WPEA's Podcast

Legislative Update Week 8 

TRANSCRIPT 

Hi and welcome to the Washington Public Employees Association Legislative Report for Week 8 of the 2023 legislative session. I’m Seamus Petrie, your WPEA lobbyist. 

It’s been a while since we last recorded a podcast because, well, it’s been busy in the last few weeks. The legislature is through the first round of cutoff deadlines and is in the middle of floor votes. 

This week on Wednesday, the Senate passed SB 5217, a bill that allows the department of Labor and Industries to issue rules regarding musculoskeletal injuries among industries with the highest rates of this kind of injury. Fully 40% of all compensable workplace injuries are this kind of ergonomic injury, yet the law prohibits L&I from issuing any rules to protect workers. This bill will allow L&I to slowly roll out new rules to help prevent this kind of injury and protect workers on the job. 
Incidentally, the reason state law bans L&I from issuing rules to protect against ergonomic injury is because of an initiative from 20 years ago. The initiative was funded by the Building Industry Association of Washington, which at the time was headed by Tom McCabe, who now runs the Freedom Foundation. That’s the anti-union group who keeps filing public records requests for your personal information so that they can find your address, come to your door, and try to convince you to give up the power of your union. 

After about two hours of debate, the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 27-21. It’s now off to the House, where a similar bill passed last year. 
 
On Thursday this week, the House passed HB 1200, a bill to standardize and improve the employee data that public employers provide to unions, so that we can better serve the members. The bill passed by a vote of 57-41, and is now off to the Senate. 

The House and Senate will be holding floor votes through this weekend and early next week, before floor cutoff hits at 5pm on Wednesday, March 8. Then those bills that passed the floor of their house of origin will be heard in their opposite house. 

We had one bill die at cutoff, the bill to improve the state’s salary survey. We ran out of time to get it out of Ways and Means, so we’re working on adapting pieces of the bill into a budget proviso – a bit of law that lives in the budget. 

There are still a bunch of bills that are important to WPEA members that still haven’t had a floor vote: HB 1187, the bill to protect the confidentiality of member conversations with their stewards; HB 1566, a bill to increase the cap on vacation leave for state employees to 280 hours, and HB 1533, the bill to protect the personal information of public employees who are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, harassment, and stalking. 

We have until March 8 to get these bills a floor vote. So I’m signing off now to head back down to the legislature to keep pushing these bills to get out of rules for a floor vote.  

Thanks for listening. 

On Monday, January 23, the legislature heard SB 5328, a bill to give public safety telecommuters access to the Public Safety Employee Retirement System. We heard testimony from 911 operators and dispatchers about the ongoing trauma they experience. WPEA shared testimony about how understaffed the Washington State Patrol communication centers are. Remember that the communication center in Wenatchee closed last year due to understaffing, leaving the remaining centers to pick up the slack.  

There has been some pushback on the bill, suggesting that it won’t solve the whole staffing crisis that public safety telecommunicators are experiencing. The bill’s sponsor, Senator Kevin Van De Wege acknowledged that this wasn’t the complete solution, and we agree. But it will help. We can’t afford to keep losing people serving this vital public safety role. 

This Friday, January 27, two House committees are scheduled to advance bills that we are working on. HB 1187 is the bill to protect the confidentiality of union member communications, and the House Civil Rights and Judiciary committee is expected to vote it out of committee. We have incorporated many of the concerns of employers, but none that compromise the core of the bill: it is vital that union members be able to have frank and confidential conversations with their union reps and stewards, without fear that the conversations could be used against them later in court. 

Also Friday, the House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee is scheduled to vote out HB 1200, a bill that standardizes how employers provide employee data to unions. We’ve been working with a broad coalition of public employee unions and employers to make sure that employers are providing our unions with consistent data in a usable format. 

Next week, the Washington State labor council is holding their annual legislative conference and lobby day, where hundreds of union members form across the state will descend on Olympia to speak with their representatives about the priorities that unite working families in Washington. For those of you who are coming, I look forward to seeing you there. If you aren’t making it next week but want to come to the legislature a different time, send me an email at Seamus@WPEA.org and we’ll schedule a time. 
 
That’s all for now. Remember that you are your union, this union is you, and we all do better when we all do better. 

Thanks for listening. 

ACTION ITEM 

1. Go to the Senate committee sign-in page here: CSI (wa.gov) 
2. In the "committee" drop-down menu, select "Labor and Commerce" 
3. In the "meeting" drop-down menu, select "1/24/23 10:30 AM" 
4. When the list of bills pops up, click "SB 5217," then "I would like my position noted for the legislative record" 

On the next screen, select "Pro" as your position in the drop-down menu, then fill in the rest of the fields. Make sure that the "organization" field is either blank or says "WPEA" - don't enter the name of your employer. If you aren't comfortable providing your phone number (which is a required field), you can use WPEA's number: 360-943-1121. 
6. Click "Submit Registration" and you're done! 

Welcome to the WPEA legislative report for week 2 of session. 

Last week, the legislature held public hearings on the governor’s budget. The governor’s budget funds our contracts, including the 4% COLA on July 1, targeted pay increases for specific job classes, plus the COVID booster bonus and the retention bonus. 

This week, the legislature held hearings on a handful of bills important to WPEA members. 

For Full Transcript, please click here.

Legislature 104 – Inside committees and floor debates 

Resources: 

Legislative website: www.leg.wa.gov 

TVW (C-Span for Washington State): www.tvw.org  

Legislative hotline: 1-800-562-6000 

Transcript 

We last talked about the overall process of how a bill becomes a law. Today, we’re going take you inside a committee hearing, then we’ll talk about what happens during floor debates.  
 

For most of session, committees are  

where the action is. All through the first two cutoff dates – policy committee cutoff and fiscal committee cutoff – the legislature spends its time in committees, only spending most of their time on the floor in the couple of weeks between fiscal committee cutoff and floor cutoff. 
Committees have three kinds of meetings: Public Hearings, where they get briefed on bills and hear public testimony; Executive Sessions, where they amend and vote on the bills; and Work Sessions, where they aren’t doing anything with particular bills, but instead might have topic area experts present information about issues relating to their committee. A single two-hour legislative committee meeting could have anywhere from one to all three of these kinds of activities. 

[audio clip: “The committee will come to order...”] 

 
A legislative committee has anywhere from 5 members to a couple dozen for the big fiscal committees such as Appropriations or Ways and Means. The chair of each committee is a member of the majority party, as are a majority of the members on the committee. The committee chair runs the meeting. They’ll gavel the meeting to order and might call on people to testify. They are assisted by a Vice-Chair, a member of their party, who might also call on people to testify during public hearings, and who typically makes the motions on bills that are brought up for executive session. Each committee also has a Ranking Member, a member of the minority party who is responsible for leading their party’s members on the committee. The Ranking Member is assisted by an Assistant Ranking Member, also of the minority party. 

The legislators sit up on the dais, in rows or in a big horseshoe.  

Also attached to each committee, sitting off to the side, is a handful of non-partisan analysts, a committee assistant and clerk, plus a partisan staff member from each caucus.  

In the middle of the room, facing the legislators, is a table where people sit when they testify. 

Then in chairs towards the back of the room, there’s the audience, made up of members of the public, lobbyists, and reporters. 

Public Hearing. 

Public hearing on a bill starts with a briefing from the non-partisan committee staff. The staff here will describe what the bill does. Non-partisan staff are scrupulously careful about describing the bill in the most accurate and fact-based terms, without having an opinion about the benefits or drawbacks of the bill. 

After the staff briefing, the prime sponsor will speak to their bill. Many times, the prime sponsor is a member of the committee. Otherwise, the sponsor will take a break from their committee or other work to come and speak to the reason they introduced the bill. Then it’s time for the public to speak. Anyone can sign up to speak to a bill, in favor or in opposition. Sometimes no one wants to speak to the bill, sometimes, on a controversial bill, there may be dozens signed up. If the committee has a full schedule with a lot of bills and a lot of people wishing to testify, the committee chair may limit folks who testify to just a few minutes to speak.  

For the full transcript please click here.

Links: 

Legislative website: www.leg.wa.gov
Schoolhouse rock “I’m just a bill” video: Schoolhouse Rock - I'm Just a Bill - YouTube 
Legislative hotline: 1-800-562-6000 

Transcript 

In a previous episode, we were talking about the work of the legislature, and I briefly mentioned the process by which a bill turns into a law. I invited you to recall schoolhouse rock, because, frankly, that’s a pretty good basic outlining of the legislative process – it was written for US congress, but the process in the WA state legislature is much the same: A successful bill has to go to committee, then to the floor, then to the committee in the other chamber, then the floor of the other chamber, then to the governor’s desk. Along the way, it can be debated and amended. That’s the simple version of the story. As you may have guessed, the real story – the legislative process as it is actually practiced - is a bit more complicated.  

It’s a perilous journey. Most won’t make it. Along the way, there are untold obstacles and nearly impossible odds. There’s also some mystery, and even a big plot twist. 

As I said, most bills will die along the journey. Only about 1 in 5 actually get to the governor’s desk. The process is actually designed to make it hard to pass a bill. There are a lot of little steps that a bill has to go through, and some bills will die at every single step. Bills die because they don’t have majority support, or because they’re too expensive, or because there just isn’t enough time. Session is limited, and there are a series of deadlines built into the calendar, called cutoffs. If a bill isn’t far enough along in the process before cutoff, then the bill dies. 

So, what does the process actually look like? 

Each bill has to go through the same process: 

Voted out of committee, voted off the floor, then the same steps in the opposite house. 

Voted out of committee, voted off the floor. 

Then signed by the governor.  

That’s 5 basic steps. If a bill raises or spends money, it has to go through a fiscal committee as well. So... seven basic steps: Policy committee, fiscal committee, floor, then to the opposite house, then signed by the governor. 

But each of those steps has little steps within it. 

To be voted out of committee, a bill must first have a public hearing. Plenty of bills never get scheduled for a public hearing in their first committee. After a public hearing, the bill must be voted out of committee. We call voting a bill out of committee “exec’ing” a bill, in reference to “executive sessions,” which is the name for the kind of committee meeting where they vote on bills.  

Plenty of bills never get voted out of committee, either because they don’t have enough votes from committee members, the committee chair doesn’t want to move the bill, or they just run out of time on the schedule. 

But bills have to be out of their policy committee by the first cutoff (called “policy cutoff”), or they’re dead. 

Then they have to be scheduled for a public hearing in their fiscal committee.  

Plenty of bills get through their policy committee, only to never be heard in a fiscal committee. And again, even with a hearing in their fiscal committee, plenty of bills that get heard in their fiscal committee never get voted out of their fiscal committee – for lack of support, lack of time, or because they’re too expensive, which is something fiscal committees care about in a way that policy committees don’t. And if a bill doesn’t get voted out of committee by the second cutoff date, what’s called “fiscal cutoff,” then the bill is dead. 

Then on to the floor, right? Well... 

RESOURCES AND LINKS 

Legislative website: www.leg.wa.gov 
Email Seamus Petrie: Seamus@wpea.org 
Legislative Hotline: 1-800-562-6000 

ACTION ITEM 
Call the legislative hotline at 1-800-562-6000 and ask your legislators to fully fund state employee contracts this year, including 100% of the funding for higher education employees. 

TRANSCRIPT 

Hi, it’s Seamus Petrie, your WPEA lobbyist, here to give you the information you need to know about how the legislature works, and why. 

Today we’re talking about the budget process, and the process our state employee member contracts go through, from negotiation to ratification to funding.  

This upcoming legislative session starts in an odd-numbered year, which means is a “long” session, scheduled to last 105 days. It’s a long session because during odd-numbered years, the legislature passes the state’s two-year operating budget.  

(Actually, the legislature considers (and in most cases, passes), three budgets each year:  

1) The operating budget, which pays for the bulk of the state’s operating expenses, including the salaries of most WPEA-represented state employees. 

2) The transportation budget, which pays for roads, ferries, and the salaries of Washington State Patrol employees (including our members at WSP). 

3) The capital budget, which pays for construction, maintenance, and repair projects around the state, including projects on our community college campuses. The 2022 capital budget, for example, paid for asbestos removal from a building at Pierce College. 

But we’re going to be talking mostly about the operating budget – that’s the biggest one, at about $60 billion per biennium.  

The operating budget bill itself is long – 700, 800, 900 pages long, with sections on K-12 education, state parks, mental health, housing, and so on. As part of that budget, the state pays for the vital public services that our members provide: helping students at our colleges, keeping our roads and food supply safe, taking care of our natural resources, and collecting the tax revenue to pay for those services. And in a few short sections near the back of the budget, you’ll find sections that approve the contracts that WPEA members negotiated with the state. Those sections are short – just a paragraph or two – but they took a long road to get here. 

So let’s go back, now, and talk about how these contracts made it into the budget. 

• Throughout the life of the contract, WPEA members can submit contract proposal ideas. As bargaining gets closer, that effort ramps up as members have ideas about how to improve their contracts. 
• During spring and summer of each even-numbered year, our state employee members negotiate our two-year contracts with the state. Those contracts last two years, concurrent with the state’s two-year budget cycle. Once our negotiating teams reach tentative agreements, those tentative contract terms are sent to WPEA members for a ratification vote.  
• All those things – the negotiation and ratification votes – have to happen, legally, by October 1st, in order to be put into the governor’s budget and considered by the legislature. 
• The governor puts out a two-year budget in December of each even-numbered year, and – and assuming the rest of the process has happened as I just described, our state employee contracts are included in that budget...

Click Here for Full Transcript

Here’s your crash course in the basics of the Washington state legislature: 

The state legislature meets for legislative session starting in January every year – the second Monday of the year, to be specific. Now, usually, they come to Olympia, but the last two years have been mostly virtual because of COVID. In odd-numbered years they meet for 105 days, wrapping up at the end of April; in even-numbered years, they meet for just 60 days, ending the second week in March. (Side note – those 105- and 60-day numbers include weekends and holidays. The legislature always works on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Presidents Day). They meet for longer in odd-numbered years because that’s when they pass the biennial budget, which includes our state employee contracts.