Amtran’s board this week approved a three-year contract with the Amalgamated Transit Union local that represents the authority’s drivers.

The deal calls for a 4% wage increase for each year.

“It’s a fair contract,” said union local President Dave James. “Both sides worked very hard to obtain it.”

The new contract takes effect June 1 and duplicates the current one in boosting wages a total of 12 percentage points over three years — although the expiring one’s increases were 5%, 4% and 3%, James said.

Health insurance benefits remain largely the same, with employee costs down a little — as Amtran changed providers from UPMC Health Plan to Highmark, according to James and CEO Josh Baker.

The number of employees at the authority has increased recently, moving the organization from the small-market to the mid-market category for health care, which means that the basis for rates went from community experience in general to the organization’s experience in particular.

For Amtran, that alone tended to increase costs, according to Baker.

Amtran’s current health insurance provider UPMC Health Plan declined to provide a quote for coverage under the new guidelines in time for the May 31, expiration of the current labor contract, saying that it needed to wait until closer to its contract’s Sept. 1 expiration, Baker said.

So Amtran sought quotes from a couple of other companies, but those would have meant a 30% increase in one case and a 50% increase in the other.

Highmark, however, offered a one-year deal for a high-deductible plan that raised rates by only 11.5%, which Amtran accepted.

Amtran could have “rolled the dice” and waited for UPMC, in hopes of an even better deal, but the Highmark offer wouldn’t have been valid by then, so Amtran decided not to take the chance, Baker said.

No employees will lose access to their current providers with the switch to Highmark, Baker said.

The deductibles are $2,200 for a single employee and $4,400 for an employee’s family.

The organization pays those amounts into employees’ health savings accounts — and the employees can do what they want with that money, Baker said.

Employees contribute between 4% and 8% toward health insurance costs, James said.

Top pay for the union members is $32.16 an hour, Baker said.

Starting pay is 90% of that — $28.94.

The national average raise in transit is currently 4.5%, while Pennsylvania’s is a bit higher, mainly because other transit agencies in the state were “behind” in their wages, Baker said.

There are 40-plus union members, plus a handful of employees who have opted out of union membership, but who receive the same benefits, although they are not required to help pay the costs of collective bargaining, based on the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus, which is applicable to public agencies, according to the State Human Resources Department in Washington state.

There was only one dissenting vote among union members on the contract ratification, James said.

“It’s a long process, but we always get it done,” James said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.