Hearing of the Joint Committee on Public Service
Testimony in Support of HB 530
June 9, 2005
Patricia V. Markunas, President
Massachusetts State College Association

Chairmen Kaufman and Buoniconti, for the record my name is Patricia V. Markunas. I am president of the Massachusetts State College Association, the union that represents 2500 faculty and librarians at the nine state colleges. I am also a professor of psychology at Salem State College and reside in the City of Salem. I have been involved in negotiations for the state college faculty/librarian union for twenty years and served as the chairperson of the MSCA Bargaining Committee for five of those years.

In September 2004, the MSCA Board of Directors voted unanimously to support legislation to change the collective bargaining process. On behalf of the Board and the membership of the MSCA, I urge your favorable report on HB 530, which would amend the state's Collective Bargaining Law (Chapter 150E) to allow our employer to submit contractual cost items directly to the Legislature for consideration.

Simply put, ladies and gentlemen of the Committee, the collective bargaining process for the public higher education affiliates is broken and it needs to be fixed. Our statutory employer of record, now the Board of Higher Education, does not have sufficient legal authority to negotiate in good faith with us and our sister unions. Since 1990, five different governors from both political parties, acting through the Office of Administration and Finance, have stymied negotiations through the use of pre-legislative vetoes and bad faith bargaining tactics. The subversion of the collective bargaining process has demoralized the faculty and damaged the system's national reputation, causing difficulty in national recruitment and retention of faculty. Ultimately, this will mean great harm to the quality of the education provided to the students of the public higher education system.

The collective bargaining statute as it exists allows the governor too many opportunities to thwart the bargaining process. Every possible roadblock that a governor could erect in the collective bargaining process has been actualized over the past 15 years: refusal to provide economic parameters for negotiations, refusal to submit ratified and executed contracts for legislative action, reneging on economic offers made and accepted at the bargaining table, and vetoes of the funding for contracts authorized, ratified and executed by the governor himself or herself. This situation cannot continue.

The proposed amendment to Chapter 150E would not affect the governor's constitutional veto power over any bill passed by the Legislature. It would remove pre-legislative opportunities to stymie negotiations and veto contractual cost items by failing to submit them for legislative action. It would allow the employer of record, the Board of Higher Education, to negotiate contracts and submit the cost items for their funding directly to the Legislature. In this regard, the Board's authority would be the same as other state agencies and the judiciary, which have functioned appropriately in terms of the collective bargaining process.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Committee, the members of the MSCA have long appreciated the support afforded by the Legislature to the state's public higher education system and to its employees. The work of the Senate Task Force Committee on Public Higher Education and the restoration of group health insurance premiums for state employees are only the two most recent examples of this support. Although our last collective bargaining agreement was fully funded, we also appreciate the legislative overrides of gubernatorial vetoes of funding for pay increases and retroactive monies due our colleagues in the other higher education unions.

It is time to fix the problem so that legislative action to remedy the bad faith tactics of the governor is no longer necessary. The faculty and librarians of the state colleges want the collective bargaining process to work in good faith. Amending Chapter 150E to allow this process to work properly is good for our membership, our institutions and our students. Thank you for your consideration of this legislation and my testimony in support of it.

For the membership,

Patricia V. Markunas
President