Impasse: Union, school district far apart on contract talks

PALMER — Negotiations between the School District and the Classified Employees Association appear to have stalled.

The Classified Employees Association is the union that represents secretaries, lunchroom workers and, according to its president, Rick Byrnes, everyone at the district who isn’t a teacher or management. Byrnes said his people have gone since June without a contract. In the interim, they’ve worked under the conditions in their previous contract.

He said that from his vantage, the district has folded its arms, offering a three-year contract with no pay increases and a doubling of union workers’ out-of-pocket insurance payments. He said the district hasn’t budged from that position, meaning that little, if any, actual negotiation has transpired.

“Everyone else in the district has between a 3.25 and a 4 percent (pay) increase for this year,” he said. “We’re not asking to be treated above and beyond anybody else, we’re just asking to be treated just like the other school district employees.”

But Colleen Vague, president of the school board, said that, in her view, the sticking point lies elsewhere — with the janitors CEA brought onboard this school year. In June, the school board voted to bring the janitors in-house, ending a contract it had held for the services with NANA Management Services since 2006. Vague said the union is trying to get janitors up to the contractual levels they would be at had they worked as district employees during the outsourcing period.

“Our position on that is that they haven’t been employees for three years,” and thus they must be treated as new employees, she said.

She said the district, and the board, didn’t want a delay and called the drawn-out negotiations an “unfortunate misplacement of energy.”

“You never want a contract to go past its expiration date and that wasn’t our desire either,” she said.

Though the CEA contract expired in June, Byrnes said the district and the union were negotiating since February. He also said the stall in negotiations has nothing to do with the janitors.

“I’m sure from the district’s standpoint they’ll try to make the case that it does, but that’s just 100 of the 700 employees that we have,” he said.

Whatever the case, the situation got a bit more visible at last week’s school board meeting. Union members staged a protest just before the meeting began at Palmer High School, waving signs and chanting slogans.

Byrnes said there are no future protests planned and that the union has a lot of other avenues to travel before it does anything drastic like staging strikes or walkouts.

“There are other steps that we can take, much like the protest and things like that, that we can continue to do to continue to put pressure on the school board to direct their attorney to negotiate,” he said.

As for what’s next, Vague said she hopes the school board will continue to follow its legal advice.

Recently, Byrnes said, the district’s attorney invited CEA to go into advisory arbitration on the matter. He said CEA’s position is it doesn’t want to wait the three or four months arbitration could take.

Asked about arbitration, Vague said that if that’s the advice the board gets then that’s likely where things will go.

“If we had all the money in the world this wouldn’t be an issue,” she said. “We’re trying to use it wisely and wisely for us is meeting the needs of the students.”

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