Permalink

Editorial: Gloucester contracts show officials still need fiscal awareness check


Published: February 20, 2009

Under normal circumstances, the six new collective bargaining agreements recently finalized with school employees by Gloucester School Committee would be welcome.

After more than a year of negotiations, the deals with clerical workers, custodians, cafeteria workers and teacher aides included raises that, for the most part, amounted to 1.5 percent over three years.

Under normal circumstances, those raises would be considered modest. Under normal circumstances, School Committee Chairman Greg Verga's argument that settled contracts produce some stability in the budget and improve the morale of the employees would be compelling.

But these, as everybody knows, are not normal circumstances. This is not the kind of largely manufactured "crisis" that is invoked every time city or school officials want a property tax override. This recession is real and it is deep. Personal incomes are declining. So, therefore, is the money to run government.

That should have prompted committee members to comply with Mayor Carolyn Kirk's Jan. 26 request that they suspend all contract negotiations, as she had with city unions, until the full extent of the financial trouble was known. But the mayor's school board colleagues declined to do so, went ahead with negotiations — and even voted to approve three of them. They were poised to approve the other three last week, when Kirk told them that the school department would have to cut another $100,000 from the current fiscal year's budget, on top of an earlier $200,000 cut.

That was enough to cancel the vote on the three remaining contracts. The committee also directed representatives to meet with legal advisers to see if they could stop the other, approved contracts from taking effect. That, of course, will create legal bills that should have been unnecessary.

The amount of money at stake here is not huge — the estimate is that all of them would have added about $75,000, which barely registers as a percentage of a budget of some $36 million.

But, as Kirk knows — and as the committee surely ought to know — nothing in collective bargaining happens in a vacuum. If these contracts are upheld, they will set the precedent for the teachers' contract. And a raise of even a seemingly modest 1.5 percent over three years for the teachers will be much more expensive and entirely unaffordable in an environment where budgets are being forced to decrease. The only alternative then will be major layoffs or crushing service cuts.

The reality is that the schools can't afford to offer pay raises at all right now. That may sound harsh and injurious to morale, but what do they think those in the private sector have been facing? Those employed by the schools are fortunate to have jobs at all — a raise in this economy should be the least of their worries.

This episode, even if it is resolved, is evidence that school officials are still not recognizing the magnitude of the current fiscal crisis, or taking it seriously.

It is past time for them to do so.