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Bargaining Unit Work 8-2
union notice and opportunity to bargain. However, the Commission was
required to modify its order to eliminate the suggestion that the end result
of bargaining would be the restoration of certain duties to the bargaining
unit.
In a 2002 case involving the Boston Police Department, the Association
argued that the City transferred bargaining unit work when it assigned
two individuals to identify latent prints recovered from crime scenes after
they were promoted to detective. 9
To determine whether the City transferred bargaining unit work, the LRC
must first determine whether the duty of latent print identification was the
exclusive bargaining unit work of patrol officers or whether patrol officers
shared the work with non-unit personnel. When work is shared by
bargaining unit members and non-unit employees, the Commission has
determined that the work will not be recognized as exclusively bargaining
unit work. 10 In those shared work situations, an employer is not obligated
to bargain over every incidental variation of job assignments between unit
and non-unit employees. 11 Rather, the employer is only required to
bargain if there is a calculated displacement of unit work. 12 Therefore, if
unit members have performed an ascertainable percentage of the work, a
significant reduction in the portion of the work performed by unit
members with a corresponding increase in the work performed by nonunit
employees may demonstrate a calculated displacement of unit
work. 13
An employer must bargain about a transfer of unit work if the transfer of
unit work results in an adverse impact on individual employees or the
bargaining unit as a whole. 14 Here, the City's assignment of latent print
identification duties to the two individuals after they became detectives
denied individual unit members the opportunity to perform the specialized
duty of identifying latent prints 15 , and reduced the opportunities for
bargaining unit members to perform this work in the future. 16
Accordingly, the City's transfer of the latent print identification work had
an adverse impact on individual bargaining unit members and to the
bargaining unit as a whole that triggered the City's statutory obligation to
bargain to resolution or impasse with the Association prior to transferring
that work. However, the record indicates that the City did not notify the
Association that it planned to transfer unit work to non-unit employees or
bargain with the Association prior to transferring the exclusive bargaining
unit work at issue here.
Often, during the life of an existing bargaining agreement, public safety
and other municipal departments realize that certain tasks, such as
custodial and maintenance work, for example, could be performed in a
more efficient or cost effective manner if they were contracted out to the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts