Teachers' union reaches tentative agreement with Miami-Dade County School Board
Late Monday evening, the bargaining team of the local teachers' union, United Teachers of Dade (UTD) and Miami-Dade County Public Schools administrators reached a tentative contract agreement for 2009-2012.
The new contract, which awaits union ratification. Voting will take place between next Monday (October 12) and Wednesday (October 14). Union members will cast their ballots online, and the bargaining team will then, depending on the outcome, ratify the contract or send it back, at which point the negotiations would go into an impasse. In this scenario, if the negotiations should continue into 2010, M-DCPS would have to start paying the 22% increases in the United Healthcare plan--money which is, right now, slated for salary improvements.
Under the proposed contract, teachers would continue to have access to a fully employer-paid point-of-service (POS) health insurance option, though the district will be self-insured as of January 1, 2010, with CIGNA as a third-party administrator, rather than continuing under United Healthcare, whose best offer to the district included premium increases of 22%. Some employees would see their dependents' insurance rates decrease, while others would see increases. However, closer examination of the proposed insurance plans reveal that out-of-pocket expenses would be higher in most cases, due to deductibles that do not exist under the current UHC plan, and higher co-pays for services including surgical procedures, anesthesia, nursing care, hospital stays and some lab work.
Employees will also advance a step on the salary schedule effective December 25, 2009. Teachers will be placed on the previously negotiated 2008-2009 salary schedules effective February 19, 2010, and will receive retroactive pay for the schedule improvements back to December 25. They will not, however, advance more than one step (teachers have not advanced their annual step since the 2007-2008 school year), and they will not receive retroactive pay for the previously negotiated salary improvements for the 2008-2009 school year (i.e., the cost-of-living raises they were supposed to get last year).
Given that the proposed contract would still include fully-subsidized POS health insurance for the employee and contains some salary improvements, it is very likely that UTD members will vote to ratify the new contract. In hard economic times, when unemployment is at a record high and when many teachers who still have jobs are struggling financially after essentially taking a pay cut of over $10,000 in lost supplements cut out of school budgets in order to save jobs, it is a relief to see that the new contract does contain a few improvements and, where it contains losses, they are less than might have been feared.
M-DCPS will also reimburse employees for the two "furlough" days of pay taken away from them in the 2008-2009 school year in the October 23 paycheck. This news, generally interpreted as good by desperate teachers needing the extra cash, does come with a caveat. The agreement, when employees agreed to give up two days of pay last year, was that the district would not make any layoffs until those days had been reimbursed. They had until the end of December to refund those days. The fact that they are repaying employees early has some union leaders worried that they are making the disbursement early so that they will no longer be bound by the agreement and can make layoffs. While teachers are generally considered "safe" (though not entirely), clerical workers, hourly workers and other support staff could be targeted as potential layoffs. Nothing is certain yet; we will see what happens after the October 23 paycheck.
