Well that was weird.
Two hours into our negotiation session on Friday, November 18th, the District presented to us, in writing, a recommendation that we cease negotiations and go straight to impasse. The District believes that the gap between its salary proposal and ours is insuperable. We believe that, yes, the gap is certainly significant. But, um, isn't that why we're negotiating?
We also believe that impasse is not the way to go. The two sides went to impasse in 2011 and the result was the District's decision to impose a contract – a contract that included the unconscionable provision (you might have heard) that in this age of soaring health-care costs the District would arbitrarily and unilaterally put a cap on its benefits contributions.
So the whole let's-scrap-negotiations-and-just-go-to impasse thing was kind of weird, and kind of insulting. The District doesn't seem to enjoy our company. We thought we were getting along just fine.
Though getting along is of course not the point. The point is that labor law demands an attempt at good-faith negotiations. Calling off negotiations after just three substantive meetings is not good-faith negotiating. It's not negotiating at all.
In the end we prevailed upon the District to continue, in good faith, with the process.
But here's something else that was weird: According to the District, if faculty were to receive the 6%-4%-3% raise we initially proposed, the school would be broke in just 3 years.
Yes, you read that right. We would be broke by 2019. We would have to shut our doors unless the state decided in its mercy to take us into receivership.
Apparently a raise that would grant us parity with the schools formerly known as comparables would drain the ECC reserve from 34.2 million dollars to a balance of – are you sitting down? – just 64.9 thousand! Ouch. No more erasers for the whiteboards, which would be okay, actually, because we'd have no markers to mark them up with.
Not so okay: We'd have no jobs.
Now before you start sending out your resume to every community college in North America, and before you call your state representative or county prosecutor to inform them of what you perceive to be the administration's criminally negligent mismanagement of taxpayer funds, you should be advised that ECC's impending financial collapse is actually not quite as impending as the District would have you believe.
The District is using an accounting method that insists on paying the cumulative cost of the three-year pay raise from the current one-year budget. So the current reserve fund – i.e., the 2016-17 ending balance – will be used to pay the new salary costs not just for fiscal year 2016-17 but for fiscal years 2017-18, 2018-19, and the first half of 2019-20 as well.
As a conservative means of staying within a working budget, this method makes a certain sense. But it makes even more sense as a way of dodging reality and avoiding a pay raise that the District simply refuses to commit to.
The reality is that ECC lists 120.1 million dollars in unrestricted revenue in its 2016-17 budget, and this revenue stream isn't likely to dry up overnight. There will be money in the 2017-18, 2018-19, and 2019-20 budgets. The District can afford the raises. It wants you to believe otherwise.
But it gets even weirder. Not only is the District using a suspiciously self-serving accounting methodology, it's also making quite an assumption. That calculation of costs projected to bankrupt the District by 2019? It's based not just on the cost of our proposed pay raise for faculty; it assumes that the Classified union will bargain for, and win, the exact same pay raise! This convenient assumption allows the District to add a cool 10 mil to its cost estimate for our faculty raise!
That's some voodoo economics there. And it puts even more pressure on your Federation team. We had no idea we were bargaining for our Classified colleagues as well. What if they were hoping for more? We've let them down.
Okay. One more thing. Maybe two more.
One More Thing Number One: Susana Prieto (who's great with numbers) and your humble update correspondent (who's not, so don't sue him if he's wrong) decided, quite coincidentally, to see how the District's accounting sleight of hand would work in scenarios different from our current salary proposal.
Susana looked to the past. She went back to our last contract, in 2014, to see what the District's methodology would have predicted as the outcome of the raises we got in that round of negotiations. She discovered that, according to District accounting methods, ECC's reserve as of Jan 1, 2017 would be negative 1,118,650! In the fact-based world known as reality our reserve is, of course, more than 34 million. Weird, right?
While Susana was busy exploring the past, your humble update correspondent travelled into the future, something he's always wanted to do. He didn't project the effects of our original 6%-4%-3% proposal, since the District has already done that for us. Instead he examined the District's just-slightly-north-of-obscene offer of 1%-1%-1%.
You just cannot believe what he discovered! Based on the District's own accounting methods, even if all we get is that meager 1-1-1 raise, El Camino will be absolutely broke by the year 2024!!! Why in the world would the District give us a raise that would destroy us in less than a decade??? That is SO weird!
Okay. One More Thing Number Two: Who'll stop the weirdness?
We're wondering where President Maloney stands on this issue. The District team clearly believes one of two things: Either the ECC faculty does not deserve a meaningful raise, or the institution itself is so poorly run and so fiscally mismanaged that it's on the verge of financial ruin and can't afford to give faculty a meaningful raise, deserved or not.
What does President Maloney think?
Talks resume Friday, December 9th.