At the end of last October I posted a note on South Butler County SD (Butler County, northeast of Pittsburgh), drawing attention to its website’s point-by-point comparison of board and union proposals and its detailed list of teacher salaries and benefits. Soon thereafter, the union struck for 18 days in November.

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.
…
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.