Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to on the Fringe, the podcast where we explore the systems, technology and people shaping the future of our work. I'm Ann Larson, CEO of Corellian Software. Tim Gauthier recently retired after decades with the Oregon Columbia chapter of neca, where he played a critical role in modernizing the way contractors and unions handle payroll and benefits administration. Tim has spent over 40 years negotiating labor agreements, shaping policy, and ensuring that both contractors and union workers get fair, transparent, and effective contracts. Tim's insights aren't just for people in the electrical industry.
If you've ever been part of a negotiation, whether for business contracts or even just figuring out how to make a deal work, there's something in this conversation for you.
So let's jump in.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I can tell you when I went to college and we had a computer, it was a computer in a building and it was all punch card. That's all it was.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: I bet it took a lot of space also.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. Well, matter of fact, even the Nika chapter building, it was built in the 60s and it has a huge basement because that's where the computer was going to go, you know, to keep it cool. And it's going to be big. When they bought their very first IBM computer and it was one of those small desktop ones, and I think they paid $30,000 for it and everybody just would look at it, not knowing. What did they do with it? I think we sold it for $1,500 to another chapter because that's when we started just buying PCs. We bought everybody in the office a computer and we didn't even spend close to $30,000. Now, most people work off of laptops, but yeah, it's been kind of crazy over time and how this thing has changed and the information that we. And that's one of the things that I wanted to see coming out of the EPR system was information that I could glean for negotiations. I could track man hours by agreement now, not just all the hours that came in.
[00:02:14] Speaker C: Yeah, so tell me about it. I'm very curious to hear the story.
[00:02:18] Speaker D: So it actually goes back to college.
I was dating a gal in high school and college whose father worked for.
At the time, I was a chemistry major and I also had just gotten a football scholarship to Southern Utah.
Well, chemistry and football practice didn't match up very well.
And my football coach came to me one day because I had missed a practice because of a class.
And he said, I want to remind you, you're here on a football scholarship, not an academic scholarship.
And football has to be first.
So I switched to business.
My then girlfriend Peggy's father said, why don't you come take a look at maybe working for Neeka? I knew what he did, but I really didn't know what he did. And my senior year, Christmas break, I went to San Francisco and had my first interview.
Actually, it's kind of interesting because I was also interviewing with Sambo's Restaurants. Sambo's Restaurants was based in Santa Barbara. Sam Battistone, one of the owners, was good friends with my father. Part of my degree was in marketing. And so I interviewed with the marketing department, and they said, well, if you come to work for corporate Sambos, you have to work in a restaurant.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: First I thought I didn't go to.
[00:03:40] Speaker D: College, work in a restaurant.
So I ended up. I had a choice, and I chose Nikita 1975.
[00:03:47] Speaker C: Wow. Just because you didn't want to work in a restaurant.
[00:03:50] Speaker D: Basically.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:53] Speaker D: And it's interesting because I went to Washington, D.C. the national headquarters, for two, three months of training, and then they send you to a field office.
I ended up in Chicago, which then Peggy and I never really got back together again because of location.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: Oh, wow. So her dad got you in.
[00:04:12] Speaker D: You know, it kind of got me the job, and then we never got back together.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: Oh, wow.
[00:04:16] Speaker D: Kind of ironic.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Wow.
So when did you get. When did you get out here?
[00:04:21] Speaker D: Here in December of 81.
[00:04:23] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:24] Speaker D: I actually interviewed at the Las Vegas Convention in 1981 with the Reno chapter, the San Diego chapter in Portland. Sight unseen.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: I moved to Portland.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: I moved here sight unseen for college.
[00:04:38] Speaker D: December, leaving Kansas City, where it's not necessarily snow covered, but when it goes dormant in Kansas City, it turns brown. And when I flew in, I never forget this, I flew in and everything's green. It's winter.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Why isn't it brown?
[00:04:53] Speaker C: So green. Yeah.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:57] Speaker D: Well, then, another interesting story.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: We started early 2000.
I had convinced the board that here in the Pacific Northwest, intel programmers, software writers, we should be doing something other than paper reporting. Because a lot of contractors had started giving us their reports on spreadsheets. And then they would have to fill in the paperwork at the bottom with all the totals. All the paper that we did our payroll reporting was approved and done through nebf, because that's the national pension.
Every NECA and IBEW local had to have NEBF in their agreements, and they designated the NECA chapter as the collection agent.
[00:05:45] Speaker C: And then you had to mail all.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: The paper back to the nebf. And so when I came to Portland, we had a mail Bookkeeper.
Because we would get all the reports in the mail, we would have to collate them all, it was a multi sheet paper and we had to get approved by NEBF as to what else we would add to their report. So all of our local trust funds, our credit union, apprenticeship, NECA dues, ibw, all had to get approved by NEBF and then they would print the forms and send them to us. And then later they said, you guys print them yourself, but here's what this has to be approved by nebflam. So we would collect the payroll reports and we would get one check and then we would distribute the money to the various accounts within. At the time it was First Interstate, now it's Wells Fargo. We would have to put all these deposit slips together for the various trust funds and I would have the bookkeeper go to the bank and deposit the checks, then take copies of that and go to the different third party administrators and then to the credit union, then to the local union. The rest were than mailed out especially to nebf. At the end of the month we'd have a box. You know, we were collecting probably 200 payroll reports at the time every month. And I think back in the day, because we didn't have as much work, we were probably collecting about a million dollars. Now I think we're collecting over 300 payroll reports and about 15 million a month. As that grew, I said, there's got to be a better way and why don't we find a company who can write the software for us, a web based portal for the contractors to enter all this information, then they can send us a check. We first ventured out in the chapter, put up $25,000 and found a company in Seattle. After two years of struggles, we had some form of a program, but then they went bankrupt.
And so I went back to the board and said, oh, failure, you know, but you know, from failure you always can gain something and you got to learn a lot. The first thing I learned is Neeka's not going to spend all this themselves. So I went to the trust funds, we put a plan together, went to the trust funds and said, hey, we all know we need to do this. We're going back and forth to D.C. and trying to figure out how to do it the right way.
We interviewed three different companies and actually I think Nikastar may have been one at the time. And then there was a company out of la and then I don't know how we found Concero, but Concero here in Portland. We settled in on Concero.
We put our agreement together in June of 2004.
We agreed that it would be an eight month contract for $45,000.
Well, about seven months into it we realized we really needed 18 months and we added another, I think $30,000 to get it taken care of. This was something brand new.
Concero had been doing some things but nothing to the extreme that we required. I think at the time we had rough numbers, 50 classifications and over 500 possible inputs.
And how you put in this was I think we had at the time maybe five agreements. Five different agreements. It's interesting because I put a little timeline together.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: That's a really funny.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: That's the report it says.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: Tim, for the life of me I don't understand this one.
Yeah, like what is this?
[00:09:27] Speaker B: That was a single employer who only paid part of the fringe benefits. He didn't pay all of them on himself. And we, that was one of the things where we made changes that we said, hey, it's not fair to all the contractors if a single employer starts his own shop and doesn't pay all the fringe benefits because now he has a competitive advantage over the other union contractors. So we wrote language in the agreement that said even if you're a single employer working in the field, you must pay into all the fringe benefits.
I had about five different contractors of different size down to a small four man shop. The bigger contractors, ec, Oregon Electric. It got very complicated to the point that Concero ended up hiring two retired programmers from Microsoft. And they came down and helped us finally put all this together. We went live in 2006 and we went mandatory in 2007. And when we went mandatory, I got several calls from people saying, you can't make us do this. I don't have a computer. The smaller contractors and we said, go to the library, go to the library. A lot of the smaller contractors, it was all paper. They didn't even have software for estimating purposes because that was all new in the 90s and all that, you know, that kind of stuff. They didn't want to do it, but we over time convinced them all through that time period, up until we went live that this is the way it's going to be from here on out. And I believe it's been successful for everybody. I mean it took a lot of pressure off the contractors especially there are administrative people that handle payroll and fringe benefit reporting. It's made it much easier across the board, not just for the contractors. We're responsible as trustees to ensure that people Are paying correctly. But that's part of living in a world that we now even more so when people are storing information.
[00:11:37] Speaker C: Well, interestingly, I mean, I think, obviously I think about it. My perspective is just like I want redundancy, I want my data to be in various places because we do think about the earthquake here.
So we think about it a lot from our perspective of needing to store the data. We were just at the employee benefit conference and they were talking about investing in data centers and what you should look at. And I hadn't really thought about that. Like what's a successful data center? What's one that you would want to invest in versus not invest in. And that was fascinating.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: Wait, so where are you located? Do you have more than one?
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Yeah, we have center here and one in Virginia, I believe.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah, keep them separated.
I know even on our trust funds we do the same thing. Venesis is just down the road here for Harrison. They're our third party administrator. And I know we have redundant data across the country, just to be sure. Yeah, there's a lot of information out.
[00:12:29] Speaker C: There and it's kind of weirdly fragile. I mean, you just, you have to protect it.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: You have to be committed to the fact that it's not in your possession.
So security is important in that. But you also need to make sure that you're reliant on where it is going, that it's retrievable or it's workable. One of the things you always think about, you know, where are we most vulnerable? And I really think it's the digital world. There's a huge vulnerability to our economics.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: I think about that so much when I talk about how vulnerable it is not to like a bad actor, but just to the fact that, I mean, I can't tell you how many cassette tapes I have in my house that I cannot play.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. You have a player.
Exactly.
[00:13:23] Speaker C: And that, that worries me sometimes.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Like, where's it going to go?
[00:13:27] Speaker C: And I think the idea of having it in the office. I'm pretty sure it was in Concero's office. There were, there were servers there at the time. The idea of the cloud was very scary to people.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah.
[00:13:38] Speaker C: That was like a worst.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Send it up there. Is it really up there? Where is it? It's really located in a data center someplace and multiple data centers.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: And that's much safer than a server in your office that has no redundancy. It's just like the, the place burns down and it all burns down.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Exactly right.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: One of the Things that I was wondering about is just how you reach those win wins. Like, do you have, like when you get in a tough spot where it feels like it's going to be a win lose situation, how do we get to a win win?
[00:14:11] Speaker B: What I really tried not to do, especially when we're right there, is to say, okay, let's meet tomorrow. Because so much happens, not just the discussion within their committee or your committee, but people will start talking to others and the others may influence them and they've never been sitting at the table. So, you know, we already get to a point that we're getting close, so that helps with a win win. While we might start out miles apart, that's typical in negotiations.
The better business managers I dealt with say, hey, you know, you're not going to get a $10 an hour increase. And we know we're not going to get a wage freeze or a rollback, so let's come to with something a little bit more credible. We settled last year for $2. You really think we're going to settle for more than that? And we know we're not going to get a wage free. So let's kind of get into a situation where a better result will come because you can waste so much time talking people off that $10 and then they come back at $9 or we go up 25 cents. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. So let's get a little bit closer. I can remember this one time we were a nickel apart on getting a contract resolved and the business manager said, oh, come on, it's just a nickel. And at the time we were doing like 2 million man hours a year. And our contractor looked at me and he said, no, it's 2 million nickels.
Kind of put it in perspective a little bit more. And then they all, okay. I mean, way back in the day we were going through periods of just wage freezes because nothing was going on. And there were some internal dues structure things that went because the man hours had slipped down. They were going to get a dues increase. And so that would have given the local union a reduction in wages to the electrician. And we had settled negotiations, everything was done.
And one of the particular business managers came to me and he said, you know, we didn't realize that the dues were going to increase because of the slippage in man hours. Would you be willing to give us 3 cents an hour? So it would really be. And obviously we go back to the board and that's what I say. About being fair.
And the contractors all agreed that's a fair thing to do. You know, it's. You're talking about nickels or dimes or pennies, you get it resolved. To this day, he still thanks me for doing that. I mean, really, because you thought it would have been $100,000 bonus or something, but it meant enough to him that we did it after we had already resolved negotiations that they were willing to come back and get just a little bit. So that's what I always thought, you know, be tough but fair. And that's when you got to be the fair guy.
[00:17:16] Speaker C: So.
And it is hard sometimes back and ask you for that. It's a reasonable request.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: There's a reason.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Exactly. Right.
Yeah. There's others that I dealt with that I don't know. I would have done that. But I've been blessed with really, really good business managers. You know, I have to be careful about how I deal with the business manager. If I get him upset at me for doing something and he goes to his members and talks about it, they don't take it out on me. Well, I could get, I could lose my job. But they'll go to the job site and that's where they could cause harm.
That's why I always thought building things together is to make a happy workforce so that they do go to work and they appreciate what is happening on the job site. Contractors treat them fairly or sometimes even better.
And it always is reflective of how management is with the electricians as how jobs go. Because I know we got bad apples on both sides. And when contractors don't do the right thing, their jobs aren't very successful. Those companies don't survive. And we've got a lot of long term contractors in Portland that have been around a long time. And it's because they've always dealt with their employees fairly.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: So this is one of my questions that I want to ask everybody in this industry, especially people who have done jobs like yours. Because I, when people ask me what I do, I'm like, I know. Really, I don't want to explain this.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: It's so hard.
[00:18:46] Speaker C: So how do you, when you meet somebody that's out of the industry, like just stranger guys are out, whatever, like how do you.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: So what I try to do is ask them, what do you do? And someone say, I'm a doctor, I'm a dentist, I'm an attorney. Well, every occupation actually has an association that represents them. I work for a trade association that represents electrical contractors. Then I go into the bargaining Collecting trust funds, negotiating labor agreements and legislative education. But many of my friends, even today. Oh, so you work for the union?
They just automatically go to that? Yeah. It's kind of funny. I know. I would imagine.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: I feel like you've told me, but I don't get it.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: I mean the software industry.
Well, not really even because it's all web based, right?
[00:19:37] Speaker C: Yeah, it's not exactly.
It's hard for people to understand what SaaS software is. I think some now more people have worked for other similar kind of.
My friends are not in this at all other than like, you know, using Netflix or using some of the tools. They don't.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: I mean, it is kind of interesting to see where this came from and what it is today and what it does.
I mean, because you could say there's 50 chapters and maybe 100 plus IBW people. But I gotta believe that under the EPR format there's billions of dollars every year that flow through the system there.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: Yes. Billions.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: I mean we don't touch them. It's the data, the contribution data. So it's like it's over a billion dollars in gross wages a month. But that's just looking at gross wages.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: The benefits are calculated off of that.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: And typically benefits can run anywhere. You know, in the south they're probably less maybe 25% of wage, but they're upwards of 50% of the wage now too.
So I mean it's getting that much to the point.
Like I said, we used to have them send us a check.
We don't touch a check in NECA anymore because it's just gotten to be so big.
So it all goes to the bank.
[00:21:03] Speaker C: Do it by postmark or something.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That's what you had to do.
[00:21:07] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really. I think that's one of the big benefits of EPR Live. If they've reported it, but haven't.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: But they're sending submit it. Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:15] Speaker C: You at least can see that they worked hours versus like they just had a zero hour, they just didn't work.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Agreement, especially for health and welfare. Because sometimes contractors get into real trouble and haven't paid for two or three months yet. The employees got health and welfare. So we look at their hours in health and welfare and if they have enough hours, we give them the credit towards their coverage. Then it's our responsibility to go collect the money. We just try to make sure we get the money.
And sometimes it's a little bit more difficult than others. But in the past we've gotten trucks We've gotten buildings when they couldn't pay in cash. We actually got two buildings one time from somebody. They weren't worth a lot of money, but we got some value out of it.
So it is interesting.
Oh, it is. It's not. You mean that's the other side of it where you're dealing with people who are down on their luck, mismanaged their company or didn't give a damn and just did it anyhow and you had to deal with them. We used to bring them in before the committee. We don't do that anymore because the attorneys are so involved now. But I can remember when we first started the collection committee, we would have contractors come in and that was tough.
[00:22:22] Speaker C: Like they had to go in and.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Face the committee and say, this is what I'm going to do. I can't. Yeah, this is how I'm going to take care of it.
[00:22:30] Speaker C: Like a little court.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And these are people that I represent, you know, and that made it even harder. So. But yeah, kind of like a judge system. Yeah.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: So another question I have is about negotiations. In a negotiation, how much are you talking about? Benefits. Benefits are important to us, what we see. But there must be a lot more that goes into this.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: And every area is a little bit different.
Some people try to negotiate benefits at the bargaining table.
We have taken a different.
We believe the best people who deal with benefits are the trustees and their professionals in the trust meeting.
So in Local 48, when we settle our wage, first money goes to the trust that are requiring contribution increases, whether it might be a pension, that because of the way it's written, that they need money in order to fulfill the liability moving forward.
And that's typically would be the only two or apprenticeship. We're going to build a new building. We need an extra nickel an hour.
So we've always had that language in our agreement and the understanding.
So before money goes to a wage, it's going to go to benefits.
So if we decide that it's $2 an hour for next year, 25 cents goes to health and welfare, then, okay, the local can decide, do you want to put some money in the pension plan. But any benefit change happens at the actual trust meeting, whether it's health and welfare or pension, a little bit different, that is helpful. Yeah.
In our situation, the contributions are made by the employer to the trust fund. In some situations they have like teachers, they'll have whether an employee will pay part of it or especially if it's for family members, as ours is a whole family contribution. Even if you're single, you get the same amount of money as a family with five.
And it's a sharing, you know, it's what the brotherhood is about, so to speak.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: You know, we're all a family.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Yeah. The young ones with no health and welfare requirements are helping the older ones with multiple kids or the ones that are sick. And that's how we spread the dollars amongst it to the point that we have a very healthy health and welfare plan, but really great benefits.
And we only do it under one family cost. I think it's less than $1,300 a family.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Yeah, that's great.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Especially now that I'm looking at getting into Medicare and all that other stuff.
Luckily, I'm still covered by neca, so I'm still employed.
[00:25:20] Speaker C: We always think that we've seen it all, and then there's something that comes up in an implementation that's like, oh, you calculate it this way and then you subtract this other benefit from it and then you. Why do you do that?
[00:25:34] Speaker B: And I know the local ch here in the negotiation. I haven't been involved with negotiation for a couple years. Change it up, too. That affected EPR because now they're looking at the contributions on overtime for pension reflect the overtime. So the contribution on a straight time hour is, say, $10 an hour. But if it's on an overtime hour now, it's $15 an hour because it's time and a half. So that's a change in.
[00:26:02] Speaker C: And I think in the early days, we didn't make people put in overtime separate.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: It was just total gross and total hours.
[00:26:09] Speaker C: Now, I think in every implementation, we're like, just put it in.
Because we've seen it change and it becomes a problem.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Yeah. We were in a meeting the other day trying to figure some things out going forward, and Todd told me that it runs between 10 and 12% extra every month. As far as the overtime contributions. 10 or 12% more.
Yeah. So that's significant.
[00:26:32] Speaker C: That adds up. Yeah, it makes a huge difference, those little changes. What we noticed is that sometimes we get collective bargaining agreements as part of onboarding and we get to read them and then we think we know how interpreted that is. One of the things I actually tell people like prospective clients for EPR Live, that it's very hard on contractors, the payroll people.
I mean, it's not like the boss is doing this. It's a payroll person who has to interpret a wage sheet. You just get a sheet that says you pay this, you pay that.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:27:05] Speaker C: This calculation Whatever.
How do they interpret that?
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Especially new people. Exactly.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: So hard. And to have every contractor have to do it differently.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:27:14] Speaker C: There's certainly, like, people underpaying or overpaying.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Instead of having a consistent interpretation. So I'm glad that we can provide that.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
Especially when it comes down to paying fringes, because you want to make sure it's paid properly.
Do you pay fringes on travel? We spell it out in the agreement because we have certain travel language that it's compensated by wage only, and some it's compensated both. But spell it out and say it so that people know.
[00:27:45] Speaker C: Yeah, that's very important.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: Definitely.
[00:27:52] Speaker C: So what was your favorite part about being a NECA chapter manager?
[00:27:58] Speaker B: There's a few different things. I think in my case, it was seeing the industry grow, which we did. I mean, tremendously. Apprenticeship has always been one of my favorite things to see people when you sit down at the interview table and make your selections, and then you see that person four or five years down the line graduate from the program, then you run into them at a meeting and they're now project manager for a contractor or something. Well, you may be, what somebody might call you, a lowly apprentice. You're the next generation of future leaders in our industry. And I said, you're going to go through a lot of scenarios of what to do. You're going to be pulled this way or that way. The best thing that I could tell you is, and I use this every day when I have to make a decision, because what I do and what I agree to is going to affect 10,000 families. It's going to affect people. I don't know. But I said, I always use my mom as my conscious and think, would my mom be proud of me if I did this or if I didn't? And I said, do the same thing. When you're thinking about doing something that might be controversial or the right or wrong thing, whether it's your mom, your grandmother, your spouse, what would they think? You know, use that as kind of a governor moving forward instead of just, I'm just gonna do it. So.
[00:29:23] Speaker C: I love that.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:25] Speaker C: I hope my kids.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:27] Speaker C: Have me on their shoulder.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Today's choices, I mean, for anybody, really can be very dramatic.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: All right, so you think we're good?
[00:29:38] Speaker B: I am, yeah. Okay, good.
[00:29:40] Speaker C: I think we've got a lot here.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Good.
