The Wisconsin State Employees Union announced Monday it had reached agreements with the Department of Employment Relations for the last four of the 19 contracts that govern the two-year period that began in July 2001.

State workers are hopeful that the completion of contract negotiation will provide added incentive for the Legislature to take the issue of the contracts back up and ultimately approve them.

“There were four contracts that weren’t settled and there were 15 that were,” said Marty Beil, executive director of the WSEU. “All 19 are now settled and are basically all on cue together.”

Tom Corcoran, president of the WSEU Local 2748, said that because the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Employment Relations stalled the approval of the 15 contracts by refusing to pass them out of committee and onto a vote by the entire Assembly, the last four contracts lost no further ground on their road to approval.

Since the committee voted to send the contracts back to the Department of Employment Relations for further negotiation in February, state employees have taken up a grassroots campaign to pressure lawmakers into giving the contracts another look. When Gov. Jim Doyle said he would resubmit the contracts if he felt there would be a different vote, WSEU members dedicated themselves to pressuring legislators to committing on their votes.

“Over the last three months, there’s been a tremendous amount of visits with legislators and vigils at the Capitol and rallies around the state that were designed to heighten legislators’ awareness to the importance of approving these contracts,” Beil said.

He said the assurances he sought from legislators had been brought about by the employees’ grassroots persistence and that there were rumors the Joint Committee on Employment Relations would meet in the next few weeks to vote again on the contracts.

“We know for a fact that some people who voted ‘no’ before will vote ‘yes,'” Beil said. “We’ve heard that the Legislature, and specifically Joint Committee on Employment Relations, will be taking these contracts up in the next few days.”

“The fact is our members came together and, basically by visiting legislators’ offices, got this done,” Beil said.

He said he didn’t expect to receive any more notice than the 48-hour minimum required by law but said that the Wisconsin State Employees Union would be sure to spread the word quickly so as to increase their presence at the Capitol on that day.

“When we hear about it, the world will hear about it,” Beil said.

Ellen Nowak, an aide to Assembly Majority Leader Rep. John Gard, R-Peshtigo, said last week that there was no planned meeting of the Joint Committee on Employment Relations and that Gard and members of the committee would want to see what health-insurance stipulations will be included in the non-unionized state workers’ contracts, which is often considered a precedent for unionized workers’ negotiations.

The president of the Teachers Assistant Association, Mike Quieto, said negotiations were supposed to have begun on future contracts but had not because past contracts were not yet approved. He said that it seemed counterintuitive for the committee to wait to see what future contracts’ health-care concessions might look like before it approved negotiated contracts from more than a year ago.

“It’s genuinely ridiculous, and it does sort of undermine the negotiation process,” Quieto said.