We’re sympathetic to the workers’ complaints. A big chunk of the
district’s offer is for health benefits, which only about half of
the workers take from the district.
The labor dispute between the Morgan Hill Unified School District and its classified employees is a distressing sign of the problems simmering in the school district.
The fact that board members seem to have failed to anticipate the reaction of members of the Service Employees International Union to the district offering significantly less to classified employees than it gave to the superintendent and the teachers union shows a stunning lack of foresight.
The situation has devolved into noisy protests covered by local television news stations.
This is not the image we want to project of our community, it’s not the environment we want for workers or students. Now that the two sides have reached an impasse, it’s likely an outside mediator is going to have to resolve the mess. That’s too bad for everyone involved.
We’re sympathetic to the workers’ complaints. A big chunk of the district’s offer is for health benefits, which only about half of the workers take from the district.
When you consider that these employees – the bus drivers, clerks, secretaries, food service workers, and more – are the lowest paid in the district, and, apparently, lower paid than their counterparts in other parts of the county, that sympathy grows.
If the district wants to attract and retain high-quality workers, it must pay competitive wages. It doesn’t seem to have a problem doing that at the superintendent level, so why can’t it do the same at the classified worker level?
If it wants to maintain a high-productivity, low-stress work environment, then the school board must take a bigger-picture approach to labor negotiations. It must realize that no raise to any employee – whether a teacher or a superintendent – is given in a vacuum, and those raises will be watched by all other employee unions, and rightfully so.
Let’s get this resolved as quickly and as amicably as possible so that all district employees can focus on educating our students instead of staging and responding to protests.
And let’s learn from the mistakes made in this case so that they are not repeated in the next round of labor negotiations.
