UPDATED: This story has been updated with the following statement provided by Saucon Valley Education Association chief negotiator Rich Simononis in an email Tuesday: “SVEA and Mr. Sultanik had agreed to terms of the non-binding arbitration at our last bargaining session. When the arbitrator was agreed upon, terms were changed. We have a phone conference scheduled for Thursday to hopefully work these issues out. Bottom line, the school board does not want to put their latest proposal up and instead wants to move further apart and regress to their October 2014 proposal. This strategy is not one to move the process along and produce a resolution.”
Note: The following update on the Saucon Valley teacher contract negotiations was issued via email by Saucon Valley School Board attorney/chief negotiator Jeffrey Sultanik Tuesday. According to Sultanik, after publicly and privately committing to work to enter into non-binding arbitration earlier in the spring, the Saucon Valley Education Association has now asked instead to return to the bargaining table and is advising the board of its right to conduct a work stoppage. The district is opposed to further bargaining due to the fact that “the board is convinced that the parties are at an undeniable bargaining impasses” over things such as health care plan design and premium costs, he wrote. Saucon Valley teachers voted last month in favor of a strike authorization, which means a strike could be called with 48 hours’ notice. Teachers have been working without a contract for nearly three years, and negotiations for a new contract have been ongoing since early 2012. Saucon teachers last struck in the fall of 2009.
At the Tuesday, April 28, 2015 board meeting, the Saucon Valley School Board publicly voted to proceed to nonbinding arbitration on its longstanding dispute with the Saucon Valley Education Association. The school board believed and still believes that it has exhausted all reasonable collective bargaining efforts to solve the almost three-and-a-half-year labor dispute. That is why the board was willing and still is willing to go to a third-party and receive his or her recommendation on resolving this yet to be resolved dispute.Indeed, the last union proposal was in excess of $2.8 million more in salary and column moving costs alone than the board’s Sept. 26, 2015 bottom line proposal. The parties are still far apart on healthcare plan design and premium share.Even though the association previously verbally indicated that it would agreed to proceed to nonbinding arbitration to a single arbitrator, the association notified the district today that it now seeks to go back to the bargaining table instead of going to nonbinding arbitration, since it is no longer likely that the parties could resolve all of the technical issues relating to the nonbinding arbitration process. The union has also threatened in writing to engage in a work stoppage.This what the district received today from (SVEA attorney) Mr. (Andrew) Muir on behalf of the union:”The Association proposes negotiating on June 1 and June 4. The Association is open to further negotiations on the matter of nonbinding arbitration, however, as the likelihood of agreeing to terms is very low [this was just further confirmed in another recent email from Mr. Muir], we must resume full negotiations… Please be advised the Association reserves its right to conduct a strike at any time following notice.”The district is at a complete loss and very disappointed why the association is now going back to the bargaining table when it knows how far apart the parties are and after the association committed both publicly and privately to go into the nonbinding arbitration process. After all of the negotiations to date, board is convinced that the parties are at an undeniable bargaining impasse.
*sigh*