[T]he Vermont House is expected to vote Wednesday on a proposal that would ban strikes by public school teachers and prohibit school boards from imposing contract terms.
The vote will come in the form of an amendment to strike the language in H.76 and replace it with a narrower version containing those prohibitions, and to create a task force to study school labor issues.
Supporters of the revised language attempted to drum up support for the amendment Tuesday.
Amendment co-sponsor Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, a school board member, testified before a joint meeting of the House Education Committee and the House General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee on Tuesday about a teachers’ strike last fall in his community.
LaLonde explained why he believes it’s important to take away the so-called “nuclear options” from both sides in a labor impasse. He explained that South Burlington’s divisive strike last fall caused harm to the community and the students.
The House Education Committee version of the bill included a controversial one-cent penalty to be levied against the homestead tax rate in towns where an impasse dragged on more than a year past the expiration of a teachers contract.
The bill then moved to the House General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee, which on Friday voted 3 to 5 against the bill’s advancement.
The amendment eliminates the one-cent penalty. The underlying bill proposed by Rep. Kurt Wright, R-Burlington, a member of the House Education Committee, seeks only to ban strikes and contract impositions. It also proposes the establishment of a task force to work on issues around teacher and administrator contracts and labor concerns.
The Task Force on Dispute Resolution in Labor Relations for Teachers and Administrators would “study possible statutory changes to improve the process for the resolution of a dispute or impasse during labor negotiations for Vermont school teachers and administrators without requiring that a dispute or impasse be submitted to mandatory binding interest arbitration.”
The members of the committee would include: the president of the Vermont-National Education Association or designee; the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association or designee; two individuals with experience in labor relations for school teachers and administrators designated by the Vermont NEA; two individuals with experience in labor relations for school teachers and administrators designated by the Vermont School Boards Association; and the executive director of the Vermont Labor Relations Board.
The amendment would require the task force to make a written report and recommendation to the House committees on Education and Housing, General and Military Affairs and the Senate committees on Education and Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs.
Banning teacher strikes is among the goals laid out by Gov. Peter Shumlin earlier this session, Wright said at a morning news conference.
“This bill is pro-community, most importantly,” Wright said of H.76, adding that, in his view, it is also pro-teacher and pro-student.
Vermont is the only state in New England that allows teacher strikes, and one of just over a dozen nationally, Wright said.
“It’s time that we join the 37 other states in the country that don’t allow strikes, and don’t allow imposition,” he continued.
LaLonde said taking away the “nuclear option” from both sides will “allow much more dialogue.”
Rep. Alyson Eastman, I-Orwell, who is also a school board member, said she has worked from sunset to sunrise “on the eve of a teacher’s strike,” and those kinds of situations don’t get talked about much, but happen. “I believe there is nothing positive to be gained from a strike,” she said.
Rep. Kevin “Coach” Christie, D-Hartford, ranking member of the House Education Committee and a co-sponsor of the amendment, is likewise a longtime school board member in his town, and has been involved as a teacher and an administrator.
“It comes down to one thing for me — it’s about the kids, it’s about families, it’s about our teachers and about our communities,” he said.
The existing system, Christie said, is not fair to everyone involved, which is why he supports banning strikes and contract imposition.
Supporters of the ban at the press conference included LaLonde, Wright, Christie and Eastman, the Vermont Business Roundtable, the Vermont School Boards Association, the Vermont Superintendents Association and the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.
The Vermont-National Education Association remains vehemently opposed to the bill.
“We remain firmly opposed to H.76, and this proposed amendment does nothing to change that,” Darren Allen of the Vermont NEA said in an email. “Given the current political climate in Vermont and around the country, we do not support any erosions of collective bargaining. We would certainly hate to see Vermont’s House – made up of mostly Democrats – join the sad list of legislative chambers already on the anti-labor bandwagon.”
Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, vice chairman of the House General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee, asked during the joint meeting of his committee with House Education, if it was valid for the legislation’s sponsors to say both sides are represented in the bill when the teachers’ union was not part of the bill’s drafting.
“The teachers are completely exempt from this conversation,” Stevens said.
“As someone who believes in strikes and impositions being banned,” watching how divisive strikes have been in Colchester and South Burlington, Wright responded, “Either way you go on this bill, you have to have some intestinal fortitude. We tried to get both parties to agree.”
Rep. Helen Head, D-South Burlington, chair of the General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee, said she believes more study is needed and does not support the bill as amended.
“My concern is that with this amendment we are removing a system that we know and replacing it with something that we don’t know,” Head said.
She said she agrees with a proposal in the amendment that calls for a task force involving the parties with a stake in teacher labor issues, but not with the bans.
Having gone through the strike in South Burlington last year, LaLonde and Head said they know firsthand what a strike does to a community.
LaLonde said he voted against the school board’s imposition of a contract on the teachers’ union last year, and the city went through a difficult five-day strike.
“We did get a lot of input from the community that it was a very negative stand for the board to take, and my general viewpoint was that we should have continued to talk and continued to negotiate,” LaLonde said.
Not allowing the extreme threat to be used will make the parties “more open to dialogue and trying to find compromise positions,” he said.