The Massachusetts Community College Council, the union representing faculty and staff at community colleges throughout the state, has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Department of Labor Relations against the Board of Higher Education, for what the council described as “drastically altered” labor negotiation practices.
A statement released by the Massachusetts Community College Council on Tuesday explained community college presidents informed the union that unless it stopped inviting silent bargaining representatives, or non-voting union members, to negotiations and began conducting all meetings in person, the union members would no longer receive course-release time, or time excused from work duties, to attend negotiations.
“This is ugly coercion to force bargaining back into the dark,” Massachusetts Community College Council President Claudine Barnes said in a statement. “This unjustified attack on a decades-old practice of giving release time to members on the core bargaining team and on the established practice of having silent representatives are blows to a previously healthy and productive working relationship between the union and presidents.
“That cooperative approach must remain intact if we want to achieve the state’s goals of expanding access to community colleges,” Barnes continued, “and being able to hire and pay the staff necessary to carry out that plan.”
The council’s bargaining team stated that silent bargaining representatives, which are permissible during negotiations, ensure transparency in contract discussions. The practice has been longstanding, they said.
Trevor Kearns, who serves as president of Greenfield Community College’s Professional Association, said Thursday that he believes the Board of Higher Education’s proposed new rules for the union are simply a “power move” to try to force out silent representatives, to which the Massachusetts Community College Council has a right.
“This is unprecedented, what management has tried to do. They’re basically saying that our negotiators’ time is simply not as valuable as management’s time, and that we should [negotiate] on our own time, as a hobby,” Kearns said. “In every single contract negotiation that has ever gone on, at least since I’ve been working in the system and for many decades as well, the union negotiators have been given time in their schedule to do this work — it’s a lot of work.”
Kearns also explained that since the state’s MassReconnect and MassEducate programs began providing free access to a community college education, student enrollment has increased dramatically and local colleges have been struggling to cover the costs.
“The community college system in Massachusetts is criminally underfunded. Community college was made free through a couple of programs in recent years, MassReconnect and then MassEducate. This has resulted in an influx of students into our campuses,” Kearns said. “We have not had adequate funding for new positions or adequate raises in our wages so that people who still have full-time jobs have to work extra part-time jobs in order to make ends meet. What we’re looking at is a lot more students, without the additional staff or faculty to support them. We’re getting a lot more students, and that’s great, but the state still hasn’t committed the financial resources that they really should to fully fund our community college system.”
The Massachusetts Community College Council stated it recently started bargaining a new three-year contract for its members in the Day Unit, in which members work full-time or regularly scheduled part-time positions. The organization noted that it views these negotiations as a “key step in having community colleges ready to meet the demand of cost-free access to public higher education.”
The new rules on negotiation, Holyoke Community College Professional Association President Johanna Kasidi explained, come at a time when campus chapters across the state have been engaged in a campaign to improve wages for faculty and staff.
“Having transparency and participation in the process is good for the colleges. It’s good for the students. We’re doing the wage study; we’re trying to get wage equity for the faculty here in the state of Massachusetts. The commissioner of higher education agrees on this,” Kasidi said. “This is all part of the bargaining and it feels like a step backwards, especially with the free college program. We want all of the students to have everything they need, and if we can’t support our faculty and staff through the bargaining, then ultimately we’re all going to lose a little bit.”
Greenfield Community College President Michelle Schutt responded to the legal action in an emailed statement on Thursday.
“While we don’t share the union’s characterization of events, we have no comment at this time due to the pending legal complaint,” Schutt wrote. “We look forward to negotiating a successor agreement at the bargaining table.”
Chris Yurko, a spokesperson for HCC, provided an identical comment, which he attributed to the Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges.