Governor Rick Snyder’s administration and state employee unions have begun a new round of contract negotiations.
The Snyder administration has set a big savings target -- $265 million - or an average of about $6,000 per state worker.
Jan Winter is the governor’s lead negotiator. She says saving $265 million in employee costs will be tough.
“Go the table, work as hard as you can. A lot of things can happen and we’re counting on working out good deals here.”
Winter says one idea is to ask state employees to pay more for their benefits.
“One of the things that we have looked at, clearly, moving to something like an 80/20 split on a health plan would mean well over $100 million in gross savings. We have a lot of ideas, and we’re hopeful the unions have lots of ideas, too.”
Cindy Estrada is the lead negotiator for UAW Local Six Thousand, the biggest state employee union.
She says workers are also looking to fix the state’s budget troubles.
“We want to create a Michigan, a state that in 10 years to come is more efficient, has better quality for the citizens that receive those services, and I think we can do that – if workers and management get together and we look for new solutions and we be really creative and stick to the commitment that we’re going to make structural changes, we can get there, definitely.
But Estrada says the savings should not come out of state employees’ benefits or paychecks since they’ve given up nearly $4 billion in concessions over the past decade.
The unions say state government could find big savings if it reduced the number of managers and outside contracts.
