CS 7 – Building Community and Effectiveness
The Scenario: A School District and the bargaining representative for its employees are in conflict.
Organizational Profile: 600+ teachers-employees of the school district and members of the teacher organization, plus the school and central office personnel.
Outcomes: Renewed mission & purpose, renewed legitmacy in the community, and demonstrated improvement in the learning for the children in the schools.
From Conflict to Concensus
As the executive director of a 600 member teacher organization, it was expected that conflict with the management of the local school district is a normal part of the routine. In this casae, however, the conflict between the two organizations had resulted in negative media coverage for both groups, and little movement toward the resolution of several outstanding issues.
I called the school district’s chief bargainer and suggested that we attempt to solve the nearly 30 outstanding grievances before submitting them to bargaining. He agreed, and when I arived at his office to begin our discussion, he met me with stacks of law books and yellow pads. It was clear that unless a completely different direction was taken, that conflict would only be solved throught the win/lose orientation of legal jousting. I have no books in my hands, just the files for each of the outstanding cases.
I put my files down, and stated that I felt we needed to be here to solve problems and not to win. So long as the law books were out it was apparent there was to be a clear winner and a clear loser. I thought we could do better. To his credit, the chief bargainer for the school district put down his books and there were only used in the future when we both needed information. All 30 grievances were solved along with identifying and fixing many of the problems that had contributed to their existance.
When it was time to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement, we agreed to used our new relationship to do so. We trained our bargaining committees ourselves using the following principles.
a. All decisions will be made by concensus of both committees.
b. Every member of both committees is equally responsible for the successful outcome to both parties to the negotiations.
c. Every committee member is responsible for facilitating the process rules including:
1. Active listening
2. Concensus building
3. Open sharing of information
Negotiations were successfully concluded with an agreement that the teachers’ organization would determine how 72% of the school district’s budget was to be spent. The teachers’ organization agreed that those decisions would be made by concensus of the teachers. The first year, the teacher concensus was to forgo any increase in wages to provide room in the budget for additional services to the children. The second year, the high school teachers decided to apply any wage increase to the elementary teachers to address inequities, and they all agreed to set asside some of their funds to fund promising new education innovations and encourage educators to try new approaches.
The experiment was so successful that it was repeated in another school district and it received numerious awards.
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