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Question for my union comrades
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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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When contracts expire you enter the status quo period you mentioned where both parties are expected to negotiate in good faith and maintain the majority of agreements. This usually does not apply to striking, of course, and you almost always need to strike to get a good contract.
To answer your question I think we'd have to be able to read your whole contract to be certain. Sometimes contracts contradict themselves, or at least seem to according to the lawyers both parties have to hire, so even if there's a line that says, "this applies until the contract expires" it may be contradicted by (1) the (enforced) law around status quo, (2) state law, or (3) other articles in the agreement.
Employers are not supposed to make any changes to working conditions during status quo, if that is helpful information. They are expected to bargain any changes and the union can usually file various legal complaints against the employer when they do inevitably change working conditions unilaterally. Though it should also be mentioned that the direct legal consequences are usually incredibly minor, so unions mostly use them as propaganda to make sure their members are pissed off and ready to strike.
To add on, the status quo period, at least for our union, doesn't mean you can't still file grievances (formal process for remedying contract violation). It just means you can't take those cases to arbitration (third party judge decides on case). Its usually good to use unresolved grievances and any unfair labor practices (like the aforementioned unilateral changes in working conditions) to add leverage to negotiations and use settling them as part of the final agreement with the employer.
I think we have a ULP already (we're in the middle of negotiating a first contract), if not multiple, but my union rep never mentions them to us. He did a while ago mention that we should keep them in our back pockets but has yet to mention using it as a strategy again. We're just cracking economics, so I hope we can use that but we have pretty much just been walked all over so far.
The agency lawyer told our rep to stop reading one of our proposals mid-sentence because she said they would read it in caucus and he just acquiesced lol
Thanks for that info! We are bargaining our first contract with a unit of about 30 employees. The lawyer used by the agency is very skilled; she added this language to an article. As we were discussing it with our union rep, he said it doesn't really mean anything, but why would the businesses lawyer want to include it if it didn't give them an edge? Idk, the local we decided to unionize with is weak and has shown to be pretty fucking yellow and unsupportive, it's been really demoralizing
Employers have all kinds of dirty tricks during negotiations. One of their favorite things to do is to force you to bargain about things that are no real concession on their part. This amounts to a delay tactic. Delays are always in their favor as it means longer before getting your next contract and it also means sapping your resources, including the energy of your bargaining committee.
So it may be that the company sees this clause as beneficial for itself or it may be that they are just trying to confuse you. This is where you'd want your lawyer to be truly competent and able to provide reasonable explanations for what to do about it. It is not a bad tactic to let the employer put something unenforceable in there so that you can focus on what you actually care about. But it really, really has to be unenforceable.
Your union rep probably isn't a lawyer but your union should have one. I would recommend finding a polite and friendly way to get your union rep to ask the lawyer ASAP and to have them explain what's up with the clause to your bargaining committee. Half-decent reps usually love the opportunity to explain their own angle towards organizing and strategy.
Our rep has only ever consulted the lawyer like maybe 3 times on our behalf for things that we've been extremely adamant about getting confirmation whether they were ULPs or not, and it's usually taken 3 weeks or more for him to give us a response from her. He hasn't even given us copies of our TA's yet and we have 13, and we don't even know what they are beyond the titles right now. We've requested them multiple times. Figure it would be important to reference our prior TA's while creating new proposals, right? Since the beginning he's tried to kneecap every single proposal we've written. His angle had always been "I don't think management is going to go for that". Today, the agency lawyer cut him off while reading a proposal and she said he didn't need to read it and he just kinda sat there.
The agency lawyer also strong-armed us and lied today that hybrid work is a permissive subject of bargaining, and they added language to our telework proposal stating that management has the discretion to determine work locations... I'm pretty sure are BOTH mandatory subjects (webe been engaging in hybrid work since 2020)....and our rep didn't say anything about that; he pretty much directed us to keep the counter language that she wrote.Thank God we haven't TA'd, so I'm hoping after reading about it I can go back in and strike all of their counters to get it close to our original proposal and HOPE it's not regressive bargaining.
Wait how do you not know what's the the TAs? Does your local not have you all on the bargaining committee itself? That's a huge red flag.
If they're that bad I would recommend making your own new unification committee dedicated to bullying your local reps into doing a good job. At the end of the day you all most likely have to vote on any agreements and if you organize your workplace against a shit contract you can force changes "from below" by issuing your own clear demands. This is the basic recipe for dealing with bad union leadership - you out-organize them.
It's a lot of work but I've seen it be very successful. Also sorry you have to deal with a bad rep.
I'd make that request for clarity from the lawyers. Or even contact pro bono labor lawyer advice. For all its faults, the AFL-CIO will often give you some free lawyer time.
So it's kind of a weird set up; I organized a union drive with my department and one other within a larger agency and we unionized with a local of a large union. This union never really provided us with any professional organizers or anything, its just been 6 employees who knew dick about the inner workings of a union trying to get this thing off the ground. We successfully won our union vote and have been assigned a union rep who is our chief negotiator. Within our bargaining unit, the same 6 of us were basically elected as the bargaining committee, along with our union rep/negotiator. We are very much isolated from the larger local; we are social service workers and unionized with more of a trade union and have had little to no contact with anyone else besides him, and there is either only one other rep, or none that I know of in our town.
We the BC all have a Google Drive with all of our proposals. We write them up, edit them and finalize them with the rep, and then he prints out the proposals to pass out over the table. During caucus he will send the agency lawyer electronic versions of.our proposals to edit and write their counters, they get printed, passed out, then we counter, and so on. So he ends up having the final signed TA document and has not provided us copies of them :(
He has felt like nothing short of a roadblock, it sucks. I'm extremely proud of myself and my comrades having put SO MUCH WORK into this. We organized our coworkers, have done tons of research, written every proposal so far, met almost every week since March 2023...but it's hard not feeling like we don't even have one competent/knowledgeable person fighting on our side.
Sorry for sending novels, today was especially demoralizing and it's just been such a struggle!! I'll hit up the AFL-CIO that's a great idea
Ah, that's less bad than I guessed but still pretty bad. Caucus should not just be your union rep, it should include others on your BC as well and anything TA'd should be 100% known and agreed to by the whole BC (or if necessary, a vote by the BC, but functional ones usually reach consensus). It feels very shifty that you're TAing things that you technically don't know the content of. And the decision to TA at all is a big one that must be done strategically - you'd want to get the stuff you don't really care about TA'd early so that you can emphasize the brass tacks at the end - the things that matter to your coworkers. Usually this is pay, benefits, and key issues of working conditions that you organized around before bargaining. The hybrid work issue sounds like one of those. You want to emphatically reject that if you think you can mobilize around it.
Your union rep is being weird to say that some issue important to you all is something the company won't go for. The power to get your demands doesn't happen at the bargaining table, it's in your ability to mobilize your coworkers to take direct action, including actions leading up to a strike, the strike itself, and escalations during the strike. If that issue is one you think you can use to motivate and rally your membership, then you should keep it on the table. If you think it would be very difficult to get them to care, that's when you can do an early TA, seeing how much you can get through bluffing and then just TA anyways.
So if your union rep isn't focused on what you can mobilize around and what your membership cares about - and thinking about how you'll include this in the inevitable need to strike - they're incompetent or worse. They may even be bargaining against you, in effect. I would start thinking about what to do if the rep begins trying to avoid striking. That is something that a milquetoast union will often do because they care about having to cover strike pay and have opted for a strategy that is more collaborative with the employer. In that case you will still need to create a parallel organizing campaign.
If I'm correct that it's just the union rep who's got the power to TA right now, I recommend changing that ASAP. Stare that you all agree that a worker must be present and collaborating. Use the fact that you all don't even know what's in in your TAs to make this demand. If you present it as an expectation / entitlement, like "we discussed this and this is how it will work going forward" you may be able to change the dynamic more generally. Of course, do all of this calmly and in a friendly way. This is probably the most impactful thing you could do right now aside from holding organizing meetings with your coworkers to discuss bargaining and to get a sense for what matters to them most. You want your coworkers to know you're on their side and to not be blindsided by anything alienating them from you when it comes time to ask them to strike. The worst case scenario is that they say, "what was the point of unionizing if this is what we get?" You can head that off through transparency and involvement. People that seem concerned can be onboarded through direct conversations and inclusion on the BC, assuming you don't have any bylaws preventing that, for example.
So getting into that room and making TA decisions together is essential and so is creating the contact, trust, and involvement of membership in preparation for your primary organizing campaign (BC bargaining and strike) and any parallel campaign that you may need to run from behind the scenes eventually.
Oh, we do TA them together, so nothing is decided without the BC, he just has not given us copies to keep track of what we have and so that we can compare language in them to newer proposals which is super frustrating. I really do feel like he's bargaining against us at this point; trying to rush us to TA everything, not questioning anything the agency lawyer has to say, or calling her put on flip flopping her reasons and he hasn't helped us identify her strategy at all. He doesn't even keep up on NLRB cases, I had to explain to him Wendt & Tecnocap multiple times and asked him if it applied to a situation we have going on and I get blank looks, it's awful.
The huge majority of our coworkers fully appreciate and support what we do, but mobilizing them has been like pulling teeth so we just kinda stopped trying to organize bigger group meetings because it's so exhausting. They are always invited to our weekly meetings but no one ever comes because they trust that we're handling it lol. Everyone is down to strike though if it comes down to it, but we don't have anyone else who seems down to help us plan and coordinate and it definitely feels like the rep won't at all.
I am trying to keep my morale up but I don't know how yall do it in the face of constant crises/union busting/little support, I'm about to just kick rocks and get another job
Oh that's good that you all do the TAs. That decreases the stakes quite a bit.
Your rep not even noting their flip-flopping may be odd depending on the context. A useful and common angle to take during negotiations is to demonstrate good faith bargaining and to be constantly reminding the other party of their obligations. This becomes ammunition during the need to strike and can also be filed with the state etc if lawyers need to get involved. For example, let's say you are going back and forth on an article with the employer. You've made a proposal and they have countered. As you make progress on items in the proposal, it would usually be considered bad faith to include brand new items or to otherwise backtrack. The expectation is that you either move towards compromise or state that you won't move further. Employers and their lawyers are usually very focused on this because they want to (1) prevent you from asking for more after you realize you didn't ask for enough in the first place and (2) delay the process and declare and impasse that is allegedly your fault. If the employer is screwing around with their items you can also come back at them in a similar way. Your rep should be almost cagey, like hyper-aware and issuing warnings/accusations, if this is the flip-flopped the employer is doing.
When you are negotiating, do you take breaks to caucus? Or otherwise have a secret channel for communicating amongst the BC and rep? I think you all can call out the rep on this if you want to since you're the BC, but you'd want to do so in a way that gives your rep a heads up so they don't feel the need to openly contradict. Basically, if the rep is surprised and disagrees with your strat (and is correct) it's bad for them to have to publicly disagree to "correct course". If your rep is surprised and disagrees but is wrong, they are now negotiating against you. If your rep is in the loop and disagrees, you can assert that you want to go forward or find some middle ground. If your rep is in the loop and agrees, then you've just built a stronger committee and may have helped establish a proper bargaining culture.
Re: your coworkers trusting you, I'm sure they do right now but consistent communication is key! I've seen the scenario I described many times before where everyone starts out saying they trust the bargaining team and like what they are doing and then *bam" right at the very end they get pissed that the BC only negotiated 3% raises or something. Consistent communication helps both aspects of this: (1) there are no surprises and (2) if you tell them that admin is demanding 2% raises or something you can rally your coworkers to demand way more and come from a stronger position at the BC. Big group meetings can be a lot of work, so it's okay to have them occasionally and rely on emails or similar for general bargaining updates. Writing down and sharing your progress and what management is doing is also useful for the bargaining process as it helps you all collect your thoughts and provides a regular platform by which to raise awareness of what bullshit management is pulling. Maybe there is someone on the BC with capacity for doing communications?
Let me know if I've accidentally skipped over any issues that are important to you or if I'm miaunderstanding something!
Sorry you're getting burned out! Bargaining is a lot of work and that is what union reps can usually facilitate. It sucks that they seem to be a net drain in this case. Don't forget that self-care is also praxis! And to rely on your BC comrades as much as you can, even just to vent together!
Thanks for that, I think from here on out we are.going to try and pre write a bunch of arguments and will show them to our rep and making a point to tell him beforehand during caucus is a good idea if anything comes up mid bargaining.
I think I just realized, management hasn't put down any proposals really besides a couple, probably so that they can whittle us down to nothing and never be accused of regressive bargaining. Like I think all they've really put down is labor relations committee and will probably put lockout strike down. Our rep included the strike clause in the set of proposals that WE were going to introduce until I said "um, that goes against all morals and dignity I have, if it's introduced they have to introduce it" then he told us that he didn't realize that it wasn't already on the table
I have one question about regressive bargaining which i think i kinda mentioned before. We put down an article yesterday; they struck out a ton of language and included some new stuff and were told that managers have sole discretion to bargain the location of the workplace so put that in, and we ended up countering some other language but left that part alone and our rep only included like half of what we thought he was.going to add so I personally was surprised when he passed out the rewritten proposal. Can we now go back and strike out all of that language? We wouldn't be changing the initial proposal to something more robust but just fighting their position after we already submitted a counter
The time to "correct" your rep's mistake is immediately. If you wait on it, it will be easier to call it regressive and/or bad faith. Management is usually very condescending and I've seen them pull that kind of thing before. They would say things like, "we forgot to include these important changes, please excuse us for not including them initially" and then shrug when there are more questions.
I would also say that it's strange that your rep is just taking notes or whatever and then making the changes and submitting them without review. It is normal for the BC to write its own counters and share them with the committee before submitting.
It is also normal for management to do basically nothing except wait for your proposals and then strike language and add their own. Delays are good for management. It's in your interest to submit your initial proposals as quickly as possible, though of course not rushing it and forgetting anything important. Then it's up to management to show movement. They will usually drag their feet and you can use this as a way to start getting membership pumped to strike. Unless your rep fucks up and lowballs wages etc I would be surprised if management offered more than 2% raises. They may not offer anything at all on that before you need to strike.
If it's helpful I'll outline the basic structure of an ideal contract negotiation. The ideal BC will create strong initial proposals, submit them quickly, not bargain against themselves, get early TAs on the boilerplate stuff (e.g. grievance procedures), and then focus almost entirely on preparing membership to do actions (you can and should do actions before striking) in support of your demands, including demands to bargain, for management to move on your proposals, etc. The BC will identify the key brass tacks around which to message, namely wages, benefits, and one or two salient issues that membership cares a lot about. When there's little left to bargain except those things, you prepare to strike, loudly. Management may move at that point with some counters on those brass tacks. That's when you write your numbers on signs and actually strike. Now membership expects those numbers and wants nothing less (though they might accept a little less and still be very happy). Then it's all up to your ability to grind the company to a halt until they capitulate and you claim victory.
The only reason to not do it this way is if your union is weak, low engagement, nobody wants to strike. But it sounds like you are actually in a fairly strong position.
Dang I thought I wrote a reply to this buy I think it got deleted!
Since these edits were made at pretty much the last 2 hours of bargaining, do you think it would be too much trouble to try and tell them that we don't accept any of their language and we continue to argue our original proposal? I realize that a good 4-6 people would quit, if we did they would be unable to adequately train up new hires so I figure that's pretty good ammunition if they were going to call that regressive. My manager could not even finish the training for my position lol
Yes that is fine so long as you make up some kind of semi-valid excuse. You can't publicly blame your rep since they're on your side but you can say it was sent erroneously due to a miscommunication and attempt the bargaining version of a take-backsy (lol). Management might make it an unpleasant experience but due to the time frame it is not egregious, particularly as this is a new bargaining unit. Regressive bargaining is doing something like adding a brand new, significant demand to an article after both sides have been compromising on it.
It will 100% undermine your rep internally though so I recommend using this as a way to reign them in and say, "stop doing this stuff without us". Of course, you'd want to present this to the rep idea as a unified group and with a respectful framing.