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Contract stalemate goes to mediation
Mar 15, 2010 3:30 PM
Philip L. Maier, appointed mediator.
Agreeing with the UFT that — six months since the union’s last contract expired — negotiations with the Department of Education had deadlocked, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board on Feb. 22 appointed Philip L. Maier as mediator.
Maier is the director of PERB’s regional office in Brooklyn, where he oversees labor relations cases that fall within the agency’s jurisdiction in New York City, Suffolk and Nassau counties.
He first joined PERB in 1991 as an administrative law judge, and has presided over hundreds of cases since that time, including many unfair labor practice cases filed by the UFT.
The union’s contract with the DOE expired on Oct. 31, 2009. The UFT asked PERB to declare an impasse on Jan. 15, after months of fruitless negotiations with the DOE; the DOE concurred in a letter to PERB that the two sides were not able to come to agreement.
The mediator works with both parties to try to broker an agreement. If mediation fails, PERB will appoint a fact-finding panel to hold hearings and make nonbinding recommendations designed to help the parties reach a final settlement.
Under the state’s Taylor Law, which governs relations between management and public employee unions, all the terms of the expired agreement continue in effect until a new agreement is reached, including during the impasse, mediation and fact-finding processes.
The DOE and the union have resorted to fact-finding panels three times over the past 17 years — in 2005, 2002 and 1993 — in order to reach contract agreements.
While both sides promised not to negotiate in the press, the demands of both the DOE and the UFT have been leaked to reporters. In addition, in his state of the city address, the mayor — breaking with a decades-long tradition of supporting pattern bargaining — announced that the city could not afford to pay public school educators the 4 percent raise that other city unions have received for their members for the same period. He offered to give educators only a 2 percent raise this year on their first $70,000 of salary. UFT President Michael Mulgrew completely rejected this demand.
Mulgrew held out hope that PERB as a “neutral third party” could help bridge the gap between the two sides.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “You will come out of this [PERB process] with an agreement down the road that hopefully both sides can feel, well, we did as well as we could, given the situation.”
