Bargaining for a statewide health insurance plan for all of Vermont’s K-12 educators has just begun, and it’s already contentious.
Union representatives sat down with school board officials for the first time on April 1 to begin negotiating for a statewide benefit.
The Vermont School Boards Association has already filed an unfair labor practice charge against the unions with the state’s Labor Relations Board. The Vermont-NEA, meanwhile, has responded with a press release, accusing the VSBA of trying to “oust educators from bargaining” and proposing “hikes that will cost educators thousands of dollars.”
Legislators last year created a 10-member commission tasked with negotiating a statewide health care plan for Vermont’s roughly 40,000 school employees. The commission includes five representatives from the union side – four from the Vermont-NEA, and one from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees – and five representatives from school boards.
At issue is whether the unions can include five “alternate” commissioners in negotiations. The Vermont-NEA argues alternates would prevent delays in the process by stepping in as voting members if a union representative can’t make it to a meeting and lend a wider perspective to talks. Will Adams, an elementary teacher in Hardwick and the spokesperson for union members on the commission, said employees were happy to have school boards appoint their own alternates.
The two sides, he said, must come to agreement on a proposal to “dramatically change public sector health care in Vermont.”
“Rather than getting down to the brass tacks of figuring out how we’re going to do that in a very compressed timeframe, the school board’s association is literally more interested in arguing about who is going to be in the room,” Adams said in an interview.
Officials with the VSBA referred questions to Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the school board chair in South Burlington and the lead negotiator for employers.
Fitzgerald declined a phone interview, but in a statement said the union’s request for alternates was “contrary to the explicit language in the statute,” which did not allow for “alternate commissioners, observers, or negotiators-in-training, as the union contends.”
“These are very complex, high stakes, and confidential negotiations. We do not want a circus atmosphere where each side brings an audience of observers, or a cheerleading section,” Fitzgerald wrote.
The two sides also appear very far apart on the substance of the proposals.
The school boards have pitched a two-year deal in which all employees – teachers, administrators, and support staff alike – pay for 30 percent of premiums. The unions have put forward a four-year proposal that would preserve existing, locally-negotiated premium cost-sharing agreements. The NEA said that would allow more time to craft an income-sensitive model in which higher-paid employees would pay more for healthcare.
Fitzgerald, in her statement, blasted the unions’ proposals for maintaining the status quo, and said it would “inevitably result in tens of millions of additional dollars of extra costs to Vermont taxpayers.”
The NEA said in a press release that the school boards’ proposal would “balloon all school employees’ out-of-pocket costs more every year; make it harder for the lowest-paid school employees to obtain health insurance; and shift most of the risk of future premium increases to school employees.”
The two sides are expected to come to an agreement by August 1. If they fail to do so, an arbitrator will have to step in. According to the timelines set out in law, a statewide plan is supposed to go into effect July 1, 2020. The union and the Vermont School Boards Association have talked with legislators about extending the timeline by six months to January 1, 2021.
