Anatomy of a strike: Bennington impasse over “steps” and health care concessions may have statewide implications

UPDATE: Bennington area teachers and the Southwest Supervisory Union have reached a tentative agreement, according to a press release from the Vermont-NEA. Schools could reopen tomorrow; the union has yet to ratify the contract. The three-year agreement includes modest raises, concessions on health care and new work rules for teachers.

Bennington is tied with Colchester for a dubious record — the second longest teachers’ strike in Vermont history. Southwest Supervisory Union has been closed for nine days now, as long as the Colchester school system strike lasted in 2005. Only the 1985 strike in Hinesburg was longer, at a whopping 87 days.

The Bennington board and union have been irreconcilable since June 30, when the Southwest Supervisory Union Board imposition went into effect. Officials from the union and board both expressed a desire to end the strike on Monday.

The Southwest Supervisory Union includes Mount Anthony Union High School, Southwest Regional Technical School District and the Woodford, Pownal and North Bennington elementary school districts. The union serves 3,114 students and employs 345 staff members.

Stephannie Peters, the head of the local union, says teachers went on strike to protest what the union sees as a draconian contract the board imposed last summer. At the end of June, the board cut the base salary for starting teachers by $2,000, required teachers to contribute 5 percent more toward health insurance premiums, and mandated that teachers work with students for an additional 30 minutes a day (for a total of five hours of direct interaction with students per diem).

Peters says these conditions have lowered teacher take-home pay.

“Imposition was quite disrespectful; it directly contradicts the idea behind actually negotiating,” Peters said. “We would not be striking today if they had not imposed.”

Tim Holbrook, unofficial spokesman for the board, said the imposition put the board in a better position to negotiate with the union.

“If you don’t have a contract, raises and things revert to the previous contract,” Holbrook said. “If that were true, we weren’t in a strong bargaining situation. They would automatically get a step increase, and there would be no incentive to negotiate. We wanted as much as possible to work with the teachers to resolve some of these issues.”

In the latest proposals from the board, Holbrook said, “nobody loses money,” even if teachers pay more for health insurance. The new contract, he said, would be retroactive over the course of the imposition and teachers would be made whole.

Both sides are anxious to get back to the negotiating table, and he said there is mutual agreement on 170 out of 199 areas of the 60-page contract. Holbrook and Peters both said they hoped the dispute would be resolved on Monday. The board planned to hold a series of meetings with the public to explain the results of the most recent talks with teachers.

State officials take sides

Whether the strike is settled right away or not, the nine-day strike has reverberated politically.

Pressure is beginning to mount from union and political leaders in Montpelier for the two sides to settle, and proxies who are taking up the charge have enjoined in a rhetorical battle over teachers’ rights.

The Vermont-NEA brought Joyce Powell, a member of the national organization who fought the “anti-union” Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, to Bennington to rally teachers before they presented a new proposal to the board Monday morning. Powell’s mission, according to a union media advisory? “To let the members of the Southwestern Vermont Education Association know that they are not alone.”

Meanwhile political pressure from several state leaders is also building.

On Friday, Pat MacDonald, chairwoman of the Vermont GOP, urged Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat endorsed by the Vermont NEA, to encourage teachers to settle.

McDonald pointed to recent “broadsides” from the governor’s office in response to a state workers’ grievance as evidence that Shumlin “isn’t afraid to confront organized labor when it suits his political interests.” She argues that he should “direct his ire” toward the Bennington teachers union.

“It is outrageous that this strike has gone on for so long, and it’s time for the governor to speak up and tell the striking teachers to get back to work,” McDonald said in a statement. “Parents need to get back to their jobs, and kids need to get back into the classroom. As Vermont’s commissioner of education put it earlier this week, it is time to stand up for the silent victims of strikes: students.”

Shumlin has not issued a statement about the strike.

Armando Vilaseca, commissioner of the Department of Education, disseminated an op-ed last week that outlined the impact of the strike on students who rely on free and reduced lunches as a main source of nutrition, and college-bound seniors who will fall behind on applications and AP studies. All students, he says, stand to suffer academically.

The commissioner advocates for new legislation that would put an end to teachers’ strikes – and a school board’s ability to impose salaries, benefits and working conditions. Vermont is one of 13 states that allow strikes; none of the other New England states permits the practice.

Since the beginning of the school year, Bennington teachers have been working under an “imposition” that requires them to take a roughly 2 percent pay cut, contribute 5 percent more toward health care premiums and spend more time in the classroom.

“This is not about taking sides,” Vilaseca said in an interview.

“I’m not saying the school board or association members are at fault. The ultimate real losers in this are our kids and our communities. It’s a gut-wrenching and difficult option for teachers to take. It is a really difficult situation for boards to be in as well. I understand both perspectives when I look at what is happening for kids. As commissioner for education, I have to be the one advocating for our kids. I want this to be a discussion point.”

The Vermont NEA said it is “disappointed” by Vilaseca’s remarks.

Darren Allen, communications director for the union, said “A time of crisis is not the time to have a public policy discussion.”
Vilaseca has floated the no-strike, no-imposition concept before. Legislation of the same sort, proposed by Rep. Kurt Wright, R-Burlington, was rejected by the House Education Committee a few years ago.

Rep. Johanna Donovan, D-Burlington, says the situation in Bennington is unfortunate, but said she is unlikely to endorse Vilaseca’s proposal.

“I think collective bargaining is a critical piece, and the right to strike is part of that,” Donovan said. “It’s not the first choice, but I support the right to strike.”

Donovan argued that strikes are very rare in Vermont.

How uncommon are they? There have been five strikes over the last 10 years. The most recent was in Richmond in 2006.

According to the Vermont NEA website, there have been 23 strikes since 1978. Over the course of the last 40 years, since unions began to form at schools around the state, about 5,000 contracts have been settled.

Though the number of strikes is fairly small, the Vermont School Boards Association past president Kalee Roberts is concerned about the length of the bargaining process. “Contract negotiations between school boards and school employees are too often protracted, sometimes taking more than a year to conclude.”

Roberts said Vilaseca’s proposal should be analyzed to determine whether an elimination of teacher strikes and board impositions would “lead to more efficient and timely resolution of collective bargaining processes.”

“This is a very difficult time,” Roberts said. “There is significant pressure on boards all around the state as they work to provide excellent educational opportunity at a time of diminishing resources. It is critical that teachers and boards understand the economic situation of this state and country and respond accordingly.”

The genesis of a strike

Bennington teachers have worked without a contract since June 30, 2010. Over the course of the last year and a half, teachers and the Southwest Supervisory Union Board went through the usual process. They negotiated and failed to come to terms.

Both sides lawyered up. A fact-finder was brought in to clarify the issues. Negotiations continued, and failed. The board imposed working conditions after school let out and teachers found out about it through a story in the local newspaper.

They took 30 years of mutually agreed upon language and disassembled it. The very nature of imposing something sends a clear message you do not want to respectfully negotiate.”
- Stephannie Peters

Teachers attended board meetings through the summer en masse, and Peters said they couldn’t get the board back to the bargaining table. After the strike ensued, negotiations took a sour turn when board members admitted they had been using an inaccurate salary schedule.

The three main issues the board and union have disagreed on are health insurance premiums, work rules and salaries.

The board asked teachers to pay 20 percent of the premium by the end of 2014 (the percentage would gradually increase); teachers wouldn’t budge from the 15 percent they were already contributing.

Holbrook said most Bennington residents pay a much higher percentage toward health care premiums. The teacher health care insurance plan is “very comprehensive,” he said. The total cost for a family plan is about $19,700, and the district picks up 85 percent of the cost.

The two sides also battled over time in the classroom. Teachers were required to spend 4.5 hours with students out of a 7.5-hour workday under the old contract. Board members wanted educators to work with students for 5 hours a day.

Salaries have been, perhaps, the biggest sticking point. Teachers are paid based on years of experience and level of education, and each district has a “grid” or spreadsheet that details all of the iterations of those two factors and applies a salary amount to each one. The grid is organized in steps. That is to say, inexperienced teachers are placed on the bottom step and teachers with masters degrees and 40 years of time in the system are at the top.

In negotiations, there are typically two salary adjustments school boards must consider. One is the “base salary” increase or the amount earned by teachers at the bottom of the grid. (This figure, a percentage of pay, is applied across the grid.) The other is the percentage “step” increase, an amount that is distributed across the grid, regardless of experience and education.

The Bennington teachers wanted a 1.8 percent annual step increase, as per usual during negotiations, in addition to base salary increases of 8 percent over a three-year period. (With the “steps,” the raise amounts to 13.4 percent at the end of three years.) The “step” alone would have amounted to a $1,455 average annual raise for teachers in the district, Holbrook said. The board offered no step increase and base salary increases of 3.25 percent over a three-year period.

Given the recession and the low average earning power of local residents, Holbrook said the salary offer was “quite reasonable.”

The Southwest Vermont Education Association balked at the work rules, the health care contribution and low percentage increase in base wages, but it was the elimination of “steps” that sent members over the edge.

“Step” increases are included in many teacher contracts in Vermont. Until the imposition, Bennington teachers received the 1.8 percent raise automatically – regardless of performance, experience or education level. The Bennington board eliminated the “step” increase in the imposition and proposed that the automatic increase be jettisoned in the negotiated contract. That same issue was the lightning rod that brought the South Burlington school system close to a strike last spring.

The final blow, and what led to the strike, according to Peters, was the board’s insistence that the new contract be based on the cuts in the more recent imposed conditions instead of the former, more generous contract, which expired on June 30, 2010.

Peters said the imposition “directly contradicts the nature of negotiations.”

“We have now been without a contract for over 500 days,” Peters said. “This was not a quick decision, not a quick action that we took without great consideration and without making serious attempts to take action — none of which were effective.”

“They took 30 years of mutually agreed upon language and disassembled it,” Peters said. “The very nature of imposing something sends a clear message you do not want to respectfully negotiate.”

Though a budget hasn’t been rejected by local voters in recent memory, Holbrook argues that the Bennington area is relatively poor, and local property taxpayers can’t afford to pay more for teachers’ salaries. The average wage in the county, he said, is about $35,000. Under the old contract, teachers earned starting salaries of about $34,500 and top out at about $63,600.

“How many people get a guaranteed step increase of 1.8 percent — no matter how the economy is faring, or how good a job you’re doing?” Holbrook said. “That’s a nice deal.”

Vermont-NEA Communications Director Allen says Bennington teachers are paid less than their compatriots in Albany and northern Massachusetts, and lowering salaries further still will make it more difficult for the Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union to attract new teachers.