Stoughton Discovers "A Better Way"
Stoughton School Board President Jerry Deschane recalls
going home angry and frustrated many times after long nights of bargaining
with the teachers’ union.
But not during this last round of negotiations,
which utilized consensus bargaining.
“I would go home from these meetings feeling
maybe tired, but not angry,” he said of the latest bargain, which
was completed last fall. “There were times this was difficult, but
it was never contentious.”
A. Henry Hempe of the Wisconsin Employment
Relations Commission (left) hands a Certificate of Achievement to
Jim Patch, chief negotiator for the Stoughton Education Association,
during a Stoughton School Board meeting. Every member of the school
board and union bargaining teams received a certificate, which honors
them for successfully negotiating a 1999-2001 contract through consensus
bargaining. |
Stoughton Education Association chief negotiator
Jim Patch agreed.
“The previous bargain was rather tumultuous,”
Patch said. “And we’ve kind of had a history of confrontational
bargains. So when the superintendent offered consensus bargaining to us,
we said let’s give it a try.”
Neither side has looked back. Last October, the
union membership and school board ratified a new two-year contract that
provides pay and benefit increases of 4% in each year of the contract
and includes some important language items.
“Our whole team liked it, and I believe the
school board did too,” Patch said of the settlement.
To celebrate the successful bargain, A. Henry
Hempe of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission presented the school
board and teachers bargaining team members with Certificates of Achievement
at the February school board meeting.
“I’m here to recognize some very visionary,
creative and courageous people,” Hempe said. “These persons
have transformed the old collective bargaining culture that once existed
here as a confrontational, adversarial war into a new paradigm.”
Hempe served both as the trainer and the facilitator
for the bargain. Through consensus bargaining, each team approaches negotiations
as partners in a joint venture. Each party agrees to share all relevant
information on each issue and to frame issues as open-ended, neutral non-leading
questions, Hempe said. Together, they brainstorm until they find solutions.
According to Hempe, consensus is reached when
every participant can say: “I understand your viewpoint and I think
you understand mine. While I may not prefer the solution we have reached,
I can live with it and I will support it because it was reached openly
and honestly and represents the best solution at this time.”
One of the big advantages of the process, Patch
said, is that it allows for in-depth discussion of important issues.
“It allowed us to look at issues we normally
wouldn’t look at,” he said. “In the past, if there was
an issue we couldn’t agree on, we just wouldn’t deal with it.”
Mallory K. Keener, executive director of Capital
Area UniServ South, said the Qualified Economic Offer law did not directly
figure into the bargain, although it “may have had an intangible
impact.”
Overall, she said, “Both sides clearly were
satisfied with the outcome.”
Posted March 1, 2000