Teachers Contract Expires Before Negotiations Take Place

Contracts expired for Fort Lee teachers at the end of April with meetings yet to take place between union representatives and the board of education, setting the stage for a potentially long renegotiation to begin this month.

The contract that expired Tuesday had been negotiated in 2010, a year before the then current collective agreement was set to expire. But, board of education business administrator Cheryl Balletto says, that process had taken place under unique circumstances.

A $3 million state aid cut that year had brought the parties together to renegotiate health coverage, Balletto said, and move from a private plan to the NJ State Health Benefits Plan to save money and minimize staff cuts.

But that unique scenario aside, both Balletto and Fort Lee Education Association president Gary Novosielski acknowledged that it is not unusual for contracts to expire before the details of a new agreement are hammered out.

“Practically,” Balletto said, “I can tell you in my experience there’s been times where we didn’t have a contract for a whole year, but others have been negotiated in six to eight months.”

Novosielski agreed that it has become “more and more common” for teachers to work without a contract for periods of time while negotiations take place, but added that in most cases meetings begin six months before the expiration of a collective agreement.

“It’s not unusual for the contract not to be settled by the time it expires,” Novosielski told Patch. “That’s not unheard of. But what is unusual is that we didn’t start [negotiating] by the time the contract expired.”

Normally, he says, preliminary meetings would begin in January for a contract expiring in June.

“For some reason we could never get a meeting set up with them,” Novosielski said. “We asked for certain information that we need them to supply us before we can sit down...to make sure both of us are starting with the same assumptions. And they took a long time to get back and a long time to set up meetings.”

Balletto said that scheduling conflicts on both sides of the table have prevented the parties from getting together so far, but that negotiations will begin in mid-May.

In other situations where teachers have worked without a contract, salaries, benefits, and other stipulations of the prior agreement remain in effect until a new contract can be negotiated.

This time, district staff will be required to make increased contributions to their healthcare, under a state law signed by Governor Chris Christie in 2011.

The law requires most public employees to make contributions to their health plans based on their pay scale, with a minimum  contribution of 1.5 percent of their salary. For teachers, the implementation of the law was delayed until the expiration of their collective bargaining agreements, and Novosielski said most employees in the district will begin making the 1.5 percent contribution this month.

While the law supersedes any union agreement, and the increased healthcare contributions would have taken effect regardless of the status of a new contract, Novosielski said that meetings would have given the union a chance to negotiate ways to offset the added cost.

“That money goes right back to the board of ed[ucation],” Novosielski said. “So if they chose to, they could certainly make it right and increase the salary by one and a half percent. That would be breaking even.”

Whatever contract emerges from the coming negotiations will be backdated to May 1, and Novosielski said that any negotiated salary increases are often made retroactive, though that stipulation is always on the table.

The last time the contract for district employees lapsed was in June 2008. At the time, negotiations had been taking place since January of that year, and an agreement was not concluded until January 2009. Given the late start to negotiations this time around, employees are likely to continue without a contract for at least several months.

“I think it’s the nature of negotiations,” Balletto said. “When you have money and benefits involved, it takes time to reach a compromise.”