- Oakland Educator’s Association – bargaining team sends out a one-question survey, the “Question of the Week” to the membership, to inform the decisions that the BT are making. If UESF did that, they would have asked the membership for guidance on salary demands before dropping them. I was told that OEA members simply went to the BT and asked for it, so its easy to do and quite possible. Here is the link to OEA website; scroll down to 10/18/2017 to see a post about a “Question of the Week”.
- Fresno Teacher’s Association has groups of union members in the room during bargaining as observers who then return to their sites and talk about it.
For example, groups of SpED teachers are in the room when something about SpED is being negotiated. Many nurses unions do this.
- Chicago Teacher Union does it a different way. The executive officers do the negotiating, but bring any decisions out to the Executive Committee (equivalent to our EBoard) for discussion and approval before making a decision. This would have been nice!
- Concord Teachers Association (Massachusetts) open bargaining strategy is described in this article. Their first step was to find out what matters to the members. UESF did exactly this with the Listening Tour two years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have informed our negotiating very much. According to the Listening Tour UESF members’ top concerns were: affordability, special education staffing and support, real implementation of Safe and Supportive Schools Resolution and student discipline, and the growing expectations and duties.
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SF educators need a strong contract and strong union 