Casco Bay ferry employees close to new contract
Following two years of failed negotiations on a new contract, Casco Bay Lines' employees and board members are within days of resolving their conflict.
Last fall, after the Casco Bay Island Transit District board and the union reached a dead-end in their contract negotiations, the matter was passed to a three-member arbitration panel, per Maine law for public employers. The ferry service is a quasi-municipal nonprofit, and runs ferries between Portland and the Casco Bay islands, as well as offers cruises and charter services.
On March 18, the arbitrators released their report on recommendations for a new contract, and a week later, the transit's board of directors voted unanimously to accept the report, General Manager Hank Berg says.
"I am just hopeful that we can bring this to a closure and look forward," Berg says. "And even through this long dispute, all the employees did a fantastic job even with that hanging over everyone's heads."
Details in the report cannot be revealed until April 2, according to Berg.
William Harrigan, president of the Local 333 United Marine Division of the International Longshoremen's Association and the ferry workers' representative, says he and the 31 union employees are reviewing the report, which includes recommendations for pensions, health care insurance, wages and overtime scheduling. He predicts the employees will likely accept it.
"We really have no choice," he says. "It is probably going to pass. We've gone as far as we can."
Harrigan says the union was "faced with huge cuts in our health care, in our wages, and also in our pension, so we had no choice but to keep going."
The board president, Patrick Flynn, wrote in a statement "that the report ... represents compromises from both sides on salary, insurance, pension and minimum pay provisions." In a letter printed in the January/February issue of the Island Times, Flynn writes that employee wages rose 26% to 47% from 2000 to 2008, and that last year, the company covered 82% of the total cost of medical insurance for workers, as well as contributed to pensions and Social Security.
Berg says the ferry had operated in a deficit for 10 years up to 2008, accumulating just under $1 million in losses and a comparable debt, and that the board and managers had done some cost cutting over the past two years to try to stabilize finances. Good summertime weather has boosted the company, he adds, and the losses between fiscal years 2008 and 2009 were reduced to about $724,000.
Mainebiz web partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments