Raising the Roof for City Workers

City employees are sick of facing financial uncertainty.

Robert John Narvaiz was one of half a dozen employees who spoke up to ask for raises in a "listening session" regarding the upcoming budget earlier in March. Another 230 sent letters to City Council members.

"There's another gentleman who's been with the city for 14 years. I haven't been with the city that long, but he makes about 60 cents more an hour than I do and I came in at the starting wage," said Narvaiz, who works in the Parking Division. "It's really disheartening…to have nobody having our backs when it comes to this budget process."

All city employees endured furloughs at the beginning of the pandemic. But not all lost the same number of hours. City documents show that 868 employees with an average salary of $24.45 were furloughed for four hours a week, while 180 employees with an average salary of $20.20 lost 16 hours.

Last year the local employees union, AFSCME Local 3999, filed a complaint against the city over the first nine weeks of furloughs. The New Mexico Public Employees Labor Relations Board has ruled that the city must repay part of the money lost. The parties are waiting for the hearing officer to decide the exact amount. Meanwhile, the city is beginning the budgeting process for the next fiscal year and employees are concerned they could be left out.

Union Vice President Gil Martinez, a graphic artist with the City Clerk's Office, talks about what's at stake.

SFR: We’ve heard from a lot of city employees saying they need a raise.

Gil Martinez: Absolutely. In our last contract, we had negotiated a 2% raise each year. That contract expired last June. Now, we're in the middle of negotiations for a union contract for a term of three years, and we want an annual raise to be a part of that. But…we're having a very difficult time negotiating with the city, it's taking us a lot longer than normal. Usually a contract will take two months to get finalized, but we're now nine months in and we're not even close to finalizing it. Some of that is because of COVID, but our membership got very concerned because if this is gonna take another six months, the budget could be approved and passed without even a contract being in front of City Council telling them that they have to account for a wage increase….Of course the union can't tell the City Council to put money aside because we are in the middle of negotiations. But our members are very upset. Many have taken it upon themselves to speak up and let the City Council know that they need to put an allocation in the budget for when the negotiation is complete so that the city can make sure everyone gets some kind of increase.

It seems like there’s this sentiment that lower wage employees have taken a bigger hit during the pandemic.

Like I said, the ones that work the hardest are the ones that aren't appreciated at all. When the furloughs were initiated last year, the people that were making minimum wage got hit the hardest. Employees making under $16 an hour were about half of the people who got 16 hours taken away from them—that's 40% of their pay. To start with, their checks are tiny, and then taking 40% of your pay away, even if it only lasted a few months—that's huge. A lot of our members were just calling us up, literally crying. They didn't know which way to turn. Most of them didn't qualify for unemployment because they were still working some, but they were having a hard time making ends meet.

What was the union’s position on wage cuts for employees?

Our position was if they have to do furloughs, it should be straight across the board. Everybody gets the same amount off. And that wasn't the case.

What’s happening now with the lawsuit?

We won the case and they did say that the city needed to make it whole to their employees. The problem we're having now is the city's definition of "whole."
They want to define it and they're not wanting to pay us everything for those nine weeks [of furloughs], so we're in the middle of hearings on that one right now. …It's going to be up to the hearing officer to determine what they owe.

Correction: Workers in the AFSCME collective bargaining unit have received raises from the City of Santa Fe in a majority of the past 15 years in increments ranging from .50 cents to 8% of pay. See a table the city provided SFR here. In an earlier version of this story, Martinez claimed otherwise. That material has been removed.