The blog has been quiet because we have been putting in serious overtime working on the fact-finding presentation. We did well in round one, which established our comparable institutions. The task this time around was to use the comparables to justify our positions on salary, retirement, health care, duration of the contract and several other small matters.

Some of these matters are quite complex, and the comparable institutions do not always have comparable ways of dealing with issues - especially health care. Creating the summaries to use for comparisons involved a great deal of work and hundreds of page of appendicies that include the relevant portions of other contracts, background data and assumptions, etc.

This also entailed a little work modifying our offer to deal with the retroactivity issue. For example, we shaved a little off our compensation request and argued that the new $10/20/30 drug card can take effect on ratification, but the premiums should start next year. The full presentation is available along with more information, including a summary of changes.

The administration is not arguing in favor of the 3 year contract they presented back in Sept. Instead, their presentation is based on the Dec offer that's a 5 year contract. When they met with us to present this offer, they had a detailed confidentiality agreement (see the cover letter to the written confidentiality agreement here in .pdf format). We didn't sign the written agreement, but thought we had a mutual agreement to keep it confidential, which the administration broke to release it. (We discuss this here, along with an analysis of their offer; it was also discussed earlier in this blog.) Now the offer, clearly marker 'NOT FOR USE IN FACT-FINDING' is, well, the whole basis of their fact-finding presentation.

What's actually more annoying is that we spent quite a while over the holidays drawing up a document we called a Framework for a Fair Contract. Although we were not going to present them with a counter-offer, we thought it important to provide some feedback that might help promote mutual understanding and bring the sides closer together. We presented this and talked about it at some length with them (reported on in the last blog entry). But they really didn't make any substantial changes to their Dec offer in light of our conversation and framework.