Houston municipal workers will get raises of 12.5 percent over three years under a tentative contract announced by the mayor and union officials Monday.
Under the proposal, all employees will receive an additional $116 per pay period, about $3,000 more a year. The contract will raise minimum pay each year and increase base wages for all eligible employees by 3.5 percent in the second and third years.
Houston Organization of Public Employees, or HOPE, represents more than 13,000 city workers in departments ranging from the 311 call center operators and library employees to Solid Waste and Public Works crews. Of the employees that benefit from the contract, 3,100 are HOPE members.
“This is the biggest raise we’ve ever gotten,” Sonia Rico, HOPE president, said after the news conference announcing the tentative contract.
The city did not put an overall price tag on the contract Monday, but Mayor John Whitmire said the first-year raise already is calculated into the fiscal 2025 budget.
The minimum wage for city workers will be $16.75 per hour. That will increase to $17.25 an hour in the second year of the agreement and $18 an hour in the third.
The union endorsed Whitmire for mayor last year as the “worker friendly” candidate, and Rico said she worked tirelessly to help with his campaign.
“He understands the importance of having a union, and that’s big for us,” Rico said after Monday’s news conference announcing the tentative contract.
A majority of union members and City Council must sign off on the agreement before it is enacted.
Rico said in April that Whitmire’s agreement with the firefighter union encouraged HOPE members.
The city firefighters union reached a $1.5 billion deal in June and secured 10 percent base salary increases for the first year. The five-year contract could result in 36 percent increases for rank-and-file firefighters by the end of the period. Officials have yet to finalize a plan on how to pay for the agreement as the city already faces a $160 million deficit in 2026 from disaster recovery costs.
City Council could hear the mayor’s plan for covering those costs and future deficits as early as Wednesday. Whitmire repeatedly has said he will not consider a property tax increase until he has cut wasteful spending, but some council members have advocated for an incremental raise to enhance services to residents.
Whitmire on Monday said his administration will approach the city’s responsibilities to the union year by year but did not elaborate on a financing plan.
“We have a good plan to deliver services to the city of Houston, and we could not do that without our rank-and-file city employees,” Whitmire said. “HOPE gives us all the reliability that we’re looking for.”
HOPE leadership had proposed 18 percent base raises when negotiating their 2021 contract but settled for 9 percent, according to the Houston Chronicle. Rico told Houston Landing on Monday that the union did not get everything it sought, but the agreement set a good precedent for negotiations in three years.
Beyond base pay raises, HOPE also secured bilingual pay of $70 per pay period and increased longevity pay for workers who have served more than five years.
The contract also would allow employees to file grievances if they believe they were unfairly passed over for promotion, which Rico said could help identify problems in city departments.
“We didn’t leave anything off the table, like we asked for everything,” Rico said. “And we got a lot of what we wanted.”
Amethyst James, a 311 call center operator who has worked for the city for eight years, said callback pay and a rule that allows workers to rest for up to 10 hours before being called back to work during busy periods were some of the most significant benefits in the new pact.
“That gives them time to rest and just chill out from that long day of work because these are people in the field fixing the water leaks,” James said. “These are our (general service department) employees, Public Works. These are those people. They have a very heavy workload, and it’s very physical.”
There still is work to be done to improve city employees’ working conditions, Whitmire said.
“City facilities have not been kept in working conditions, a lot of neglect, leaking roofs, failure of backup power,” Whitmire said. “Bullying won’t be tolerated in my administration. All this goes to having a workforce that is motivated to improve the quality of life for all Houston.”
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