Tough Times at the Table
AFT affiliates fight to protect hard-won bargaining gains

People used to wait anxiously for the latest contract agreements coming out of the New York City, Chicago and Minneapolis public schools. From groundbreaking peer-assistance programs to landmark career pathway options, these and other AFT locals helped set the standard for systemwide improvement through collective bargaining. Many of these pacts won national and international acclaim, and they laid the groundwork for positive improvements in a host of other districts, large and small.

Today, people still wait anxiously for contract news—but for entirely different reasons. A sour job market, skyrocketing healthcare costs and a tidal wave of government red ink—compounded by many instances of blatant anti-union sentiment across the table—now set the tone. And locals at the forefront of bargaining for school improvement and educator professionalism now find themselves in the fight of their lives to defend years—even decades—of progress at the negotiating table.

“Without a doubt, this is the toughest bargaining environment I’ve ever seen,” says AFT research and information services department director Jewell Gould, who for more than two decades has provided locals with statistical expertise during contract negotiations.

He gets no argument from David Sherman, a vice president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, which is in tough negotiations of its own. “I’ve helped bargain six contracts,” Sherman says, “and I cannot remember a worse situation.”

As Minneapolis gears up for contract talks, Louise Sundin, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and an AFT vice president, is certainly under no illusions about what’s ahead. The local already has fought tooth and nail to restore hundreds of lost jobs from the end of the 2002-03 school year, salvaging about half of those cuts, and now finds itself in a daily battle just to get the district to honor language in the last contract. “Everything we’ve worked to create is being dismantled,” warns Sundin. “The most disappointing part is we see 20 years of progress being whittled away and 20 years of professionalism being turned back.”
 

BAD MEDICINE

So what’s poisoning the bargaining landscape? There are almost as many reasons as there are locals, but certainly healthcare costs have made a big dent in constructive dealmaking.

The annual employer health benefits survey by the Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET) found that the cost of employee premiums rose a staggering 13.9 percent in 2003. That’s the third consecutive year of double-digit increases and the biggest jump since 1990. You can see its impact on the U.S. Labor Department’s widely watched Employment Cost Index (ECI), a gauge of compensation for nonfarm private workers as well as state and government workers. The ECI rose 1 percent in the quarter ending September 2003, easily outpacing inflation. But it was the rising cost of benefits, not salaries, that gobbled up much of the gain. And the “crowding out” effect of healthcare and other benefits was much worse for state and local government employees, a sector in which the benefits price tag rose at an annual 8 percent clip.

“Among state and local government workers, benefit costs accounted for more than 55 percent of compensation gains during the quarter, with health insurance and defined-benefit costs” eating up half of the overall compensation gains, the Labor Department reports.

And the problem is getting worse, not better, the latest HRET survey suggests.

“In every negotiation, the cost of benefits continues to be the ‘800-pound gorilla’ at the table,” Gould says. “The latest Employment Cost Index is additional evidence that competitive wages and other key bargaining objectives could be jeopardized without healthcare reform.”

Certainly healthcare costs have weighed heavily in Chicago, where 33,000 Chicago Teachers Union members have rejected a five-year tentative agreement and were poised to vote on a revised contract proposal as American Teacher went to press. In October, members voted overwhelmingly against a tentative agreement, and substantially higher employee costs for healthcare co-payments and prescription drugs were a big reason for the “no” vote. (Many members also objected to the five-year length of the tentative agreement and to extended-workday provisions in the first proposed contract.)

The tentative agreement included annual salary increases of 4 percent, the biggest gains in a quarter century, but “the concern among members was that the salary increases would be eaten up by the healthcare increases,” explains CTU president Deborah Lynch, who is also an AFT vice president. And context is a key to understanding the vote against the proposal, she says. Illinois drew a bull’s-eye around Chicago in the mid-1990s, when it stripped educators of their bargaining rights, and it took years of struggle to regain those rights. In that span, CTU members have suffered a string of below-inflation wage gains and endured attacks and recriminations from all fronts—from a debilitating lack of materials and poor working conditions in many buildings to the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability benchmarks, which have ignored progress in many schools and labeled hundreds of Chicago buildings as failures.

“Members feel scapegoated, and there is a basic mistrust of employers,” Lynch says. “There is a history of suspicion. Members didn’t get big raises in the 1990s, just a series of 2 percent increases, and the board always said ‘there’s no more money.’”

Higher healthcare costs were a spark that helped set this tinderbox of “anger and frustration” ablaze, she adds.
 

HONEY, I BLEW UP THE BUDGET

Ransack public coffers for billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. Restock government at all levels with cookie-cutter politicians chanting the no-new-taxes mantra. Blow up government receipts with a grinding, multiyear economic downturn. And add a bit of conservative invective against “throwing money at failing urban schools.”

That’s the recipe for misery concocted for districts such has Minneapolis, where funding has gone from bad to worse. The state contribution to the school system has dropped by 30 percent, 31 percent and 28.5 percent in the past three years. Politicians have abandoned any effort to focus resources on the schools and students who need them most, opting instead to spread funds thinly around the state.

“In the past, the Legislature had accepted the wisdom that it is more costly to teach kids with multiple challenges, who are not prepared when they come to school, who come from different backgrounds speaking different languages,” MFT president  Sundin says.

“But there’s been a huge shift to the right, and the attitude in the Legislature and governor’s office is to get Minneapolis.”

The cuts translate into across-the-board broken promises, Sundin says. Three times city voters passed a levy to reduce class sizes in recent years. Today, class sizes are going up in the district. Last spring, the board simply stopped fulfilling contractual responsibilities: granting sabbaticals, giving step and lane increases, and providing mentors, forcing the union to grieve many contract violations.

“The school board feels that it would be better for them if someone forced them to do it, that it’s more cost effective for [these issues] to go to arbitration and maybe eventually to court,” Sundin says.

None of this bodes well for contract talks, Sundin adds. In fact, the only thing that she’s sure of is that the local will do everything in its power coming out of talks to remind members and the community of how the system was set up for failure. “We will always focus this back on the politics behind it, how we got into this mess.”
 

WISE UP

Sometimes politicians do the right thing. Such was the case in Nevada, where the Legislature set aside money for a 2 percent raise for public school employees in 2003. But the victory meant little to AFT members in Carson City, Nev., who are represented by the Nevada Classified School Employees Association/AFT. They saw the district plow their state raises into a school general fund that administrators say is strapped for cash. The move touched off a firestorm of protest, as AFT members walked picket lines outside the school district’s central office and at the home of the school board president.

“We’re letting them know we’re not forgetting about this,” says union spokesman Dennis Ziemer. “They have a 2 percent obligation and that’s it. It’s a matter of how soon do they want to stop this.”

The Carson City episode illustrates a key point in many school negotiations. Higher healthcare costs and budget shortfalls are the tragic “givens”—circumstances that neither side can completely control. But, beyond the pressures is the question of how people respond to them. Do they understand compromise? Do they appreciate that having a shared mission is the key ingredient to any successful education effort and not just “a nice thing to have in schools”? Do they fathom that schools are fundamentally different from corporations and fast-food franchises?

It’s that aspect of bargaining that has Sherman and other UFT leaders worried as bargaining proceeds in New York City. Already the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has signaled its intention of using hard-line negotiating tactics and pushing a private business model aimed at bringing a mind-numbing “may-I-take-your-order-please” uniformity to buildings across the city.

At the close of the 2002-03 school year, the system laid off and later recalled 485 paraprofessionals. The union knew these employees would be recalled; the administration knew they would be recalled, too. And little was done, Sherman said, to disguise the point of the layoff: Breathe a little fear into the membership ranks before talks begin.

In October, key administration officials did not even bother to show up at the first bargaining session. And recently school officials have been promulgating rules aimed at “micro-mismanaging” schools. For example, the administration is pressuring principals to dictate everything from the arrangement of classroom furniture (rows, bad; open circles, good) to the decoration of bulletin boards.

“All of these conditions send one message and one message only: Your professionalism is neither valued nor respected. You are here to do as you’re told. Your competence is measured by your compliance with the ‘bulletin-board bylaws,’ and your productivity is measured strictly by test scores. Most of all, you are accountable regardless of the obstacles placed in your way,” UFT president Randi Weingarten told reporters.

“Our goal for these negotiations is to change that message, to achieve for frontline educators the voice and professional consideration that will make public education work for all our children,” said Weingarten, who is also an AFT vice president.

It’s not a bad statement of the core mission that all AFT leaders bring to negotiations. Whether they succeed in these toughest of bargaining climates will depend to a very large degree on the skill and vision that greets them across the table. Facing tough times, this year of bargaining dangerously, what will management’s stance be? “Let’s work through this together” or “Bargain them back to the Stone Age”? It’s an open question—a wildcard that keeps many union leaders awake at night.

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