Without new contract, city teachers to protest their own way
Members of Teachers Guild will observe ‘work-to-rule’ guidelines, which means shunning volunteer duties before, after working hours
WOONSOCKET — Members of the Woonsocket Teachers Guild are set to protest their return to classes without a contract by observing work-to-rule guidelines that call for them to shun all volunteer duties before and after normal working hours.
Over 400 of the WTG’s roughly 650 teachers and paraprofessionals voted overwhelmingly in favor of the workplace restrictions during a meeting in the Woonsocket High School auditorium Monday, said Jeffrey Partington, the union president.
The vote comes as elementary and middle school students, plus half the kindergartners, return to classes after the summer break today. High school student and the rest of the kindergartners join them tomorrow as the 2018-2019 academic year begins in earnest.
“We expect everyone to work to rule, but we understand that there may have to be some flexibility to guarantee the safety of children when they’re leaving school,” said Partington. “We don’t have any formal agreement, but we are appealing to the administration to make sure there aren’t any gaps in child safety.”
Despite the vote, the WTG hasn’t established a timeline yet for the start of work-to-rule observances. But Partington said the restrictions could begin as early as Tuesday.
Work-to-rule is the latest salvo from the union in response to stalemated collective bargaining talks that were aimed at ironing out a successor to the city’s five-year pact with the WTG that expired on June 30. The union declared a formal impasse on Friday after Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s negotiating team, led by lawyer Charles Ruggerio, tendered its last best offer to the union, which was far below the WTG’s minimum acceptable threshold, according to Partington.
Pay hikes are the only remaining bone of contention in
collecting bargaining, which amounted to about 16 meetings between the WTG and rthe administrative team since April before talks were suspended.
The union received a 2 percent wage hike during the final year of its last contract, dwhich the WTG negotiated with the state-appointed Budget Commission in 2012. The WTG’s last increase before that was in 2009, according to Partington.
Partington says the stattus quo is an inheritance of the austerity policies of the Budget Commission that are no longer justified. With multi-million dollar surpluses on the books for several years running, the city can afford to give teachers a raise – and teachers, whose salaries are now the lowest in the state, deserve them.
“The city and school departments have built a surplus on the backs of the lowest-paid teachers in the state,” Partington said in a formal statement announcing the impasse.
“Despite that, teachers in this city have done all they can to be professional while teaching in difficult conditions and keeping the city afloat financially. However, this has become more and more difficult as our teacher-to-student ratio increased to one of the highest in the state and we lose highly qualified educators to our neighboring cities every year.”
Responding to news of the impasse, Ruggerio said the fiscal conditions that caused the state to appoint a budget commission to take control of the city’s purse strings more than six years ago haven’t necessarily vanished.
“Over the course of the last several months our entire negotiating committee has worked incredibly hard to arrive at a fair agreement for both the teachers and the taxpayers of the city of Woonsocket,” Ruggerio said. “Following the recent work of the Budget Commission, it is important that any agreement reached reflects the fiscal realities still facing the City of Woonsocket.”
Anticipating that teachers would begin observing workto-rule guidelines in response to the impasse, Supt. Patrick McGee says administrators have been preparing a readyto-go plan to make sure students – particularly in the elementary grades – don’t get lost in the shuffle around dismissal time.
Typically, teachers voluntarily remain on school grounds for a half-hour to 45 minutes after classes are dismissed to make sure students either get on a bus or they’re retrieved by their parents, according to Partington.
Partington indicated that he’s attempting to iron out an arrangement with the administration to see that teachers who want to waive work-torule to stay behind for dismissal chores are somehow compensated for doing so, but nothing ironclad has been obtained yet.
Ultimately, says Partington, the demand for extra monitoring of students around dismissal isn’t driven by a lack of manpower at either the teacher or administrator levels. The root cause is that school buses often run quite late, he says. Sometimes, parents who pick up their children are late, too.
Perhaps, Partingon suggested, work to rule may turn into “an exercise in showing the extra time the teachers donate every day,” providing uncompensated services that “aren’t going to be there.”
The union president says he anticipates that his next step in addressing the impasse in collective bargaining will be to make a formal petition for the intervention of a third-party, neutral mediator – an unprecedented move.
“I’ve never done this before,” said Partington. “It’s been 30 years since the Woonsocket Teachers Guild has worked without a contract. This is all new to me.”