State, biggest union reach agreement on contract
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- October
- 29
 The state has reached a deal on a new four-year contract with its largest employee union, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced today.
  Under the agreement that still has to be ratified by the 70,000 members of the Civil Service Employees Association, workers will get a 3 percent raise retroactive to April 1 of this year, 3 percent raises next year and the year after and a 4 percent hike in 2010.
  The increase will cost taxpayers about $950 million over the course of the contract. Workers in the New York City metro area will get extra pay, sometimes of more than $3,000, to offset the higher cost of living in that part of the state.
 The pact also includes some changes in health care, but a Spitzer spokesman wasn’t able to say immediately how much those are worth.
 The pact leaves the Public Employees Federation, which has about 50,000 members who work for the state, as the largest union without a new contract. The old pacts expired on April 1.
 The four-year deal with CSEA means Spitzer won’t have to deal with a new contract before the 2010 election, if he decides to run for a second term.
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on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 5:40 pm by Jay Gallagher.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
