House, Senate at odds on rules to govern collective bargaining with their staff

In less than two months, several hundred employees of the Washington Legislature will be able to form unions and negotiate contracts.

But as of late Tuesday, the House and Senate could not agree on exactly which workers would be eligible to unionize and what topics could, and could not be, collectively bargained.

Lawmakers hashing out the differences expressed confidence that an agreement on Senate Bill 6194 can be reached before the session ends Thursday but stopped shy of assuring success.

“I’d say we’re close. I am expecting us to get there,” said Sen. Derek Stanford, D-Bothell, who, along with House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-Burien, are leading their respective caucuses in bicameral talks.

“There’s a lot of differences. The Legislature is a unique workplace and the House and Senate are different places,” Stanford said. “There’s a lot of words to try to get right and we’re trying to think how the words will be interpreted in the future.”

Under a 2022 law, employees of the House, Senate and legislative agencies can petition to form unions starting May 1. And, if a union vote is successful, those workers can begin bargaining. Any completed agreements would take effect on July 1, 2025.

One major hang-up with legislation now under discussion to set further guidelines for the unions is the definition and composition of bargaining units.

Under the Senate-passed version, full-time partisan employees in the House of Representatives and Senate – which include staff of lawmakers and the Democratic and Republican caucuses – plus any additional partisan staff hired each session, would be eligible to form a union. There would be separate bargaining units in each chamber.

The House went further to keep employees of the Democratic and Republican caucuses in each chamber as separate bargaining units unless a majority of employees of each caucus vote to be in the same unit.

Employees of the House and Senate administration would be able to unionize. So too would non-managerial workers in Legislative Support Services, Legislative Service Center and Office of the Code Reviser, who do not work full-time on drafting and finalizing legislation during a session.

However, the House version bars any combination of employees of those three agencies from forming units together. Nor can workers in those three agencies unite with House or Senate employee units.

Another difference concerns the length of the work day. Both chambers bar bargaining on hours of work during a legislative session. The House extends the ban to work during the 60 calendar days before a session and the 20 days afterward. 

And the House caps the number of confidential and managerial employees designated by the employers – the Chief Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate – at 20% of the total number of employees eligible to bargain. 

For Legislative Support Services, Legislative Service Center and Office of the Code Reviser, the cap is 20% of the total number of employees in each of those agencies, according to the bill.

If lawmakers can’t overcome these and other differences and approve Senate Bill 6194, provisions of the original 2022 law would govern the process starting May 1.

That would mean the Public Employment Relations Commission would set the ground rules on eligibility in bargaining units and subjects for negotiations. That’s in addition to its regular role of overseeing elections for union representation, certifying the bargaining units, and resolving disputes that may arise in the course of negotiating agreements.

The commission is the independent state agency that carries out Washington’s collective bargaining laws and resolves disputes involving employees of the state, local governments and schools.

“One way or the other, our staff deserve the same rights so many other public employees enjoy,” said Rep. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, author of the 2022 collective bargaining law.

Riccelli said he’s not been in the room and is not privy to precise sticking points. Given the uniqueness of the work environment of the Legislature, it is not surprising to see conversations continuing on what will be in the final language.

“The prudent thing to do is to develop public policy that works in this place,” he said. “I do think we have folks with a background and understanding of labor rights. I think they want to ensure the basic tenets of collective bargaining are projected outward as we look inward.”