As Marblehead’s teachers and custodians continue working without contracts, the School Committee is mulling taking a step for which the teachers union has been clamoring for months: opening the negotiations to the public.
While the School Committee’s attorney has counseled against such a move, we believe that, after months of rancor and minimal progress, it would do more good than harm to bring more transparency to the process.
Massachusetts residents can be forgiven for becoming inured to a lack of sunlight when substantial amounts of public tax dollars are being spent. But it’s worth noting that not every state allows negotiations with public employee unions to be held in the dark.
In a 2018 policy brief for the Washington Policy Center, Erin Shannon notes that, of the states that allow public employee collective bargaining — Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina have no collective bargaining process for government workers at all — nearly half (22) do not exempt those negotiations from their states’ open meetings laws.
“Some of those states’ open meeting laws even go so far as to expressly require some level of public access to various components of those negotiations,” Shannon writes.
The main reason for disfavoring secret negotiations of government employee contracts should be obvious: Personnel costs represent the biggest slice of town departments’ budgets, which taxpayers fund.
“The public should be allowed to follow the process and hold government officials accountable for the spending decisions they make on taxpayers’ behalf,” Shannon writes.
While we have no indication this is an issue in Marblehead, Shannon notes that rank-and-file union members can also benefit from knowing exactly what proposals their union representatives are requesting, and what proposals they are rejecting.
To this point, the public has largely been kept informed about the progress (or lack thereof) of the Marblehead school negotiations through dueling press releases and unrebutted public statements. Public negotiations would bring more accountability into the process, making it easier to discern if one side is being unreasonable or otherwise not operating in good faith.
A recent example of this came last at last Thursday night’s School Committee meeting, when chair Jenn Schaeffner and member Sarah Fox represented that the union’s wage proposals represent a 40%-170% increase over three years and would require either a 14% tax override or the laying off of 42% of the schools’ staff.
That sounds extreme but is also the type of claim that suggests there may be more to the story — or maybe there isn’t. In any event, the board, the union and the public would all be better off if hyperbole or mischaracterizations could be cleared up in real time.
We would hate to see the Marblehead negotiations go the way of an example Shannon cites from two Washington school districts, where the sides had to call in a third party to perform “fact finding” and, in Shannon’s words, “separate the rhetoric from the reality.”
In Massachusetts, Proposition 2 1/2 — a wrinkle not present in other states — only further makes the case for bringing transparency to public employee negotiations. The whole point of Proposition 2 1/2 was to tell cities and towns, “If you want more tax dollars, you have to ask the taxpayers.” As we’ve seen in recent years in Marblehead, that “ask” is frequently challenging. But it can become easier once the public feels it has gotten a look from all sides at the problem town leaders are trying to solve.
At this point in the negotiations, we’ve heard some people talk as if teachers’ strike in Marblehead is inevitable. We hope that is not true, and our leaders should be pulling out all the stops to avoid crossing such a costly rubicon.
Of those “stops,” making the negotiations public holds significant potential for moving the talks toward a deal that would pay teachers and school staff what they deserve at a cost the town can afford.
