EDITORIAL: Twisted EMRB ruling must be overturned

If there were any doubt that the Nevada Local Government Employee-Management Relations Board is in the tank for labor, the panel erased it last month by declaring that state law doesn't mean what it says and allowing a group of Clark County employees to collect illegal pay raises.

The decision, which is being appealed to Clark County District Court by county management, is a textbook example of what happens when a biased nonjudicial entity pretends to be an even-handed arbiter of the law. The Nov. 24 ruling is a tangled, have-it-both-ways hot mess of political expedience.

The issue, argued in September after an arbitrator already had settled the county's years-long labor dispute with the Service Employees International Union, is Senate Bill 241, the badly needed labor reforms passed by the 2015 Legislature and put into effect June 1. Among other things, the law prohibits the awarding of pay increases after a contract's expiration if a new agreement is not in place. This provision was intended to discourage bad-faith bargaining by abolishing so-called "evergreen" clauses, which allow employees' salaries to continue growing while their unions drag out negotiations well past a contract's termination.

Because the SEIU's contract with Clark County had expired about two years prior to SB241 taking effect — allowing annual pay raises to continue under an evergreen clause — the new law compelled Clark County to immediately halt the awarding of seniority-based "step" pay raises. The county resumed the awarding of those raises when its new contract with the SEIU took effect Aug. 25. But employees who were due raises between June 1 and Aug. 25 lost them. That was the intent of the law. If they could collect the raises retroactively once a new contract was reached, the law would have no teeth.

The EMRB, to no one's surprise, ordered the county to award those raises anyway. It said the SEIU's evergreen clause, voided by SB241, remained in effect June 1. Then the EMRB said the evergreen clause expired June 30, and that SB241 took effect July 1 because no new contract was in place. However, the EMRB ruled that SB241 doesn't apply to "step" raises, only contracted cost-of-living adjustments, which can't be awarded after a contract's expiration anyway. So even though SB241 was in force and the SEIU had no contract in place, workers who lost their step raises could still have them. Got it?

The county's appeal of the EMRB's decision should be a slam dunk at District Court. The ruling can't possibly stand, and the sooner the court issues a decision, the sooner local governments and unions can conduct new contract negotiations with legal certainty.

Clearly, this year's labor reforms didn't go far enough. In 2017, the Legislature should abolish the EMRB.