One of the state’s longer-running contract negotiations will go on still longer. On April 15 the Northwest Area SD (Luzerne County) board rejected a union settlement offer by a 5-3 vote. While trying to find out what the dispute is all about I belatedly stumbled on a two-years-old, must-read ruling by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board — striking down a union attempt to muzzle the Northwest Area school board.
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.
