The story is about a teachers strike called for tomorrow, February 4, in the Penn Hills SD (Allegheny County). Here are the two sentences:

The district said in a statement that the teachers trimmed their salary requests from 15 percent to 6 percent a year after it became public.
…
“Don’t believe everything you read by the board,” Union spokesman Butch Santicola told KDKA-TV. “It’s designed to misdirect and miscommunicate and put pressure on the teachers.”

What’s wrong here?

The first of those sentences is based on a statement at the board website, published on February 2:

Prior to December of 2009, the District had withdrawn several of their proposed changes and agreed to contract language proposed by the Teachers’ Union, but the Teachers’ Union made no changes except to reduce its wage demand from 15% a year to 6% a year but only after the 15% demand was publicized.

One problem is that it appears that the school board waited a long time to expose an initially outrageous salary demand — a 15% pay raise the union would not have dared to make in public. If so, this is a textbook example of how closed-doors negotiations allow a union to stall…and stall…and stall — all while maintaining a public posture of reasonableness. The articles I found online suggest that as soon as the board publicized that 15% demand last summer, the union lowered it dramatically. Here’s a news report of the union response:

After school officials revealed details of the union’s initial salary and benefits request, the union’s representatives asked board members and other officials to sign an agreement not to speak publicly about the talks.

No surprise there. Any private party (e.g., a building contractor, a fuel oil supplier, or an insurance company) making a non-competitive bid for public money would prefer to have its bid kept confidential until after it’s been accepted.

Now consider the second sentence from he article: Mr. Santicola’s implication that the board statement is false, or at least misleading. For all I know, he may be right. So why doesn’t he correct the record by publishing the actual union position?

If there’s a strike, and it looks as if there will be, the Penn Hill kids and their parents will be hurt. The public doesn’t have to know about every tentative idea and every trial balloon floated in the process of trying to read an agreement. The public is entitled to read and evaluate all written, potentially binding proposals made by both the union and the board. There’s no excuse for a process that asks the public to take sides based on unsupported charges, counter-charges, rumors and insinuations.

By the way, don’t bother looking for details about the points still at issue in the Northwest dispute in the online report in CitizensVoice.com. All you’ll learn is that the union “made concessions.” If you go to the school district website (and look under “district news”), you’ll find a summary of the board’s formal contract offer as of October 8, 2008, including a proposed salary schedule. However, I didn’t find the board excerpts from its offer easy to follow.

I understood the issues better after reading a fact finder’s report dated September, 2006. (This dispute has been going on for a long time and has included strikes and “work to rule” tactics.) The teacher union’s website struck me as more user-friendly than the board’s webpage, but it’s even less informative. It includes a lot of letters from teachers, but its numerical data tells you very little about what the union is demanding while purporting to show that the district has plenty of money to meet those demands.

The PLRB decision was the real find. It seems that the Northwest board (back when negotiations begun) entered into an ill-advised honor-system agreement not to publicize its own proposals. At some point the board apparently decided that honor system meant that the board was expected to honor this agreement while the union worked the system. Anyway, the board published its proposal (not the union’s), and the union called this an “unfair labor practice.” A hearing examiner ruled in favor of the board, and the PLRB denied the union’s appeal on July 17, 2007. Here are excerpts from the PLRB decision (legal citations omitted and italics added).

… the breach of a ground rule for negotiations is not a violation of the duty to bargain in good faith … The Hearing Examiner credited the District’s testimony that it passed the April 19, 2006 resolution concerning public examination of the tentative agreement “to quell the public’s aroused perception that it had no prior notice of how its money was spent … rather than with the express purpose of thwarting the negotiating process.”
…
At its most basic level, what the Association is seeking to restrict is when, where and how a governmental body may consult the public with regard to matters of collective bargaining before ratifying a tentative agreement. However, the public employer’s process of considering a tentative agreement, and deciding whether to obtain public input, is within the public employer’s exclusive purview. The same holds true for a union. It is well recognized that polling of employes and the union’s contract ratification procedures are internal union matters that neither an employer nor non-members of the union have standing to challenge before the Board. As was aptly recognized by the Hearing Examiner, the District was entitled to obtain the public’s opinion before it voted on ratification of a tentative agreement, and it does not matter whether it chose to do so for a period of “ten seconds, ten minutes, ten hours or ten days.”

I think that nails it. The union, which has every right to tell its own members whatever it thinks best, tried to impose a gag rule on elected officials’ right (a duty, I’d say) to tell the public how those officials were proposing to spend public money. I think that the board made a mistake in ever agreeing to gag itself — an agreement that doubtless sounded sensible at the start of negotiations but a mistake nevertheless. But the board’s ultimate decision to publish resulted in an important statement of principle by the PRLB. That statement deserves to be more widely read.

An article in the today’s Valley News Dispatch reports that both board and union have submitted proposed settlements to an arbitration panel. The story said that the board would be posting its offer online soon, so I thought I’d check to see how they’d do that. While I was at it, I checked the union’s website, too. (The teachers union is the SBCEA, for South Butler County Education Association.)

Usually, the closest thing to numerical analysis on union websites is data suggesting that the teachers whose contracts are being negotiated are paid less than those in nearby districts. Now and then, you’ll see data to the effect that the union demands are affordable — e.g., that a district’s fund balance has grown or that many of its older teachers are retiring. The SBCEA website makes these arguments, but its most interesting material is an attempt to discredit the board’s description of pay raise percentages. Basically, the SBCEA argues that seniority-based pay increases shouldn’t be counted when computing these percentages.

In its “economic issues” paper, the board asserts that it is offering its teachers a 3.25% pay raise worth, on average, $1,775 per year and further asserts that the union is demanding 5.9%, or $3,400 per year. (Note: Neither the board nor the union has yet posted the proposals just submitted to the arbitration panel. The numbers that follow may be dated, but the logic of the case is still instructive.) Here’s the union point of view (minus graphics).

The vast majority of teacher contracts in Pennsylvania use a salary scale system, as per the Pennsylvania school code. Each year a teacher moves up one step/one increment on the scale until reaching the top of the scale (as a master teacher). In the case of South Butler, there are 20 increments on this scale….taking 20 years to get to the top of the pay scale. The incremental cost is how much money it takes to move everyone through the incremental steps each year.
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Therefore, in order to keep the integrity of the scale as well as keep the spending power of this scale steady from year to year, new money has to be added to the existing money on the current salary scale. Incremental costs MUST BE subtracted from any percentage as that is the money necessary to keep the salary scale intact and not make it regressive to any member on the scale. Any additional money after incremental costs is essentially the RAISE a member receives to keep their salary in line with inflation/cost-of-living rates. [Capitals in original.]

Elsewhere the union defines incremental raises as “raises received by teachers to move them, one step per year, from wherever they are on the salary schedule toward the job rate as they master their craft.” (My italics here.)

The SBCEA goes on to say that the average “incremental cost” for South Butler during the course of the proposed contract will be 2.26%. The union insists that this percentage should be (sorry, MUST BE) subtracted from both the board’s and the union’s proposals. That would reduce the board’s offering to an “insulting” 0.99% increase (averaging $414/year) and the union’s to “a reasonable 3.49% raise on top of the increment” ($1,848/year).

In plain English, “incremental raises” are what are usually called “step increases” or seniority-based raises, meaning the annual increases in teachers’ base salary for every additional year they work in a district (up to some negotiable limit — 20 years in the South Butler district). And since seniority-based step increases are part of the natural order of things, something to be taken for granted, they shouldn’t be counted when calculating the size of negotiated pay increases.

As bizarre as the union argument sounds to people in the private sector, there’s an underlying logic to it that resonates emotionally with a lot of teachers. Beginning teachers, just graduated from a four-year college, are likely to start at about the same salaries (and often better benefits) as professionals in other fields who have similar academic credentials and no prior work experience. But professionals in other fields can expect to move up in salary based on the results they produce for their employers. By contrast, teachers, if they stay in teaching, know that their financial advancement depends almost entirely on seniority, not on how hard they work or how effectively they teach kids. When an entire system defines “job rate” in terms of years of tenure, it’s not surprising that people in that system think of annual pay raises as automatic and consider a “real” raise only something that can be negotiated above what they would have received under their old contract just by staying on the job a year longer.

As reasonable as all this sounds to many teachers, to most people in the private sector it sounds nuts. In the private sector annual raises can’t be taken for granted. In the current economy, a lot of people count themselves lucky to have jobs at all, let alone get automatic raises, simply because of a past career choice.

Incidentally, the term “job rate” is an odd borrowing. Even within industries where seniority is a factor in raises, “job rate” suggests different pay scales for different jobs within a firm — e.g., in construction, different rates for welders and sheet-metal workers, or in a consulting firm, different pay scales for computer programmers and accountants. The term would make sense in public education if teaching physics and teaching physical education were recognized for what they are — different jobs, with some similarities and some differences, rather like welding and sheet-metal work.

Finally, defining a “master teacher” by some negotiated length of tenure is silly on the face of it. Some teachers deserve that label long before 20 years; others after two decades are just marking time. The latter group are “master teachers” only in the sense that I’d be called a “master runner” in a road race competition. The event sponsors would use that to refer to my age class, but that flattering label doesn’t tell you anything about how fast I can run.

The SBCEA’s case may be convincing only to the union faithful. And the board’s case may be convincing only to people who understand only that a raise by any name must somehow be paid for. At least, however, both sides have made their cases in public. I suspect that the union felt compelled to respond to the board’s published data. In any case, I’d love to know how these two ways of looking at the numbers play in the South Butler SD during the next few weeks, while both sides await an arbitration finding and then have to vote on whether to accept it.