Week of January 30, 2023

AFT Collective Bargaining Conference

Last week, I spent the week at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters in New York City attending an intensive collective bargaining conference. While I have negotiated all four of the NTU contracts, this conference gave me the opportunity to work with other locals leaders, access what we do well with negotiations, look at what we might consider changing, and learn from local, state, and national experts.

The Collective Bargaining Certification

The program, created by AFT in conjunction with Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, can lead to a certification through Cornell University. The certification requires ten units relative to collective bargaining. I earned five this past week by attending the conference. I will be taking an online, asynchronous training on contract costing which will earn my three more credits. The other credits come the form of one-day conferences on specific collective bargaining topics and webinars.

My Take Aways for a Week in New York

Our Union and teams do a lot of great things already. I am extremely proud of the work our negotiations have done, and a lot of that is thanks to those NTU Presidents and negotiations teams that came before me, laying the foundation, sharing their knowledge, and setting a great example for our newer members. 

Areas We Do Well In

Strong Membership: The Union is only as strong as its members, and we have strong, dedicated members. When we make the call for support,  you answer that call and show up. Our ability to organize and show up sends a powerful message. 

Contract Campaigns: We have utilized well through out contract campaigns to get our message out to the public, share our message, and rally around our issues.

Dedicated Negotiations Teams: Last week, I heard that some of my colleagues had trouble getting their negotiations teams to attend the meetings. This was stunning to me. Our teams have been extremely dedicated to the membership, to the process, and to attending every meeting. This shows unity and commitment to our members and to the management side.

Areas to Look at for the Future

Training: The conference highlighted training for our negotiations team. We don't have anything formal, but experienced members do a great job of helping newer members understand the process. Over time, I think it would benefit our local to develop a negotiations training module with documents and information for new negotiations team members. This might also include mock bargaining. This was an extremely helpful process to be able to call a timeout and talk about what you may or may not want to phrase something in a specific way, why certain questions should or should not be asked, etc. 

Contract Campaigns: Don't get me wrong, we do a great job on contract campaigns, but I think we should always be looking at ways to improve them. AFT offers contract campaign training to locals and would comes to New Hampshire to provide it to us. This would allow for multiple people to attend in addition to negotiations team members.

Next Steps

I am writing this while on the train back from New York. My next steps include reviewing the pages and pages of notes I have, the handbook they gave us, which also has more notes, and thinking about how this training can help our Union. I expect many conversations with the Executive Board and the Negotiations Teams. I am coming back excited and full of ideas. This was a great week of professional learning for me.