated? Or does the city go nuclear, try to rip out the incentives, and offer nothing in return? That would be, um, interesting.

The bottom line at this point is that for better or worse you can't fiddle with the perks without giving something back. And considering how horrible this situation was/in, rolling them over at this point may have been the only way to get any kind of contract done.