College budget struggle impacts contract negotiations

As the MHCC administration seeks to implement “shared sacrifice” across the college and its employee groups, the full-time faculty president has a different view.

Full-Time Faculty President Sara Williams said she doesn’t believe the sacrifices are fair and that too much is being asked of the faculty. She said the faculty gave up more than $2 million in the last negotiations.

“Between 155 people, that’s about $10,000 a piece,” she said. The administration is asking for the same amount again for this year, which she calls “too much.”

“I think the idea that an equal percentage of how the budget is presented is pretty arbitrary,” Williams said.

In the recently unveiled college budget proposal for 2013-14, President Micheal Hay spoke of shared sacrifices. Marilyn Pitts, president of the Part-Time Faculty Association, said “I believe that it’s the college’s intent to fairly distribute the sacrifices that’ll need to be made in order to have a balanced budget next year.”

Pitts added, “Students experienced an increase in tuition last year, so I’m pleased there’s no tuition increase included in the proposed budget for 2013-14.”

Pitts is confident that the sacrifices are truly being shared and that her bargaining team is seeking ways part-time faculty and tutors can pitch in, she said.

She said she doubts labor talks will get out of hand like two years ago, when a full-time faculty strike nearly occurred.

But Williams voiced concern that, overall, negotiations are moving very slowly. Not much is happening and contract language proposals she brought forward have not really moved along, she said.

The negotiations are slated to finish by June, but Williams said she thinks that isn’t going to happen. “I have no idea how they think we will be able to finish by then.”

She said that her faculty group passed two proposals it thought were pretty big concessions. “For example, we wanted to add some explanation of how you get representation from the association as a faculty member. That explanation was for the faculty member, for what they can expect and for the dean, knowing what their job is” when handling disputes, she said.

“It’s good for the dean to have that written down someplace to protect them from screwing up,” Williams said.

“We thought that was good language, but they (the administration) didn’t want that kind of language in the contract. We wrote a page for how it works, and they responded with a paragraph on the topic that they said already existed.”

Williams said her full-time faculty accepted that, but had thought the administration could “come back with something that would get through quickly.

They said ‘Thank you, we will think about it.’ How long does it take to think about it?”

Maggie Huffman, MHCC communications director, said the school is acting with a proper sense of urgency, but the process is far from simple.

“The (current) contract expires Aug. 31. Our desire is to reach an agreement as early as possible,” she said.

“It takes mutual desire for ‘getting to yes’ in any negotiation process. The administration appreciates the difficulty and tension inherent in any negotiation discussions…” Huffman said.

The administration, too, is dead-set against any further tuition hikes, Huffman noted.

“The students have absorbed all the tuition increases they can possibly absorb. Our board has no appetite for hitting the students up again either,” Huffman said.

The school is also very reluctant to price itself “any further way from the state average for community colleges than it already is,” she said.