Lamont Reaches Deals With 10 Unions, But Raises Still Delayed

Governor Ned Lamont has reached tentative contract agreements with 10 more state employee unions, covering nearly 20,000 workers across agencies ranging from corrections to child welfare to the University of Connecticut. But with more than half of state government’s 35 bargaining units still waiting on raises that are now eight months overdue, the deals offer only partial relief to a workforce that has grown increasingly frustrated with the pace of negotiations.

Union members gathered at the Capitol complex Thursday evening to make clear that patience is running thin. The State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition was direct about the tone of the event. “We are not coming out to Capitol tonight to celebrate,” the coalition wrote in a statement. Members called on the Lamont administration and governing boards for public colleges and universities to reach “honorable and fair contracts for all state workers that address our need to recruit, retain and reinvest.”

The newly announced tentative agreements are retroactive to July 1 of last year. They would provide workers a 2.5% annual cost-of-living increase plus a step increase for all but the most senior employees. A step typically adds roughly two percentage points to the total raise, bringing the effective value for eligible workers closer to 4.5% per year. The agreements still require ratification by rank-and-file members and approval by the General Assembly before they take effect.

Workers covered by these deals include correction officers and their front-line supervisors, mid-level administrators, clerical staff, vocational and technical teachers, education professionals, accountants and fiscal staff, transportation planners, child welfare social workers, and non-teaching professional staff at UConn and UConn Health in Farmington.

Lamont struck a separate tentative four-year deal roughly two months ago with a 4,000-member maintenance union for comparable raises. Three Judicial Branch bargaining units, representing probation officers, marshals and other court staff, secured a one-year 2.5% cost-of-living raise plus a step increase through arbitration that concluded in December.

Republican legislators have criticized the size of the raises Lamont has negotiated since 2021, arguing they run at or near 4.5% annually and outpace what private sector workers typically receive. That argument drew a relevant counterpoint this week when Local 478 of the International Union of Operating Engineers and the Connecticut Construction Industry Association announced their own four-year deal granting 4.25% annual raises to roughly 3,000 operating engineers and mechanics in the private sector.

Union leaders and several state agency heads have been arguing for months that the real problem is not the size of raises but the state’s eroding ability to attract workers at all. Wage freezes and cuts to health and retirement benefits negotiated during the concessions packages of the 2010s left the public sector at a competitive disadvantage. The state also reduced its Executive Branch workforce by roughly 10% during that decade, a cut that continues to generate mandatory overtime in several key agencies.

The urgency behind Thursday’s rally reflects a political reality as much as an economic one. Lamont, a Democrat now in his final term, built much of his governing coalition on the support of organized labor. Leaving a majority of the state’s bargaining units without settled contracts as his administration winds down would be a significant failure on that front, regardless of what deals get done in the coming months.

The clock is not abstract. Contracts that expire without resolution mean workers go without raises that, in many cases, they were owed starting last summer. For social workers handling caseloads stretched by understaffing, or correction officers working mandatory overtime to cover shifts that have gone unfilled for years, that delay compounds frustrations that predate the current contract cycle by more than a decade.

Lamont has ground to make up, and the unions are making sure he knows it.