By Jim Cline
As we indicated in an earlier blog, the State Supreme Court has accepted review of the Kitsap County retroactive insurance case. The issues in the case involve whether an employer can retroactively increase health insurance premiums and whether they may also deduct the amount needed to cover the increased premiums from the employee’s paychecks without employee consent. Our previous blog provides a detailed review of the legal issues before the Court.
Here’s a link to the September 30 oral arguments. The parties’ legal briefs can be found here .
The issue hasn’t been addressed before now, seemingly because arbitrators have not seen fit to increase insurance retoactively. Not many parties have typically done this in agreed settlements either. In a 2004 City of Redmond Police arbitration, Arbitrator Jane Wilkinson applied a retroactive increase in premiums, but she didn’t indicate that the Association there had presented any legal objections of the type at issue in Kitsap, or at least she didn’t address any such objections.
Following the Kitsap arbitration decision, in December 2013 Arbitator Tim Williams increased health insurance premiums retroactively in a Port Angeles-Teamsters police decision. As in the Redmond case, it doesn’t appear that the Teamsters voiced a legal objection to the retroactive increase, although reportedly they are now resisting implementation of this aspect of the decision having since become aware of the lower court rulings in Kitsap.
Obviously, the Kitsap case bears directly on the relative balance of power in your contract negotiations. Not being able to impose insurance increases on you without your consent to the increase forces employers to come to the table and bargain more promptly. If they can hold up your COLA and still hope to achieve an after-the-fact increase in insurance, we’ll be seeing even more management stalling at the table.
As Pierce County Judge James Orlando explained in ruling for the Guild, “common sense” indicates that you can’t take a benefit away after the fact. We’ll see if the Supreme Court shares his view.
