6/12 Weekly - Election Results + Leave Comparison
Hi All,
Elections: I am pleased to announce the winner of our 2025 UAEA Vice President Elections.
Brittainy Nelson will be serving as UAEA’s Vice President from July 1st, 2025 to June 20th, 2027. I want to extend a warm welcome to her but also want to thank Brian Gonzales for running - I’m always happy to see a competitive race and it was nice to hear both of the candidate’s perspectives on the future of our organization. Brian remains a valued member of our team, serving as UAEA Treasurer. Per our bylaws (Article 5, Section 1), the role is his until he would like to move on.
The Executive Board for the 2025 Year will thus be as follows:
President: Joel Guy (term ends June 30th, 2026)
Vice President: Brittainy Nelson (term ends June 30th, 2027)
Secretary: Lisa Johnson (term ends June 30th, 2026)
Treasurer: Brian Gonzales (term ends when Treasurer would like to leave the role)
Resolutions Director: Natalya Ennels (term ends June 30th, 2027)
Communications Director: Kelly Taylor (term ends June 30th, 2026)
Membership Director: Jeremy Hopf (term ends June 30th, 2027)
Citywide Representative: Olivia Calderon (term ends June 30th, 2026)
Citywide Representative: Annette Betancourt (term ends June 30th, 2026)
Citywide Representative: Leah Sergeant (term ends June 30th, 2027)
Citywide Representative: vacant (term ends June 30th, 2027).
I will update bulletin boards with new contact information in the next few weeks. Please note that our team has specific email account names for every role besides the citywide representatives - this means, for instance, that Jeremy Hopf’s email will change from jeremy@uaeatempe.com to membership@uaeatempe.com and Leah Sergeant’s email will change from vicepresident@uaeatempe.com to leah@uaeatempe.com. Please reference our Executive Board page for up-to-date emails. The page is not updated yet - I will switch things over on July 1st when people take over their new positions.
I also wanted to give a shout out to our Elections Committee which handled all of the administrative work for our election. Their names are as follows:
Tim Li: IT Security Administrator
Brady Mckay: Crisis Intervention Specialist
Megan Lumen: Arts & Culture Specialist
Finally, please note that we have a vacant Citywide Representative role. The UAEA Board has not decided if we want to fill it at this time but are open to applications. If you’d like to be considered, please send me an email with a short statement of interest and relevant qualifications. The duties of a Representative can be found in Article 6 of our Bylaws - you can also ask me or Resolutions Director Natalya Ennels what the work normally entails.
Member Meeting: Our next member meeting will be June 26th, from 12PM-PM at the Tempe Historical Museum. RSVP here by Tuesday, June 24th, at 12PM.
Segal: I don't have any exciting Segal updates but did want to reiterate that we've been working on a wide range of appeals projects for members across the City. I am currently directly working with 21 members on issues that impact about 55 members. Once the dust settles I'll try to provide some details about any pay adjustments we were able to secure. I did want to note that UAEA has been working with TSA on getting adjustments in certain workgroups - while both unions have a shared interest in securing fair wages, I have been pleasantly surprised by how many supervisors and managers are going to bat for their employees, regardless of whether or not that would yield an adjustment for them.
Juneteenth: Next Thursday, June 19th, is a City Holiday and the City’s celebration of Juneteenth. Please don’t come to work if you’re not scheduled. I don’t have a full writeup but did just want to say that Juneteenth is an important holiday for labor unions - beyond the obvious evils of slavery, bodily autonomy and the ability to negotiate fair workplace conditions are some of the most fundamental rights of American labor. Having a separate class of people with no rights also makes it nearly impossible to negotiate fair wages - unions can always be undercut by free alternatives if injustices like slavery are allowed to exist. Labor unions thus need to promote both worker’s rights and civil rights - the two are effectively inseparable.
If you’re interested, there is a family friendly Juneteenth event happening this Saturday, June 14th, at the Tempe History Museum - find more information here. If you’re interested in learning more about past African-American labor leaders and activists, check out the writeup I did for Black History Month.
As a followup to last week’s bylaws email, I wanted to provide some information on the leave policies of other Valley cities. Several people have reached out and said that donations of (up to) 8 hours of leave each year would be a burden or not worth it. To that, I’d like to reiterate that this is a standard model used by unions across the country, that the amount of leave needed will decrease if our membership continues to grow (making this less of a burden as time goes on) and that the amount of leave UAEA has been able to negotiate in the last decade has made us a leader in Valley cities. The board is not asking for 8 hours of time just because employees have it (again, this is so we can continue to operate), but I think we can make that case that an 8 hour donation by our members would continue to keep Tempe as one of the most generous leave providers in the area.
A few years back I did an analysis of the total leave offered by 6 comparison cities that Tempe used to be benchmarked against (Phoenix, Chandler, Gilbert, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale) - I’ve since got through and updated the comparison with 2025 data. It’s a little hard to do an objective comparison due to the variations in how each city distributes time, how certain cities (like Tempe) have much more generous policies related to things like leave for family deaths), how people accrue variable amounts of vacation time throughout their careers, and how some cities like Phoenix have multiple union contracts, but I was able to do a fairly comprehensive breakdown by Holiday count and Sick Leave time, with a slight aside to discuss Vacation Hours. Please note that I have only looked at the Phoenix LiUNA contract - more than happy to include any differences if someone wants to look through the 2 Phoenix AFSCME contracts as well.
Please also note that 5x8 and 4x10 schedules consistently get different amounts of leave - 5x8 employees usually end up with slightly fewer hours of leave than 4x10 employees, but due to needing to take fewer hours for days off they sometimes end up with more total days of leave. 4x10 employees get fewer total days of leave but they also usually have an easier time scheduling chunks of time off due to only working 4 days a week. It’s difficult to find a balance that is perfectly fair for people working both schedules but UAEA is open to suggestions for future MOU negotiations.
Holidays: Tempe currently offers 13 paid holidays a year, second-only to Phoenix in Valley cities. These holidays are New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Presidents Day, Cesar Chavez Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Indigenous People’s Day, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day. Phoenix celebrates the exact same holidays but also offers employees a half day when Christmas Eve falls on a weekday. Mesa, Chandler, and Scottsdale all offer 11 paid holidays a year. Chandler and Scottsdale do not celebrate Cesar Chavez Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Mesa does not celebrate Cesar Chavez Day, Juneteenth, or Indigenous People’s Day, but is the only City which pays for employees to take all of Christmas Eve off. Glendale does not celebrate any of those days, which means employees get 10 paid holidays. Gilbert does not celebrate any of those as well as Veteran’s Day, which means employees get 9 paid holidays a year.
Complicating matters slightly, most cities offer some time for personal days or personal holidays. I’ve also looked at those, and Tempe comes out on top. As of July 1st, Tempe employees will get 24 hours of Holiday Leave and 8 hours of Personal Leave, for a total of 32 extra hours of leave time. Gilbert provides 20-24 hours of Personal Leave time, depending on schedule-type. Phoenix employees receive 2 Personal Leave Days, for a total of either 16 or 20 extra hours of time. Glendale provides 16 hours of Leave time, while Chandler and Scottsdale provides 1 Personal Leave Day, for a total of either 8 or 10 hours of time. Mesa does not currently give any Personal Leave.
Using 5x8 and 4x10 schedules, Tempe employees thus get between 136 (13*8+32) and 162 (13*10+32) hours of Paid Holidays per year, giving us between 16.2 and 17 days paid holidays off per year. This is the highest in the Valley. This is 0.7-1.5 extra paid leave days per year compared to Phoenix, 4.2-5 extra leave days per year compared to Chandler, Scottsdale, Glendale, and Gilbert, and 5.2-6 extra leave days per year compared to Mesa.
Sick Leave: Tempe is tied with several cities for sick leave - employees in Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, and Scottsdale all get 8 hours of sick leave per month, or 96 hours/year. Glendale and Phoenix are slightly higher- Glendale provides 0.055 hours of sick leave per hour worked (9.53 hours/month), which works out to be about 114 hours/year, while Phoenix provides a flat 10 hours per month. Gilbert provides the minimum amount of sick leave required by state law, 1 hour per 30 hours worked. Assuming a normal full-time schedule, that’s 5.8 hours/month, or 69 hours/year. Looking at a 5x8 and 4x10 schedule, Tempe employees get between 9.6 and 12 sick days per year, compared to between 12 and 15 for Phoenix and between 11.4 and 14.2 for Glendale. Though we are tied or above 4 of our market peers, Tempe employees get slightly less sick time than the maximum, 2.4-3 less sick days per year than Phoenix. That said, we do get 2.7-3.4 more days of sick time each year than Mesa, and vacation time is where things reverse direction yet again.
Vacation: I don’t know if it’s meaningful to include vacation time in this analysis like the prior two sections - UAEA full-time employees might be accruing anywhere between 9.33-18 hours of VA time per month. That said, I did check on vacation accrual and the short version is that Tempe employees accrue vacation faster at every point in their career compared to Phoenix and Gilbert. We also accrue vacation faster than Mesa employees until they’ve finished their second year of employment - at that point our employees pass them again in accrual once they’ve hit 11 years of service with Tempe. Chandler, Scottsdale and Glendale all accrue vacation time faster than Tempe employees in the first 15 years of employment, but they max out either at year 10 or year 15. After that, Tempe employees surpass them and accrue more vacation time at 21+ years of service (216 hours/year) than Chandler (215.8 hours/year), Glendale (197.6 hours/year), Phoenix and Scottsdale (180 hours/year), Gilbert (177 hours/year), or Mesa (144 hours/year). This means at 21+ years of service Tempe employees end up with between 7.2 and 9 more days of vacation time each year than Mesa employees.
Conclusion: Between Sick Leave and Holiday Leave, here is how all of those comparison cities break down. To keep things simple and wrap up this email sometime soon, I have already factored in an 8 hour time donation to the Tempe numbers.
(there was a chart here but Squarespace doesn’t want to keep that formatting. See the diagram below)
Tempe is comfortably in second place behind the City of Phoenix, whether or not the 8 hours of time is factored in. Further, Phoenix employees accrue Vacation time at a slower rate than Tempe employees - the gap narrows considerably when that is factored in. By year 11 of employment as a Tempe employee (when employees are accruing 160 hours of VA/year compared to 132 hours of VA year for Phoenix), Tempe pulls ahead. But even beyond that, 8 hours of donated leave still gives Tempe employees 1.7 to 7.3 extra days of leave every year compared to our other peer cities, regardless of the schedule you work.
My point with all of this is to hopefully demonstrate that UAEA’s time request is reasonable. I also think I’ve inadvertently proven that there’s a connection between union presence in cities and total leave time - I’m aware of active unions (that are comparable to our own) in Phoenix and Glendale, two of our peer cities with the best leave policies. Unions may occasionally ask for support from our members but we also tend to get results - while this request for leave time may seem onerous now, it allows UAEA to continue to negotiate for even better contracts in the future, possibly leading to future leave allowances down the road.
Thanks for a great week, everyone!
