PPOA Executive Director
wquint@ppoa.com
Every one of PPOA’s labor Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) contracts with the County of Los Angeles expires this year. By now, the PPOA Bargaining Unit (B/U) 612 (Sergeants and Lieutenants) MOU has expired, effective January 31. To be certain, the existing PPOA MOU for B/U 612 will continue to be valid as long as good-faith bargaining continues, which is presently the case between PPOA and the County. In fact, PPOA’s sixth and seventh bargaining sessions (January 22 and February 3) will have occurred by the time you read this message. Please make sure to read each Saturday morning’s Week in Review email for negotiation updates. If you are not receiving the Week in Review, please make sure you call the PPOA office and provide us with your non-LASD/LADA BOI email so we can input it into PPOA’s database.
The Unit 612 negotiations team, chaired by President Steve Johnson, began the contract process with internal meetings with the PPOA negotiations team in April 2024. One of the first orders of business by the team was to receive valuable input from PPOA’s LASD and LADA BOI Sergeants and Lieutenants. The team was committed to relying on their fellow B/U member responses to assist them in formulating contract proposals. An electronic survey was sent to our 612 members in July 2024, and in September 2024, PPOA and the County of Los Angeles held its first bargaining session to negotiate a successor MOU to the 2022–25 contract.
One welcomed change from the 2022–25 contract negotiations is that PPOA and the County will resume traditional, across-the-table, in-person collective bargaining. The last contract negotiations were, for the first time in PPOA’s then-71-year history, conducted virtually due to pandemic concerns. To date, all seven bargaining sessions for our successor 2025 MOU have been in person. A respectful reminder: Contract negotiations with the County are confidential, so don’t believe the many rumors that circulate during negotiations. PPOA — and only PPOA — will be your sole source of reliable and credible information throughout contract negotiations.
As we continue into 2025, PPOA’s other B/Us will engage in good-faith negotiations:
- Unit 614 (Coroner and LASD): Criminalist, Criminalist Lab Technician, Forensic ID Specialist I and II, Senior Criminalist (expires September 30, 2025)
- Unit 621 (LASD): Civilian Investigator, Court Services Specialists, Crime Analyst, Custody Assistant, Law Enforcement Technician, Public Response Dispatcher I and II, Public Response Dispatcher Specialist, Security Assistant, Security Officer, Supervising Public Response Dispatcher (expires March 31, 2025)
- Unit 631 (Coroner): Coroner Investigator (expires September 30, 2025)
- Unit 632 (Coroner): Supervising Coroner Investigator I and II (expires September 30, 2025)
PPOA anticipates meeting with the B/U 621 negotiations team in March and the other B/Us in early summer.
Additionally, PPOA has already joined the other 14 County unions, consisting of 30,000-plus members who belong to the Coalition of County Unions (CCU), in negotiating a successor MOU to the 2022–25 Fringe Benefits contract, which expires March 31. Each union affiliated with the CCU has a maximum of three representatives at the CCU Fringe Benefits bargaining table. The CCU bargaining team negotiates with the County to determine the County’s financial contribution to the Choices Plan (medical, dental, etc.); the County’s match to our Horizons Plan (deferred compensation plan); and paid time off and other provisions that fall outside of the respective unions’ individual MOUs. Please access your B/U PPOA MOU and the Fringe Benefits MOU at PPOA.com/members/contracts.
The working women and men of L.A. County deserve wage and benefit increases that allow them, at a minimum, to counter their significant losses in wage and medical purchasing power.
The County began its preliminary FY 2025–26 budgetary process in December. It is absolutely imperative that the Board of Supervisors recognizes and addresses as one of its most urgent priorities fair and reasonable successor MOU agreements for its represented employees.