(The Center Square) – State workers in Washington are about to get a raise, while secretive union negotiations that could include another raise get underway.
A two percent pay hike negotiated as part of a 2025 contract kicks in on July 1. State employees got a three percent increase one year ago in the first year of the two-year contract.
Specific job classifications, such as those in the Department of Corrections, are getting higher general raises, with some receiving a 4% increase on July 1.
On Tuesday, the Department of Retirement Systems sent a notice to all state workers about the coming raise, advising them to use the additional compensation to:
pay off credit card debtsave for a big vacationopen an account or add to your child’s 529 college savings fundincrease your DCP contributions for retirement
Washington state has more than 150,000 state employees, with the number of people employed by the state steadily increasing in recent years.
Three state agencies alone make up nearly half of all spending for agencies. Those include the Department of Social and Health Services, which employs up to 19,000 workers. The Department of Corrections with roughly 9,000 employees and the Department of Transportation with about 7,600 workers.
Over 50% of all state employee salaries go to higher education, with the University of Washington (UW) alone accounting for 41% of all state salaries.
The state budget does not pay the salaries of all UW employees but primarily covers a portion of base compensation for state-funded employees, while the university’s tuition revenue makes up the remainder.
The highest salaries at the UW are in athletics, including head football coach Jedd Fisch who was paid nearly $5.9 million last year and head basketball coach Danny Sprinkle, who was paid $3.1 million in 2025.
Important to note that these athletic positions are often funded in large part through ticket sales, television contracts, and boosters rather than solely taxpayer-funds.
Meantime, leadership for the largest state employee unions have started salary negotiations for their next two-year contract.
Those include the Washington Public Employees Association, the Washington Federation of State Employees, the Professional and Technical Employees Local 17, and the Washington Federation of State Employees.
The contract talks come just a couple of weeks after Governor Bob Ferguson’s Office of Financial Management Director warned of a dire budget picture coming in 2027, including a potential $7 billion to $10 billion shortfall.
As state salaries constitute up to 30% of the entire budget, there is some extra pressure on those negotiations this time around.
Ryan Frost, budget and tax policy center director at Washington Policy Center told The Center Square he’s not holding his breath that state leadership won’t cave to union demands for more salary hikes.
“I think from the outside perspective if a private company has no money, they don’t then ask for $2 billion in employee raises. Only the state manages to do that. This has been kind of an ongoing problem in Washington for a long time,” said Frost.
Secret negotiations
“We have zero seat at the table when those negotiations are being made. There’s not a state that’s more secretive than Washington and we can’t shine a single light into how that negotiation goes,” said Frost.
Frost explained the closed-door deals between union leaders and OFM staff are so secretive, members of the public, including the media, are not entitled to receive any documents related to the negotiations through public records requests.
“There’s not a way to keep it more hidden from the taxpayer more than the way we do it.”
The state worker contract negotiation process in Washington begins with union leadership surveying its members to set core priorities. From there, negotiators from both sides exchange proposals and counter-proposals until they reach a tentative agreement, which union members then vote to accept or reject.
If the contract is ratified, it is submitted to the Office of Financial Management by Oct. 1 for inclusion in the Governor’s budget request. Finally, state lawmakers review the proposal, holding the power to vote it up or down in its entirety, but they are strictly prohibited from making any amendments.
“They can’t do anything. So, frankly, until there’s a seat at the table from the taxpayer perspective, then these types of things are just going to keep happening over and over again,” said Frost.
“I don’t see how this next round of bargaining agreements are going to look any different than the ones that happened last time, despite the fact we’re probably going to have a $7-10 billion deficit.”
Frost also suggests a potential conflict of interest in that over 95% of union political action committee money in Washington spent on partisan politics has gone to Democratic or progressive candidates for state and local offices, with significant funding to candidates such as Bob Ferguson for governor.
“If you look at who they contribute to with all their money, it’s going to the people they are negotiating their upcoming raises with. That’s just a rather large conflict of interest.”
The Center Square reached out to the four main union groups involved in contract negotiations. The Professional and Technical Employees Local 17 was the only union to respond to say they were “in negotiations all day and unavailable.”