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Employees in Vermont’s state’s attorney’s offices overwhelmingly voted to join the Vermont State Employees Association Friday morning. The deputy prosecutors, victim advocates and secretaries voted 59-12 in favor of the unionization.

The employees — numbering 110 across 14 counties — had been discussing unionization for several years, leading up to a December 2018 vote by the VSEA Board of Trustees to proceed with an election.

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“This is really great news for the OSA workers, and I applaud them for their decision to band together as a unit to work with VSEA to get the wages, benefits and working conditions they want and deserve,” VSEA President Dave Bellini said in a statement.

Bellini said the VSEA will now begin the bargaining process to get the new members a “fair and just” first contract that addresses their key concerns, and gives the workers a voice in day-to-day operations like caseloads, staffing and allocation of resources.

A press release from the VSEA noted that a timeline has not yet been established for formal bargaining.

“I am looking forward to working with VSEA and my fellow prosecutors, victim advocates and support staff across Vermont to begin addressing the challenges we are all facing statewide,” Washington County Deputy State’s Attorney Ashley Hill said in a statement.

Hill has previously said through the unionization effort, OSA workers were hoping to tackle the issues of stagnant wages, expanding case loads, long hours, and gender-based pay disparities.

The process toward unionization has been many years in the making. [In 2014], the labor board voted that state’s attorneys employees were neither state nor municipal workers, meaning they could not claim the labor rights of either group.

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Two years later, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature clearly intended for all government employees to have the labor rights of municipal and state employees. This led to a 2017 law outlining what the state’s attorneys employees could negotiate once unionized.

The law gives state’s attorneys employees the right to negotiate wages, benefits, reimbursements, hours, leave, working conditions, overtime compensation, leave, insurance coverage and the collective bargaining rules — but it leaves hiring and firing largely up to elected county prosecutors.

Vince Illuzzi, who is both a VSEA lobbyist and the Essex County state’s attorney, said the union will create greater equity across the state for employees. He recalled one deputy state’s attorney who would have making an additional $25,000 a year if they had received customary state employee pay raises.

“There were just so many inequities in the system, which leads to resentment, which leads to talented people leaving,” Illuzzi said. “When employees don’t feel appreciated they bring experience and institutional knowledge to the private sector and that only hurts the state.”

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