Focus first on collaboration
Published 12:01 am Thursday, March 24, 2011
The murder of corrections officer Jayme Biendl at the Monroe Correctional Complex cast an appropriately bright light on safety issues in Washington’s prisons. The governor, corrections officials and legislators have vowed to work with corrections staff to identify shortcomings in technology, policies and procedures and work diligently to improve safety.
That process deserves a chance to work. It took a major step forward Monday with the release of a report by federal corrections experts that made 15 recommendations, and the announcement by state Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail of a 19-point “prison safety initiative action plan” that includes immediate and longer-range safety improvements.
An internal investigation is under way, which we hope will yield more safety enhancements and address failures that may have occurred the night of Biendl’s death. The Department of Labor and Industries is investigating whether state workplace safety laws were violated.
All that, and what leaders say will be an earnest effort to increase collaboration with corrections staff on safety issues, needs a fair amount of time — several months, anyway — to show whether it’s sufficient.
That’s why we think an effort in Olympia to grant greater collective bargaining rights to state corrections workers on safety issues, including staffing levels, is premature. EHB 2011 passed the House on a 59-36 vote on March 7, and currently is being considered by a Senate committee.
The governor’s budget director, Marty Brown, has raised concerns that the bill could have a dramatic and unpredictable impact on costs, because failure to reach agreement on safety and staffing issues would leave an arbitrator to decide who “wins.” Against the current fiscal crisis, it’s an unwise risk.
Corrections officers say they just want a voice on safety issues. That they should have. If it can be accomplished through a collaborative process, one that builds trust between labor and management through sincere and meaningful actions, we suspect it will be more effective.
If leaders from the governor on down fail to seriously collaborate with corrections staff, this kind of legislation can always be revisited in the future. But lawmakers facing billions in cuts to public safety, education and social services should stop and consider the potential costs of taking staffing-level and other safety-related issues to the financial uncertainty of arbitration.
Brown argues that having arbitration as an option tends to reduce the incentive to reach agreement on a contract. That’s exactly the wrong direction to take the relationship between corrections officers and management at this delicate point in time.
Obviously, correction officers’ safety must be a high priority. It’s also true that the budget crisis is real. In addressing the former, the state can’t lose sight of the latter.
