Court agrees with school district on cleaning work

PALMER — In a decision handed down Friday, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld the Mat-Su Borough School District’s decision to outsource janitorial work.

The matter has been in the courts since 2006 when the union that represents district employees, the Classified Employees Association, filed a grievance asking that the district submit to arbitration on whether CEA’s contract with the borough allowed outsourcing.

Janitorial work was outsourced to NANA Management in 2005 after a series of heated school board meetings. Since then, opponents of outsourcing have made their voices heard sporadically at school board meetings. The district and CEA are hashing out an agreement to possibly return to doing janitorial work in-house. An outside auditor at a meeting last month advised against it.

The district, upon receiving the grievance, refused arbitration and instead filed a suit in court, which the CEA followed up with its own complaint. Both wanted the judge to decide the arbitration question but CEA also asked the judge to rule outsourcing illegal under state law. In 2007, Palmer Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler upheld the district’s decision to avoid arbitration and found that Alaska law permits outsourcing.

In a split 3-2 decision, the Supreme Court upheld Cutler’s decision.

Justice Warren Matthews, writing the majority opinion, said that the agreement the borough signed with CEA has no section dealing with outsourcing. Instead, he said, CEA had relied mainly on records of the history of the bargaining that led to the contract’s creation.

That nobody put it in writing, Warren wrote, was significant.

“Collective bargaining agreements must be in writing, meaning that when we address the question whether a dispute plausibly involves the interpretation or application of a term of an agreement, we look to the written agreement. Here, the written agreement is silent on the subject of outsourcing.”

As to whether state law prevents outsourcing in school districts, Warren said the state law CEA cited doesn’t say that the school district has to employ janitors itself, merely that it has to provide for the services. The law, which goes on to state that borough assemblies will provide for construction, repairs and upgrades of school facilities, is more a way of divvying up responsibilities, Warren wrote.

In that context, Warren said, the law, “suggests that its objective was merely to make clear that borough school boards rather than borough assemblies would have the responsibility to provide, pay for, and control the provision of custodial services for school buildings.”

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Dana Fabe wrote that she would have overturned Cutler’s ruling.

“Because I believe that the determination whether CEA’s interpretation of the (contract) is plausible should be made by the arbitrator, not by the court, I disagree with the court and would reverse the superior court’s decision not to compel arbitration,” Fabe wrote.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.