Registration is open for both the MGEC Golf Tournament and the MGEC Annual Meeting & Dinner. The Golf Tournament and Annual Meeting & Dinner will be held at the Oak Marsh Golf Course in Oakdale, MN on September 22nd. Registration closes 5:00 pm September 12th. The Golf Tournament will begin at 2:00 pm and end approximately 5:15 pm. Winners will be announced shortly thereafter. The cost to play 9 holes which includes a cart is $50. See registration link below. For those attending the dinner & meeting, social hour will begin at 5:30 pm with dinner at 6:00 pm. There is no cost ... Read More >>
Newsletters
MnDOT Meet and Confer Topics: Published Seniority Lists
On Wednesday, August 13, MGEC met with MnDOT senior leadership in our quarterly meet-and-confer meeting to discuss items of interest. The first agenda item related to the seniority lists that are regularly updated and published internally in the agency. Originally, the lists were published by classification seniority; employees could see where they stood in their job class against others in the same class across the whole state. At some point in the last several years, however, MnDOT began publishing the lists by “seniority unit”, essentially seniority by district, not statewide. MGEC’s ... Read More >>
2026 Health Insurance Premiums Update – 17% Increase
On Monday, August 18, the Joint Labor Management Committee met to learn the details of 2024 and 2025 healthcare spending across the SEGIP plans. That information is correlated with analysts’ expectations of near-term spending trends to arrive at the healthcare premium expenses for 2026. National healthcare spending– and healthcare spending trends within SEGIP - have risen by rates not seen since 2012, and health insurance premiums have to cover these spending increases to ensure the solvency of our plans. On average, SEGIP members needed more care, and costlier types of care, than they ... Read More >>
MGEC 2025-2027 Contract Negotiation Update
MGEC Officers and staff have met with the Minnesota Office of Management and Budget (MMB) to set up dates and protocols for the negotiation of the next labor agreement. We share the frustration of working under a contract that has expired while the next one is negotiated, although it is common in public sector negotiations. The MGEC Bargaining Committee has met several times over the last several months to identify bargaining priorities. Given that MMB reads our member communications such as this one, we prefer a strategy where they don’t know what our asks will be before we get to the ... Read More >>
FLSA Overtime Issue Update
As we covered in last month's newsletter, there is an ongoing issue for some of our “FLSA exempt” members who worked approved overtime that occurred in pay periods that also have a holiday. The same situation could also occur with other types of benefitted time like sick and vacation leaves, but we’re primarily focused on holidays because employees don’t have a choice whether they will take them or not. To recap, some employees are being asked to pay back “overpayments” to the state for the additional hours they worked even though they were hours where our members traded their time for ... Read More >>
FLSA Exempt: Overtime during pay periods with holiday reminder
Several MnDOT FLSA exempt employees have recently been asked to pay back hours they worked in pay periods that contained both holidays and approved overtime. While MGEC is trying to understand the employer’s basis for this (no one from MnDOT or MMB has advised us of what they are thinking or that they will be demanding payment), we advise people to respond to any request to refund “overpayments” with the following as written by our attorney: “I do not agree that I was overpaid, and I do not agree to any reduction in my paycheck. If you make an unauthorized reduction of my pay, you will be ... Read More >>