Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • January 21, 2019 • Hartford Business Journal 7 PDS has been meeting the needs of the construction industry since 1965. Our dedicated team of design and construction professionals welcomes the challenge of serving its past and future customers on their most demanding projects. Valenti Maserati-Fiat | Hartford, Connecticut This building entertains two different dealerships. A Fiat car dealership and a Maserati dealership. The entire building was an interior and exterior renovation project. It was a complete renovation with high end fi nishes, ACM Panels, and new mechanical systems throughout. Project Size: 7,700 SF 107 Old Windsor Road, Bloomfi eld, CT 06002 (860) 242-8586 | Fax (860) 242-8587 www.pdsec.com PDS ENGINEERING & CONSTRUCTION, INC. DESIGN BUILDERS • GENERAL CONTRACTORS • CONSTRUCTION MANAGERS SPOTLIGHT ON: A THINK • PLAN • BUILD Technologies Corp. (UTC) in 1955, although back then the school was called the Hartford Graduate Center, and UTC was known as United Aircraft Corp. Since then, the school has specifically catered to working adults continuing their education. Krause said he sees the school serving the dual constituencies of students at Rensselaer and employ- ers that hire (or currently employ) them. That's why increasing the output of skills-specific, short-term programs makes sense, he said, noting that completing a master's program on a part-time basis typi- cally takes about three years. "When you're staring at that pro- motion or that new job, you don't necessarily have three years to wait to make that leap," Krause said. "I think the reason certificates are really proliferating is because both employers and students are looking for abilities that will get them just to the next (skill level)." The setup is also beneficial to employers that can enroll workers in a program to update their skills, Widness said. Rensselaer's first six certificate programs will cover production and health analytics, business intelligence, machine learning and artificial intel- ligence, systems engineering and lean quality. The rest, if approved, will be rolled out over the next three years. Krause formulated the new pro- grams, which will cost students $1,750 per credit hour, based on his exhaus- tive meetings with employers, he said. For example, when putting together the business-intelligence certifi- cate, Krause and his team met with officials from dozens of the largest employers in need of those skills, in- cluding British Aerospace, Honeywell, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Aetna and Infosys, to name a few. Those meetings led to a proj- ect-based curriculum, which is designed to allow students to participate in real-world analytics projects, Krause said. While the new programs haven't yet debuted at the Hartford campus, Dunn is confident that certificate courses will become a mainstay at all of Rensselaer's campuses. "I think there's more and more of a demand (for certificate programs), it's not just Hartford," Dunn said. "We do expect to be growing these out further." Rensselaer's Hartford campus is located on Windsor Street. PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED Despite incentive to quit, state workers' union membership rate climbs By Alex Wood Journal Inquirer T he U.S. Supreme Court's decision in June that public employee unions can no longer collect mandatory "agency fees" from nonmembers gave public employees all over the country an immediate finan- cial incentive to drop out of unions. The average Connecticut state em- ployee can now save more than $685 a year by refusing to join a union. Yet, the average membership rate of Connecticut's state employee unions has gone up — rather than down — since the June decision. As of the Sept. 28 paycheck, 88.5 percent of Connecticut state em- ployees who were eligible for union membership were members, accord- ing to figures from the state Comp- troller's office. That was up from 87.8 percent at the June 22 paycheck and 86 percent at the April 27 check. A likely reason for the increase is that many state employee unions mounted membership drives before and after the widely anticipated Su- preme Court decision, officials say. But despite the increase in mem- bership rates, the total revenues of Connecticut's state employee unions declined about 7 percent, from $1.31 million for the two-week pay period covered by April 27 paychecks to about $1.22 million for Oct. 12 checks. That decline occurred even though the total number of employees in state bargaining units increased 1.5 percent from April 27 to Sept. 28 and continued to grow in October. The obvious reason for the revenue decline is that the agency fees collected from nonmembers dropped from some $145,000 in the April 27 pay period to zero after the Supreme Court decision took effect. One union that had a big member- ship increase in 2018 was AFSCME Council 4, which represents Cor- rection Department employees. Its membership in the correctional bargaining unit climbed 27 percent. Jan Hochadel, president of AFT Connecticut, which represents edu- cation professionals, said the June Supreme Court decision has had little impact on her union. "We've spent three years talking to them about the importance of the union," she said. Robert Beamon, a correctional officer and member of the Enfield- based AFSCME Local 391, cited safety as a key reason for his sup- port for the union. The people who make decisions aren't in the prisons, he said, arguing that the union is needed to inform management of employees' safety concerns.

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