According to a December 23 article at CitizensVoice.com, Lake-Lehman teachers are on strike. The article says that striking teachers are not only picketing the schools but the places of employment of at least three board members. A state mediator has asked the two sides not to comment on negotiations. Maybe that’s good tactical advice for the principal negotiators, but from a public policy perspective there’s something bizarre about it. Why is it OK for strikers to try to manipulate public opinion, even to the point of targeting individual school directors, but not OK for the handful of people on both sides who are well informed about the issues to state their positions in any detail?
Whatever the merits of either side’s case, I remain baffled how anyone can claim to be against “negotiating in public” while marching around with placards in front of their own job sites and the job sites of people on the other side of the negotiating table.
In fact, both sides have posted summaries of their proposals at their websites, and so far the union has made the more detailed statement of its case. The text of its December letter to the Lake-Lehman superintendent appears at the union website.
The school board has a summary of its proposal at its website. This summary is dated August 27, and it appears that the board proposal has changed little, if at all, since that point. I’m not critical of that, but it seems to me unwise for the board to give the union the last word in what is now a very public debate.
The union case is more detailed, but hardly bulletproof. It cites PSERS data celebrating five years of pension fund gains but ignoring a recent Wall Street Journal report (published one week before the union letter) of PSERS losses around 14% since June 30. The union seeks an “early retirement incentive” of 75% of last year’s salary for teachers who retire this year and a continuation for retirees of “current insurance until eligible for other employment or government provided insurance.”
The union letter indicates that its most recent salary proposals are lower than previous ones but that some earlier concessions on health care cost-sharing have been withdrawn. The reason given is that the district’s participation in a health trust has resulted in premium rebates, making it possible for the district to pay more than it is offering. The union asks for salary increases rising over a seven-year contract from 3% to 4%. (The board’s proposal begins at 1.5%, retroactive for the two contract years that have already passed, followed by five annual raises of 3% beginning in the current year.)
The board statement of its position is only minimally informative. It’s clearer in the union proposals that health benefits are a major bone of contention. The board lists its proposed deductibles and co-pays, but then adds only this cryptic line: “abrogation of past practices.” Readers are left to guess what this means. I gathered from the union proposal that this must refer to continued benefits for retirees, but that’s my inference, not something I’m sure of. Why should anyone have to guess? The union website makes a strong case that its proposals are affordable, and the board fails to point out that affordability is not in itself a strong argument. The case to be made is not merely that an employer can pay employees more but that there are good reasons why the employer should pay more.
As always, my brief is for transparency. Union negotiators can make absurdly high demands behind closed doors, modifying them to look more reasonable when forced to go public. Boards can employ the same tactic, making absurdly low offers behind closed doors. In fact, however, boards have less room than unions for gamesmanship. That’s partly because so much about district finances is already a matter of public record and partly because boards need to know how they’ll pay for whatever they offer with real money. “Negotiating in public” would produce better negotiations — less room for gamesmanship on either side and, I’m convinced, fewer strikes.
