DH's Saturday Soapbox Weighs in on D 158 Negotiations Snag

The news brief above (click on it so you can read it better)appeared in the Daily Herald on Saturday.

Bongo published a post last week about the fact that District 158 issued a unilateral press release regarding the progress of negotiations between the district and the Huntley Education Association (HEA). Bongo also promised to sniff out the truth about why the release did not include any statements by the union.

The Daily Herald brief suggests that the teachers union is not cooperating with the rules they agreed to follow regarding joint releases every two weeks. It has been interesting to read comments to newspaper articles in which humans who sound suspiciously like union negotiators have tried to blame the district for breaking the rules for sending out the joint releases. The accusations are pretty interesting, considering they are coming from the folks who promised to release a statement twice each month and have failed to do so.

Here is what Bongo knows to be true. When setting the official rules for the contract negotiations, BOTH sides agreed to joint releases that would go out twice each month. The first published public statements included the initial contract proposals for the district and for the HEA. That joint statement was made in early April. Following the twice each month rule, that would mean that the next joint statement would have been due in mid-to-late April. The district put out their unilateral release in early May, almost a full month after the initial proposals were made public.

Bongo has heard through the grapevine that the district tried on multiple occasions to put out a joint release and that the union leadership stalled and stalled and stalled. Thus the eventual unilateral release by the district.

How clever, yet transparent, of the union (which did not want open negotiations in the first place) to try to stall and stonewall on the updates, with hopes that no update would be put out by the district by itself.

Bongo is very upset with union leadership that agreed to put out joint releases and now is showing that they have no intention of living up to their end of that agreement.

The hard-working teachers of District 158 deserve union leadership that represents them respectfully and in a manner that does not portray teachers as a group that is greedy and that can not be trusted.

Bongo hopes that a joint release will come out on time in mid-May, and if the union continues with their nasty tricks, that the district will continue to put out unilateral releases so that the public can remain informed about the progress of the negotiations.