Designed and made in Canada
State and city labor relations offices
For the office that sets the parameters
A governor’s or mayor’s office of labor relations, a state office of employee relations, a budget office overseeing many bargaining units. You do not sit at every table, and you answer for all of them.
The record is held in Canada · Your documents stay in your own systems
The advantage to you
Whether a table stayed inside its bargaining parameters becomes a matter of record rather than a matter of reporting.
The settlement authority is recorded where it is used, at the table it governs, and what was settled against each limit is recorded next to it. The question is answered by the record the agency already keeps rather than by asking it to write you a memo.
Costings are done the same way at every table, against the same published payroll rates carried with their sources, so a figure from one table can be set beside a figure from another and mean the same thing.
What is hard about this today
- Latency
- You find out where a table is when somebody tells you, which means you find out late, and what you are told is a summary written by a party to it.
- Comparability
- Twenty units cost an offer twenty ways. The differences are usually in the assumptions rather than the arithmetic, and the assumptions are rarely written down anywhere you can see them.
- The per person problem
- Social Security stops at an annual wage base for each person, so the cost of a percentage increase does not scale with total payroll. A model built on an average and a headcount gets a number that is wrong in a direction nobody notices until the cost note reaches the legislature.
- Afterwards
- A state auditor, a comptroller, a legislative committee or a public records request asks what happened at a table, and the answer has to be assembled from recollection.
What changes
- Parameters as a record
- What was authorized, by whom, when, and with which limits, recorded at the table it applies to. Settlement against each limit is recorded as it happens, including whether it fell inside.
- One method
- Every table costing against the same published rates, each carried with its source and date, and stating plainly where something is not carried rather than substituting an estimate. Pension contributions and health premiums are not statutory and are not included; the costing says so.
- Disagreement, separated
- Where the two sides differ on a number, the assumptions behind it can be put beside each other, so a disagreement about facts is separated from a disagreement about position.
- A record that stands up
- Each employer holds its own record of its own table, exportable and independently checkable. That is what an auditor asks for, and it does not depend on us being asked nicely.
- Separation, structurally
- Nothing in the design lets anyone see inside a party’s private caucus, and that includes you and includes us. It is what makes a union willing to sit at the same table.
The honest position on a portfolio view
This is the part where a vendor would normally show you a dashboard. We are not going to, because it does not exist.
- What exists today
- Everything above is per table. The employer at each table holds its own parameters, its own costing and its own record, sealed to that employer. An office that is not a party has no seat and therefore no view.
- What does not
- There is no view across tables for a body that is not a party to them, and nothing that reports a portfolio position upward automatically.
- What we would want from you first
- What you are entitled to see, under what authority, and what each agency and each union would have to be told about it. We would rather design that with you than build something nobody can lawfully use.
What it does not do
Named here rather than found later. Anything missing from this list that matters to you is a question worth asking, and we will answer it the same way.
- There is no cross-table dashboard, no portfolio roll-up and no automatic reporting to a central office today.
- It does not set parameters, judge whether they were reasonable, or decide whether a settlement complies. It records what was authorized and what was settled.
- It takes no position on whose costing is right, and does not produce a number of its own.
- US payroll rates cover federal taxes and the New York and Massachusetts unemployment rates today. Other states are added once their published rate has been checked against the state’s own source.
- We do not hold a SOC 2 report yet, and we will not describe readiness work as though it were a report.
Where to go next
- The trust page · live checks, sub-processors, and the audit roadmap with dates
- What your agencies are told · the same product, from the table
- What the unions are told · worth reading before you ask them to use it
Both sides of a negotiation get the same product. If you want to know what the people across the table are being told, it is on the pages for public employers, state and city labor relations offices, and unions. We would rather you read all three.
A question? Talk to us.
Buying, a security review, a purchase order, or a question about your own situation: write to us and a person on the team will reply.