If there is language in an article that is along the lines of “until the expiration of the agreement”, does that mean that whatever is contained in that article is no longer legally binding once a contract expires? I feel like that should be obvious, but my union rep seems to think that’s not the case. I do know that terms and conditions of a CBA are to continue under an expired contract (besides strikes/lockouts) but if that language lives in the document, then is that how an employer can get around maintaining whatever benefit it’s tied to?
I feel like I read a labornotes article that spoke to this but I CANNOT find it. If anyone can help I would be grateful!
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When contracts expire you enter the status quo period you mentioned where both parties are expected to negotiate in good faith and maintain the majority of agreements. This usually does not apply to striking, of course, and you almost always need to strike to get a good contract.
To answer your question I think we’d have to be able to read your whole contract to be certain. Sometimes contracts contradict themselves, or at least seem to according to the lawyers both parties have to hire, so even if there’s a line that says, “this applies until the contract expires” it may be contradicted by (1) the (enforced) law around status quo, (2) state law, or (3) other articles in the agreement.
Employers are not supposed to make any changes to working conditions during status quo, if that is helpful information. They are expected to bargain any changes and the union can usually file various legal complaints against the employer when they do inevitably change working conditions unilaterally. Though it should also be mentioned that the direct legal consequences are usually incredibly minor, so unions mostly use them as propaganda to make sure their members are pissed off and ready to strike.
To add on, the status quo period, at least for our union, doesn’t mean you can’t still file grievances (formal process for remedying contract violation). It just means you can’t take those cases to arbitration (third party judge decides on case). Its usually good to use unresolved grievances and any unfair labor practices (like the aforementioned unilateral changes in working conditions) to add leverage to negotiations and use settling them as part of the final agreement with the employer.
I think we have a ULP already (we’re in the middle of negotiating a first contract), if not multiple, but my union rep never mentions them to us. He did a while ago mention that we should keep them in our back pockets but has yet to mention using it as a strategy again. We’re just cracking economics, so I hope we can use that but we have pretty much just been walked all over so far.
The agency lawyer told our rep to stop reading one of our proposals mid-sentence because she said they would read it in caucus and he just acquiesced lol
Thanks for that info! We are bargaining our first contract with a unit of about 30 employees. The lawyer used by the agency is very skilled; she added this language to an article. As we were discussing it with our union rep, he said it doesn’t really mean anything, but why would the businesses lawyer want to include it if it didn’t give them an edge? Idk, the local we decided to unionize with is weak and has shown to be pretty fucking yellow and unsupportive, it’s been really demoralizing
Employers have all kinds of dirty tricks during negotiations. One of their favorite things to do is to force you to bargain about things that are no real concession on their part. This amounts to a delay tactic. Delays are always in their favor as it means longer before getting your next contract and it also means sapping your resources, including the energy of your bargaining committee.
So it may be that the company sees this clause as beneficial for itself or it may be that they are just trying to confuse you. This is where you’d want your lawyer to be truly competent and able to provide reasonable explanations for what to do about it. It is not a bad tactic to let the employer put something unenforceable in there so that you can focus on what you actually care about. But it really, really has to be unenforceable.
Your union rep probably isn’t a lawyer but your union should have one. I would recommend finding a polite and friendly way to get your union rep to ask the lawyer ASAP and to have them explain what’s up with the clause to your bargaining committee. Half-decent reps usually love the opportunity to explain their own angle towards organizing and strategy.
Our rep has only ever consulted the lawyer like maybe 3 times on our behalf for things that we’ve been extremely adamant about getting confirmation whether they were ULPs or not, and it’s usually taken 3 weeks or more for him to give us a response from her. He hasn’t even given us copies of our TA’s yet and we have 13, and we don’t even know what they are beyond the titles right now. We’ve requested them multiple times. Figure it would be important to reference our prior TA’s while creating new proposals, right? Since the beginning he’s tried to kneecap every single proposal we’ve written. His angle had always been “I don’t think management is going to go for that”. Today, the agency lawyer cut him off while reading a proposal and she said he didn’t need to read it and he just kinda sat there.
The agency lawyer also strong-armed us and lied today that hybrid work is a permissive subject of bargaining, and they added language to our telework proposal stating that management has the discretion to determine work locations… I’m pretty sure are BOTH mandatory subjects (webe been engaging in hybrid work since 2020)…and our rep didn’t say anything about that; he pretty much directed us to keep the counter language that she wrote.Thank God we haven’t TA’d, so I’m hoping after reading about it I can go back in and strike all of their counters to get it close to our original proposal and HOPE it’s not regressive bargaining.
Wait how do you not know what’s the the TAs? Does your local not have you all on the bargaining committee itself? That’s a huge red flag.
If they’re that bad I would recommend making your own new unification committee dedicated to bullying your local reps into doing a good job. At the end of the day you all most likely have to vote on any agreements and if you organize your workplace against a shit contract you can force changes “from below” by issuing your own clear demands. This is the basic recipe for dealing with bad union leadership - you out-organize them.
It’s a lot of work but I’ve seen it be very successful. Also sorry you have to deal with a bad rep.
I’d make that request for clarity from the lawyers. Or even contact pro bono labor lawyer advice. For all its faults, the AFL-CIO will often give you some free lawyer time.
So it’s kind of a weird set up; I organized a union drive with my department and one other within a larger agency and we unionized with a local of a large union. This union never really provided us with any professional organizers or anything, its just been 6 employees who knew dick about the inner workings of a union trying to get this thing off the ground. We successfully won our union vote and have been assigned a union rep who is our chief negotiator. Within our bargaining unit, the same 6 of us were basically elected as the bargaining committee, along with our union rep/negotiator. We are very much isolated from the larger local; we are social service workers and unionized with more of a trade union and have had little to no contact with anyone else besides him, and there is either only one other rep, or none that I know of in our town.
We the BC all have a Google Drive with all of our proposals. We write them up, edit them and finalize them with the rep, and then he prints out the proposals to pass out over the table. During caucus he will send the agency lawyer electronic versions of.our proposals to edit and write their counters, they get printed, passed out, then we counter, and so on. So he ends up having the final signed TA document and has not provided us copies of them :(
He has felt like nothing short of a roadblock, it sucks. I’m extremely proud of myself and my comrades having put SO MUCH WORK into this. We organized our coworkers, have done tons of research, written every proposal so far, met almost every week since March 2023…but it’s hard not feeling like we don’t even have one competent/knowledgeable person fighting on our side.
Sorry for sending novels, today was especially demoralizing and it’s just been such a struggle!! I’ll hit up the AFL-CIO that’s a great idea
Ah, that’s less bad than I guessed but still pretty bad. Caucus should not just be your union rep, it should include others on your BC as well and anything TA’d should be 100% known and agreed to by the whole BC (or if necessary, a vote by the BC, but functional ones usually reach consensus). It feels very shifty that you’re TAing things that you technically don’t know the content of. And the decision to TA at all is a big one that must be done strategically - you’d want to get the stuff you don’t really care about TA’d early so that you can emphasize the brass tacks at the end - the things that matter to your coworkers. Usually this is pay, benefits, and key issues of working conditions that you organized around before bargaining. The hybrid work issue sounds like one of those. You want to emphatically reject that if you think you can mobilize around it.
Your union rep is being weird to say that some issue important to you all is something the company won’t go for. The power to get your demands doesn’t happen at the bargaining table, it’s in your ability to mobilize your coworkers to take direct action, including actions leading up to a strike, the strike itself, and escalations during the strike. If that issue is one you think you can use to motivate and rally your membership, then you should keep it on the table. If you think it would be very difficult to get them to care, that’s when you can do an early TA, seeing how much you can get through bluffing and then just TA anyways.
So if your union rep isn’t focused on what you can mobilize around and what your membership cares about - and thinking about how you’ll include this in the inevitable need to strike - they’re incompetent or worse. They may even be bargaining against you, in effect. I would start thinking about what to do if the rep begins trying to avoid striking. That is something that a milquetoast union will often do because they care about having to cover strike pay and have opted for a strategy that is more collaborative with the employer. In that case you will still need to create a parallel organizing campaign.
If I’m correct that it’s just the union rep who’s got the power to TA right now, I recommend changing that ASAP. Stare that you all agree that a worker must be present and collaborating. Use the fact that you all don’t even know what’s in in your TAs to make this demand. If you present it as an expectation / entitlement, like “we discussed this and this is how it will work going forward” you may be able to change the dynamic more generally. Of course, do all of this calmly and in a friendly way. This is probably the most impactful thing you could do right now aside from holding organizing meetings with your coworkers to discuss bargaining and to get a sense for what matters to them most. You want your coworkers to know you’re on their side and to not be blindsided by anything alienating them from you when it comes time to ask them to strike. The worst case scenario is that they say, “what was the point of unionizing if this is what we get?” You can head that off through transparency and involvement. People that seem concerned can be onboarded through direct conversations and inclusion on the BC, assuming you don’t have any bylaws preventing that, for example.
So getting into that room and making TA decisions together is essential and so is creating the contact, trust, and involvement of membership in preparation for your primary organizing campaign (BC bargaining and strike) and any parallel campaign that you may need to run from behind the scenes eventually.
Oh, we do TA them together, so nothing is decided without the BC, he just has not given us copies to keep track of what we have and so that we can compare language in them to newer proposals which is super frustrating. I really do feel like he’s bargaining against us at this point; trying to rush us to TA everything, not questioning anything the agency lawyer has to say, or calling her put on flip flopping her reasons and he hasn’t helped us identify her strategy at all. He doesn’t even keep up on NLRB cases, I had to explain to him Wendt & Tecnocap multiple times and asked him if it applied to a situation we have going on and I get blank looks, it’s awful.
The huge majority of our coworkers fully appreciate and support what we do, but mobilizing them has been like pulling teeth so we just kinda stopped trying to organize bigger group meetings because it’s so exhausting. They are always invited to our weekly meetings but no one ever comes because they trust that we’re handling it lol. Everyone is down to strike though if it comes down to it, but we don’t have anyone else who seems down to help us plan and coordinate and it definitely feels like the rep won’t at all.
I am trying to keep my morale up but I don’t know how yall do it in the face of constant crises/union busting/little support, I’m about to just kick rocks and get another job
