This is Part 5 of my series looking back as the former Union president of the San Francisco Community College District Federation of Teachers, AFT 2121, during the negotiations for our first contract, from 1978 to 1979.
For other parts of this series, you can look here:
We had already agreed that the contract would cover three years, starting with the 1978-79 school year. The negotiations had been ongoing since September, 1978, and it was the summer of 1979. Here is the June 27, 1979 flyer we sent out to the faculty explaining that impasse had been declared.
As this flyer explains, the District and the Union mutually declared impasse on June 22, 1979. Under the law, PERB (the Public Employment Relations Board) had five days to appoint a mediator. The mediator had 15 days to work to get a settlement but could only act as a go-between, and could not order a settlement. If the mediator was unable to get the parties to agree, then he or she could call for fact finding. In fact finding, the PERB appointee would serve on a panel with an appointee of the Union and one of the District, to conduct an investigation of the issues in dispute. If no settlement was reached in 30 days, the panel would recommend terms of a settlement, but they would be advisory only.
The mediator came and met separately with each of the bargaining teams, and then shuttled back and forth making suggestions and trying to move the parties closer together. The mediator assisted in getting some areas resolved, and the timelines were extended, but on August 16, the District rejected further mediation and called for fact-finding.
The District's "final offer" was a 12% raise for full-time, 14% for Centers Division part-time, and nothing for College Division part-time. (As explained previously, the Centers part-time faculty could work up to 15 hours a week, but had a lower hourly pay rate than the College part-time faculty, who were restricted, for the most part, to 9 hours a week.) There were other important issues not yet resolved, but we had previously scheduled an all-faculty meeting for September 4. We had to get the faculty to turn down the offer so that we could continue to improve both the money and the non-money items. Inflation was running 7.62% in 1978, and 11.22% in 1979. (The Cost of Living adjustments for Social Security were 6.5% and 9.9% for the same two years.) The District was offering 12% with nothing retroactive to the previous year. We put out a flyer explaining that "12% = 4% + 4%". (That is, the money in the District offer would be the same as if they had given a 4% raise retroactively to the previous year, and a 4% raise in the current year.)
The faculty met and accepted the recommended motion to reject the offer, to contact the Central Labor Council to seek strike sanctions, to set up a strike committee and a picket committee, and set a date for an all-facuty meeting after the completion of the fact-finding process to consider the fact-finding report and the final District offer and take necessary actions.
The fact-finding panel met and went through all the outstanding issues. The Union representative and the District representative each tried to convince the PERB representative to agree with their side's position. On November 10, the panel met for the last time. The fact-finding report was complete on November 15. The Union said all our demands were not met, but we were prepared to take the good with the bad and use it as the basis for the final settlement. The District refused to accept the report as a basis for settlement.
We had two more negotiating sessions before the November 20 Governing Board meeting. We asked the Labor Council for help, since the Governing Board was an elected body and would react to political pressure. The Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council asked me, as Union president, if we really had a strike if we couldn't reach an agreement. I felt that the faculty would be very reluctant to strike, but we needed the help of the Labor Council and I wasn't going to lie to him. I told him the truth, which was that there was a core group of activists who were pushing for a strike if it seemed necessary, and I wasn't sure who would come to the all-faculty meeting. (It would have been horrible if we had voted to strike and it turned out it was an empty threat.) That was enough for the Executive Director, and he attended much of the 19-hour negotiating session on November 19 (although I did see his eyes glaze over on occasion).
At that meeting, using the fact-finding report as a basis, the Union and the District reached agreement on all the remaining non-economic issues. The Union expected the Board to give new guidelines to the District negotiators while in executive session at the meeting, but they did nothing. The next day, we hand-delivered a request for strike sanction to the Labor Council, with a hearing scheduled as early as November 28.
The District added a little money to the agreement, making it 12.5% for the full-time faculty, but they were still keeping the offer for the College Division part-time faculty at zero. We scheduled a meeting for December 4 to have a vote on the agreement. In the meantime, we tried to get the District to change the offer so that the part-time credit faculty would get a raise as well. On the way to the meeting, I was so nervous because we were waiting for a phone call from the District on whether they would agree to change the part-time rates so the college credit faculty would get a raise. If they agreed, we would recommend the faculty accept the agreement. If they didn't agree, we would recommend they vote it down.
Here is a video clip of an interview Jessica Buchsbaum did with me in 2008 when she made a video for a Labor Studies Class.
(If you can't see video, here is the transcript: "And on the way to the meeting we were waiting for the District to come back with another offer if they were going to make this change on the part-time thing. And I was with Rudy Kne who was our AFT helper, driving down to this meeting at a big school we were going to have. I was really nervous and Rudy is sitting there calmly saying, "Don't worry, you know, things will be okay. Things will be okay. Just don't worry about it." So we get there, we get the call, they change it, we announce it, we vote, it's agreed to, it's passed, thank goodness. On the way back in the car I said to Rudy, "Oh gosh I'm so glad you were here. You've been through this before and you know how things are and you know it's all right." and he said," I've never been through this before, not like this." [laughter])
The District Governing Board ratified the contract two days later. In Part 6, I'll talk about what we got in that first contact, and how it was the foundation for the many contract negotiations that followed.