"Outside Experts" or "Hired Guns"?
	by Mona Field
	Mona Field is a professor of Political Science at Glendale College and is currently serving her third four-year term as Trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District. This article is an updated version of one originally published in the April, 2005 FACCC journal

 While only a handful of faculty ever deal directly with their district in the roles of union contract negotiators, every faculty member is affected by the contract that the union and district create.

    Negotiations for that contract can last for months (sometimes years) just to develop or update an agreement about salary adjustments, health benefits, workload, and other important aspects of working conditions.

    Thanks in part to a state law that permits reimbursement for a portion of the district's costs of negotiating, some districts do not rely on their own administrators to sit with faculty unionists and hammer out the contract.  Many districts pay hundreds of dollars per hour to non-employee consultants (often attorneys) and the total spent can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars if negotiations drag out.

    At Santa Monica in their two-and-a-half year long negotiations ending in 2006, an attorney flew from Napa Valley, earning approximately $200 per hour plus expenses, and, according to some faculty sources, tended to "drag out" negotiations --- perhaps due to legitimate bargaining details, but perhaps due to his hourly earning capacity.

    Because of some previous labor-management difficulties, Santa Monica also used a mediator (believed to charge $2000 per day) to assist in “communicating” back and forth at the bargaining table.  The total costs of negotiations are only partially reimbursable by the state, so the district inevitably uses some of its basic operating funds for these outside experts – not to mention the faculty time and effort involved.

    Districts that frequently use outside consultants include Santa Barbara, Ventura, Marin and San Jose Evergreen.  In some cases, where newly defined unions are developing their first contracts, outside consultants are being used by districts, in some cases with the intention of ensuring a legally accurate contract and of setting the stage for future “employee to employee” bargaining. However, when districts bring in costly outsiders, unions sometimes feel they must respond in kind, thus spending scarce union funds for THEIR negotiations consultants.

In fairness, the use of an outside expert who knows the Education Code and labor laws may have some value.  If the consultant truly supports collective bargaining, understands our often-arcane issues (50% law, 60% law, 75/25 ratio, lab/lecture ratio, etc), and wants to get the job done right, it may be valuable.  This would especially be true in districts with recent turnover in administration, and perhaps not enough managers available who know how to negotiate. Management employees who serve as district negotiators  generally lack training for this specialized task, and a skilled outsider may be needed.  Better training of management can occur, but a district has to make this a priority.

    On the other hand, at Antelope Valley College, the district spent nearly a million dollars in one year for outside “help” only to find that the negotiations were slow, the attorney didn't understand such items as intellectual property rights, and faculty felt the attorney was not committed to a positive outcome.  Ultimately, the district management (with a new college president in place) and board decided that the outside help was not productive, got rid of the lawyer and sent both union and management for Interest Based Bargaining (IBB) training.   ( see sidebar for more info about IBB )  

Role of the Board of Trustees

    In many districts,  CEOs want to control their Board, and one way is to tell novice Board members that they may not talk with employees during negotiations, for fear of creating an unfair labor practice.  The “unfair” is a very official complaint filed with the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) and can lead to various sanctions for a district.

    The problem is that a good Trustee wants to stay in touch with employees all year long, and not be incommunicado during what can be long periods  of negotiations.   The  ground  rules  for Trustee/Faculty interaction would include a clear “NO PROMISES” approach whenever an individual Board member hears employee concerns about negotiable issues.  A good Board member realizes that he/she is just one vote and can never commit to any particular action or outcome based on information exchanged at a meeting with faculty.   You can help your Board members stay in touch with your issues by making clear that your interest in communicating with them is to maintain clear and direct communication rather than create specific policy or negotiations outcomes.

Does your District use “Best Practices”?

    There is no clear “one size fits all” when it comes to collective bargaining.  Some unions report that the outsider is preferable to poorly trained managers, others feel that outsiders slow the process and don't understand the issues.  Find out how your district and union negotiate, and find out the real costs  (in dollars, time and quality of results) to both the district and union when one or both sides use outsiders.  An alternative is to get everyone involved in a more collegial approach such as IBB which can vastly improve the climate of bargaining and the outcomes.