The BTU bails out
The Boston Teachers Union this week declared an impasse after 18 months of contract negotiations with the Walsh administration, and in a memo to members president Richard Stutman insisted it was the city that was refusing to negotiate — after stalling “until the clock ran out.”
Curiously, the union set the timing on that alarm clock itself.
It’s also worth noting that the BTU declared the stalemate after other dramatic tactics — including a ludicrous claim that the city was engaging in gender discrimination in negotiations with a female-dominated union — didn’t have the intended effect.
It’s pretty simple — the city has stood firm on some key reforms to which the union objects, so the union is rolling the dice. It’s an unfortunate development. A state mediator with no skin in the game shouldn’t be the one to determine the fate of reforms that are intended to ensure city tax dollars are spent most efficiently, and in the best interest of students.
Indeed, one of the biggest sticking points between the two sides is not teacher pay — but rather how the school department will be permitted to treat tenured teachers who from year to year are not selected for teaching positions. Perhaps it’s because they lack in-demand licenses, or are considered underperforming. Either way they’re classroom teachers without classrooms.
Instead of continuing to pay those teachers a full teacher salary (now an average of nearly $91,000 a year) ad infinitum, the city wants to create “exit strategies,” including moving them into paraprofessional roles if they can’t lock down a classroom job within two years.
The union, however, insists the “unplaced teachers” lack classrooms “through no fault of their own.” Naturally.
If the union and the city were at a true impasse then state mediation was probably inevitable. But the charge by the union that the city is refusing to bargain “in good faith” is nonsense (as an email obtained by the Herald this week showed).
Perhaps the BTU feels Mayor Marty Walsh owes them one, after the union offered up a powerful eleventh-hour endorsement in the 2013 election. Credit to Walsh’s team for putting kids (and taxpayers) first.