This is what the association officially wrote about the meeting they had with their members:
The Saucon Valley School District campus (FILE PHOTO)
“The Saucon Valley Education Association met today. The meeting included two votes. First, the members overwhelmingly turned down the board’s proposal from Feb. 28. Second, the association confirmed a strike authorization vote by a 2 to 1 margin. These votes prove that there needs to be more dialogue to bring these negotiations to resolution.”
The district has no knowledge whether or not these votes were secret ballot votes or if the vote tallies were accurate.
Assuming that the information is accurate, it demonstrates that if the board were to have granted the extension of time for the association to vote on the February proposal it would not have received the approval of the membership. Put another way, the association membership now seeks a proposal that involves MORE money than what the board authorized as it’s bottom line before the deadline on Friday afternoon. Such a monetary proposal has virtually no support on the part of the board and I remain very skeptical whether or not a bargaining session or sessions will ever be able to bridge what is now a significant gap between the association’s demands and the board’s Oct. 8, 2014 proposal.
All the association allegedly did is voted on an expired board proposal and essentially indicated that they need a more generous collective-bargaining agreement than the board’s bottom line. Based upon the board’s vote of Tuesday evening, the extent of the board’s authority will be based upon the Oct. 8, 2014 proposal; the Feb. 26, 2015 proposal that the union wants to use as a basis for bargaining is no longer on the table and was never intended to be a bargainable proposal.
Though the board recognizes that discussion is often good, the parties are so far apart in their positions that a settlement does not appear to be remotely achievable in the foreseeable future.
The district remains disappointed that the association membership entrusted the union leadership to call a strike given the association’s failure to properly consider the now withdrawn board’s bottom line proposal during the eight week offer period. The board remains concerned that the union’s current leadership has created unrealistic bargaining expectations on the part of its membership that will never be achieved in the collective-bargaining process at the district.
