Personnel

Labor Relations Reform

2011 ushered in sweeping employment reform for the public sector through changes to Public Act 312 (Compulsory Arbitration) and the Public Employment Relations Act (PERA). The summaries provide an overview of the changes along with links to the actual laws.

Public Sector Pay and Benefits

The League’s statewide pay and benefits survey covers 143 classification titles and is available through a password-protected searchable database, available to participating members only. The database provides reports in excel to allow for easy analysis and creation of tables and graphs.

The Center for State and Local Government Excellence is a national non-profit, non-partisan research organization focused on public sector compensation, benefits and recruitment/retention issues. They have excellent research and reports comparing public and private sector compensation, retiree healthcare and pension programs, including an issue brief comparing State/local employees to private sector workers. A key finding of that study is that total compensation for public sector workers is about 4 percent less than that in the private sector.

The Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust released its 2012 Employer Health Benefits Survey. This survey provides national data on access, cost and utilization of health benefits across industries, including State/Local government.

Social Media

“Social Media” is now mainstream, grandparents are on Facebook, young children know what Twitter means and thriving downtowns will be Foursquare hot-spots before the year is out! Rather than using one-way communication, social media creates the opportunity for instantaneous two-way dialogue. This provides endless opportunities for communities to market themselves and engage their public in ways never before imaginable. Research suggests that the effective use of messaging and technology is instrumental in succeeding in the 21st century.

Social media also creates complexities and potential liabilities for municipal government, with regard to Open Meetings Act, Freedom of Information Act and the responsibilities and limitations of public employers. It is indeed an exciting time in public service, and the most successful communities will leverage the opportunities presented by social media while carefully planning for potential pitfalls.

The City of Novi provides a sample policy on technology use and electronic records retention that applies to social media use.

The City of Seattle has a sample policy on blogging and social media use.

Contact [email protected] with questions or to share your sample policies related to social media.