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Public employee union files grievance in highway patrol negotiations – Daily Montanan

['Arren Kimbel-Sannit', 'More From Author', '- January']

Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00

The Montana Federation of Public Employees filed a complaint Tuesday with the state Department of Justice alleging that Montana Highway Patrol leadership initiated changes to working conditions in the midst of a round of collective bargaining between rank-and-file state troopers, who are organized under MFPE, and management.

The most recent contract governing labor relations between the bargaining unit at Highway Patrol and management ended last June, with a new round of negotiations beginning in August. But last fall, the department announced and began implementing new physical fitness requirements for troopers and an associated incentive program for troopers without having completed negotiations agreeing to the changes, according to an unfair labor practice complaint filed by MFPE with the Montana Board of Personnel Appeals.

And when MFPE reached out to the state to negotiate this change, officials forged ahead, pursuing the changes unilaterally, the complaint says.

“It’s not at all about the substance of the change,” said Amanda Curtis, the president of MFPE. “It’s honestly just about recognizing your employees constitutional rights to form a union and have a voice in their working conditions.”

By circumventing the established process and creating new policies outside of the bargaining process, those rights were violated, Curtis said.

The previous highway patrol contract contained an addendum laying out a voluntary, once-a-year physical fitness test designed to simulate on-the-job duties like search and rescue. Hitting certain performance targets yielded scaled bonuses in the form of pay or compensation time.

But that program officially ended with the termination of the previous contract. However, the complaint contends that instead of negotiating new standards or incentives through the collective bargaining process, leadership announced the beginning of mandatory and proctored quarterly testing on a rowing machine. Chief administrator Col. Steve Lavin wrote in a letter to troopers that there would be a pilot group that would take rowing tests to close out 2021 and begin 2022 that would be the basis of more specific, quantitative requirements moving forward.

Those who participated in the test groups would be eligible for a cash bonus or comp time, Lavin wrote to employees in letters filed as exhibits in the MFPE complaint. Those bonuses began going out at the end of the year, though the complaint notes that there was no negotiation over the size of those bonuses.

“This new proposal was not reached hastily,” Lavin said in one letter from September 2021. “The Wellness Committee met for over a year and created this policy based on input from other agencies, scientific evidence and best practices for MHP.”

The department had already purchased more than 20 rowing machines by that time, he said.

Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who oversees Montana Highway Patrol, announced Lavin’s appointment as colonel shortly before he took office at the beginning of 2021.

In another letter, Lavin wrote that “a career in law enforcement requires a basic aptitude in physical fitness to perform essential job functions,” and that the department “can no longer rely on optional participation in physical fitness testing.”

But the concern expressed in the complaint isn’t that the new standards are necessarily improper. Rather, Curtis says they’ve been proposed — and with the beginning of a new incentive structure, implemented — without following proper procedure.

This has created uncertainty amid contract negotiations that have now stretched for months, and troopers aren’t clear on what exactly happens if they don’t comply with the new testing requirements or meet whatever standards are eventually developed.

Labor conflict of this nature isn’t typical at MHP, Curtis said, but seems to have intensified under new leadership at the Department of Justice. Spokespeople for the department did not return a request for comment by Tuesday evening.

“State troopers are not the first group of union members to agitate with their boss,” she said. “It takes a lot to get troopers to draw the line.”

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