On January 4, the Negotiating Team met with the administration's team to follow up on their offer from December and our concerns about the breach in the confidentiality agreement through which they released that offer. We've posted the agenda for the meeting and a Framework for a Fair Contract elsewhere on the site, and I'd encourage you to check it out. (The Team spent time over the break preparing and refining the framework over the break to get ready for the meeting, and I can tell you the Fact-finding team has also been exchanging emails about the favorable decision by the Fact-finder on comparable institutions and starting to organize for the next round.)

Since this is a somewhat long post, it broken down into two sections. The first is on our concerns about the confidentiality agreement and the effect of its breach. It reviews some of the history and what we said at the meeting. The second part deals with our conversation about the framework and the plan for going forward.

Confidentiality Agreements Made Mutually Should Be Broken Mutually, Not Unilaterally

For those who missed it because of the end of the semester/holiday distractions, we posted a few concerns about confidentiality and the an analysis of the administration's offer on Dec 20. This grows out of the early Dec meeting, following President Fallon's 'invitation' to return to negotiations, meaning they had an offer for us. The administration had written up an extensive, very restrictive confidentiality agreement (the .pdf of the cover letter is available through the link above). We were exceedingly skeptical and wanted them to run it past our lawyer, Harvey Wax. In spite of having days to do so and knowing his schedule, it didn't get to him in time.

We flat out refused to sign the letter and discussed a verbal confidentiality agreement, under which we would be able to share details of the offer with the Executive Committee but not the Bargaining Council or the faculty generally. We all believed that sucked. Standing in the hallway for a caucus, the notion "this is Bulls%@t" came up more than once. We came very close to just leaving the meeting. But ultimately, we felt it was int he best interests of the membership if got to the point where we could actually receive the offer they had worked on and talk about it.

The offer itself was unimpressive, as we've analyzed in the link above, and as Howard indicated to faculty in emails. But what's relevant here is that the administration decided, without further consultation with us, to make the offer formal and share it widely with the EMU community. This was the concern we tried to raise with them at the meeting - the confidentiality agreement was worked out mutually and should require mututal agreement to modify. The AAUP had already agreed to meet with them in January, so there was no need for unilateral action here.

Ultimately, what's the point of negotiating an agreement if one side can abandon it on a whim? While they claim to have done this for us and so we could communicate with our membership, we are deeply skeptical of the administration acting unilaterally in ways they see as being for our own good. That's a bad precedent, and it would have been better to show respect for the mutual agreement and the bargaining process to return to that before moving forward unilaterally.

Bottom line - we've told them officially that the confidentiality agreement is no longer in place, that we won't be negotiating another one in any form, and they've undercut what trust remained in the process. We will not be attending meeting if they indent to show us a proposalon paper, then try to collect it before the end of the session (something they did over the summer). Unless we can take the paper with us and talk to the full membership about it, we're not interested.

Framework for a Fair Contract and the Lack of a Couter-proposal

When we left the session in December, the administration's outside attorney Jim Ggreene said he expected a "significant" counter-offer from us. So there's the game: throw us a few bread crums and expect a counter-offer where we give up a lot more than they gave. The Executive Committee voted not to make a formal counter-offer, and the Bargaining Council did the same after a brief summary of the offer that was consistent with the confidentiality agreement. Our last request of a contract that had a net raise (raise minus health care premiums) of 3.5% and there was substantial agreement that we should no come down from that.

The Framework came out of the desire to respond to aspects of their proposal we found unacceptable - the money not to base salary in year 1, no retroactivity, and a very backloaded contract. It articulates some ongoing concerns - how the AAUP has proposed many changes in healthcare, how we have shown reasonableness in restructuring health care for the long run, and how we think they should now compromise on their excessive demands for high premiums in the first year. (It's amazing that the Health Care Task Force recommended a wellness program and other options to implement before health care premiums, but the administration has not taken basic steps that are well established to help control health care costs, and just wants to massively increase premiums and get us to commit to 10% a year increases after that.) Many thanks to Jim Carroll for starting this document an offering many helpful suggestions.

As we ran through the framework, they did not have too many questions. Most of the discussion was on the combination of a flat wage increase and a percentage increase. Over the summer we had proposed this as a way to make sure premiums did not adversely affect those withthe lowest salaries. We liked this idea, although it was not a formal element of all the proposals because it gets complicated to compare offers with more moving parts (ie the new proposal has new health care premiums and new flat raises). But we're committeed to this and wanted to make sure the concept was clear, so we had a foundation for implementing whenever we agree on raises and premiums.

When we were done, they wanted a counter-offer to put detail on our framework. We refused and explained that coming down from our lasst reasonable offer was not in our best interests. They were surprised and annoyed we were not playing this game. They cancelled negotiating session over the summer when we wanted more, they walked out when we wanted to talk, but we're the bad guys now for believing that fact-finding is more likely to get us a good contract than swapping another few series of proposals.

What came out in the end is that we'll produce a 'demonstration paper' that will be the same as our last offer, but elaborated to include the flat plus percentage increases. We wanted to make sure that if we produced it, there wouldn't be a PR attack for offering the same proposal again, so we're going to work on a short memo whereby they invite us to submit the demonstration paper fleshing out our last offer, and whereby we don't attack them for rejecting it.

As a final note/concern: late in the session, it became clear that each side had very different assumptions on what a 1% raise cost. We had a very elaborate explanation of how we calculated the cost of our salary proposal when we did the original presentation (click here and go to salaryproposal.pdf). They never engaged on this, and when they presented their original 2% salary offer they didn't include any analysis or supporting documentation for it, so this issue never even came up as it should have.

So, we've proposed that we create an explanation of how we arrived at our figure that could be run by the new VP of Business and Finance to see if we can come together on the figure a little.

No new meeting dates have been set. the fact-finding team meets today at 10, and I'l be leaving in just a minute for that. I hope everyone can be patient a bit longer and hang tight with us. This is frustrating, but we do not want to sacrafice our long-term interest in a good contract.