Issues of Concern from the 2023 PAT Successor Bargain and

Suggested Remedies

The observations and suggestions below are based on the 2022-23 PAT/PPS Successor CBA
negotiation which resulted in a strike that lasted from November 1st until November 26th, 2023.

The intention of this document is to memorialize elements of the history of this negotiation and
offer suggestions for improvement. These include:

● Clearer by-laws and procedures for the bargaining process

● More democratic decision-making
● Member-driven proposals and priorities
● A clearer understanding of how District finances impact bargaining

It is hoped that insights gained from a critical analysis will be used to improve PAT’s bargaining
process in the future, strengthen PAT at the bargaining table, and bolster the confidence of
PAT’s members in their union.

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Strategic Issue #1 Lack of transparency, democracy, and oversight in the creation of the
bargaining platform

The bargaining platform had 10 planks, all of which had numerous sub-issues. Many of these
were related to the concept of “Community Schools”, of which our membership was mostly
unaware. This led to an Initial Proposal containing elements the membership did not fully
understand, that the Bargaining Team could not be certain the membership broadly supported,
and that was too sweeping in scope to be bargained with any real chance of success in all
areas.

Background and Effect on Negotiations:

As the months of bargaining unfolded, rather than narrowing the scope of the bargain to
focus more on issues of the highest importance to the greatest number of members, no
issues were dropped or consolidated. From the perspective of management, when PAT
claims that everything is important, it is hard for them to understand PAT’s priorities. The
confusion of the District team was made explicit nine months into the bargain, when a member
of the management bargaining team expressed with some frustration, “We are having a difficult
time determining PAT’s priorities.” After nine months of bargaining, both parties' key priorities
should be crystal clear.

This ambiguity matters because management will be less likely to make proposals that show
movement until they can be certain the movement they make will be of value to PAT and can be

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exchanged for something of value to management. The PAT strategy of “going for all of it”
contributed to management’s logical counter, which is to “give on nothing.” This
gridlocked the bargain and ensured that dozens of open issues remained on the table at the
start of the strike when it would have been more advisable to have three to five key issues.

Problems of Process:

The best practice is for a bargaining survey to be the basis for determining the key priorities of a
proposal. Member surveys were used as the basis for an Initial Proposal that was ready to
present to the District in March 2020. Member priorities were workload relief, COLA, and
safety/discipline issues, in that order. The bargaining campaign and platform were to focus on
these three issues and their related sub-issues.

Covid-19 prevented passing this proposal until the 2022-23 school year. Both the PAT UniServ
staff and the elected leadership turned over in the 2020-22 time period. New leadership
introduced the concept of “Community Schools” as the organizing idea for a bargaining
campaign. Adequate education of the membership on the concept of Community Schools was
not achieved. Adequate surveying of the membership to determine their support for new
Community Schools proposals did not occur. Nonetheless, at the direction of the PAT
President, a substantial number of new Community Schools proposals were added to the
already very large and ambitious Initial Proposal. A proposal too grand in scope runs the risk of
over-promising and under-delivering to the membership thereby undermining the members’
support for the platform and their confidence in the union’s ability to deliver on its promises.

Suggested Process Remedies

1. To ensure that bargaining issues are developed from the grassroots, the Bargaining
Team should employ bargaining surveys, listening sessions, focus groups, and
other means of determining membership priorities. Information gathered in this
manner should be the basis for determining the bargaining platform. The
Bargaining Team and PAT President should be equally responsible for determining the
content of surveys and other means of gathering input from the members.
Comprehensible survey data must be provided to the bargaining team, as well as to the
Executive Board. The use of a Likert Scale or other methods that allow for
mathematically valid numerical ranking would be best.
2. A Bargaining Committee, composed of a group of educators that encompass as
many different job categories and levels as possible should be recruited to
support the Bargaining Team and provide direct feedback on educators’ needs from
their perspective. This committee would not require approval from the Executive Board.
The PAT President would make every effort to ensure that the committee is broadly
representative of the membership and not skewed toward any one category or
demographic.
3. A Bargaining Team, appointed by the PAT President and approved by the PAT Executive
Board should be the body responsible for reviewing data collected from the members
and the Bargaining Committee. The Bargaining Team, in consultation with the PAT

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 President and UniServ staff, should determine the bargaining platform from that
data. The platform should then be approved by the Executive Board.
4. The Bargaining Team, with support from UniServ and in consultation with the PAT
President, should draft proposals that are realistically achievable and aligned with
member priorities as determined in #1 and #2 above. It is recommended that
proposals avoid being overly “aspirational” in nature unless the intent is to use them
early in the negotiation to make a point before dropping them after they have been
rejected. Caution should be used when making aspirational proposals and care should
be taken to drop them early enough in the bargain to avoid confusing the District about
our priorities and prevent the problem of over-promising to the members.
5. A complete draft of the Initial Proposal should be submitted to the Executive
Board and be explained by the Bargaining Chair, President, and UniServ staff.
Changes to the Initial Proposal requested by a majority of the Executive Board should be
made unless vetoed by the President, in which case, a two-thirds majority of the
Executive Board would be required to mandate a change to the Initial Proposal. Once
approved by the Executive Board, no significant additions should be made to the
Initial Proposal by the President or the Bargaining Team without the approval of a
majority of the Executive Board.

Strategic Issue #2: Unilateral decision-making which undermines democracy and

strategic planning

As a bargain unfolds it is inevitably necessary to make adjustments to bargaining strategies,

tactics, and specific proposals. No single person should have the power to make these
decisions.

Background and Effect on Negotiations:

There were several key “decision points” during the bargaining process where the PAT
President made unilateral decisions. One was setting a timeline for when to bring the
bargain to a ‘crisis point’ should negotiations go poorly. The ‘early window’, which would run the
timelines as quickly as possible, would lead to a potential strike action on or around November
1st. The ‘late window’ would place the action on or around February 1st. While the November
window had the advantage of achieving the quickest possible resolution, the late window was a
safer choice for several reasons:

1. November has too many non-teaching days, and should the strike go long, it plays in the
favor of management who may try to wait us out.

2. The late window provides more time to narrow the bargaining issues and build political
pressure.

3. The late window increases the chances of coordinating bargaining with other work groups
such as PFSP and SEIU.

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4. The late window opens the possibility of highlighting school funding issues during the time
the legislature may be considering the budget for schools.

5. Holding a strike authorization vote in October but not immediately striking would provide
PAT’s team additional leverage at the bargaining table as management holds out hope that a
strike can be avoided, potentially leading to compromises from the District team. Once the
District knows without doubt that we would strike, there would be no incentive for the District to
make concessions in the hopes of avoiding a strike.

The pros and cons of the two dates were discussed in a Steering Committee meeting, but it
appeared as though a decision had already been made outside the committee, making the
Steering Committee deliberations perfunctory, and the early window was selected, presumably
by the PAT President.

A second key decision point was on October 31st, in the hours leading up to the start of the
strike. The PAT Initial Proposal included a reference to a Community Schools Article or MOU,
but the specifics of this had never been included in previous packages. The PAT President
introduced a full multi-page proposal to the PAT Bargaining Team to review. The Bargaining
Chair was caught completely by surprise when this was introduced. After listening to the
proposal be read through, which due to its considerable size took a significant amount of time,
the Bargaining Chair shared with the President the many problems of introducing a brand new,
highly complex proposal mere hours before the start of a strike. Each of the Chair’s concerns
was met with a counterargument by the President. The introduction of this proposal at this time
would have certainly had an explosively negative response from the District bargaining team,
perhaps even leading to an Unfair Labor Practice complaint against PAT. Alarmed, the
Bargaining Chair asked for the Bargaining Team to have a closed meeting to discuss the
possibility of going forward with the President’s proposal. Such a meeting is consistent with
past practice and with the traditional separation of powers between the President and the
Bargaining Team.

The Bargaining Team is meant to be independent of the President in its decision-making power.
Presidents have always been ex-officio members of the Bargaining Team without voting powers.
In all past bargaining practices, if the President wished to have the Bargaining Team take a
particular action, the President would present their idea to the team, answer questions, and
excuse themselves for the team to debate and vote. After following this protocol, the Bargaining
Team determined that it would be best to hold off on a Community Schools proposal and pursue
it later in the bargain or immediately after the bargain as a separate MOU. The President was
invited to return to caucus, but the events of the evening prevented a further discussion of the
matter. The next day, the President began the caucus meeting by expressing extreme
displeasure at not being in the room for the deliberations on the president’s proposal and
demanded that no such meetings ever be held again. The President introduced a set of norms
for the Bargaining Team, however, these norms did NOT address what happens when the
Bargaining Team disagrees with the President. The Bargaining Chair pointed this out and
reminded everyone of the modified consensus process we have always used and had
previously agreed to as a team to resolve differences of opinion for a course of action. Notably,

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this process WAS NOT included in the norms document of the President, leaving it ambiguous
as to what power the team had to disagree with the President or a process for resolving such
disputes. The use of norms1 was used to silence dissent on this and at least one other occasion
later in the bargain, asking people to avoid using their body language to express disapproval of
the decisions of the PAT President. The demand of the President to be present in the room
during all deliberations and the use of selective norms had the effect of rendering the
President effectively immune from dissent.

A third key decision point was on Tuesday, November 14th at 8pm. At that moment it became
clear that caps to class sizes were not going to be an achievable goal. We had a hard stop at
9pm because of the venue we were in. Rather than having a deliberative discussion with the
Bargaining Team about what to do next strategically. The President unilaterally decided to
pivot to the St. Paul class size committee model of limiting class sizes. Without discussion
or debate, the President copied and pasted a version of the St. Paul language into our proposal.
No one on the team appeared to have any knowledge of the St. Paul model. The Bargaining
Chair challenged making this move, asking how the president could know this was something
our members would want. The Chair was told something to the effect of, “I’m the President.
People elected me to get caps, so we’re getting caps one way or another.” In less than 45
minutes we were presenting a new proposal, riddled with errors, to management incorporating
St. Paul class size committee language.

It was possible to have used that moment to pivot to gain leverage for some of our other
demands. We might have reluctantly backed away from caps in exchange for better
concessions on other important demands. The key point here is that there was no room for
discussion; the President assumed all power to make achieving St. Paul language a “must
have” of the bargain in addition to all the other critical open issues. This one decision almost
certainly caused a significant delay in achieving a settlement prolonging the strike.

Suggested Process Remedy

Enshrine into bylaws a separation of powers between the President and the Bargaining
Team.

The President has the power to set goals, articulate the vision of the bargain, and argue for a
course of action with the full weight of their office behind them. However, Presidents don’t have
a vote on the team for a reason. They do not have to immediately live under the conditions
negotiated in the contract. The longer they hold office, the more disconnected they can become
from the current classroom experience. Presidents may have their own political agendas they
wish to pursue via the power of their position in the union that is not reflective of the wishes of
the rank-and-file membership. For these reasons and others, it must be the Bargaining Team
who are empowered to make final decisions, not the President.

Strategic Issue #3 Lack of plausible financial strategy

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See Exhibit A

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It is critical to have a clear understanding of finances; misestimating the money available
can lead to overreaching on demands or leaving gains on the table. The PAT President
and UniServ staff believed PPS could afford the entirety of our $250 million+ proposal.

Background and Effect on Negotiations:

It seems clear that there was a large miscalculation on how much money it would be possible to
extract from the PPS school board. Inevitably, there is guesswork involved to some extent.
Assumptions were made about the total available dollars for this bargain. There seems to
have been a genuine belief by UniServ staff that PPS could afford everything in our
proposal. The total cost of our proposal was truly astronomical, leading The Bargaining Chair
and others to frequently question how the District could pay for it. Satisfactory answers were
hard to come by and required a leap of faith to accept. This misunderstanding of how much
could be extracted from the District may have emboldened leadership into believing that
compromise was unnecessary because “the District can afford it all.” This strike revealed the
limits of brute force tactics in compelling financial concessions from the employer.

Suggested Process Remedies

1. Ensure there is a clear and realistic understanding of not just how much money
the District has, but how much can be PROVEN they have. Beyond this, there has to
be sufficient political leverage with board members to make them willing to spend what
PAT can prove they have.
2. Look at historical norms of spending and revenues to help give a baseline of what
is available. Exploiting contacts among board members, external organizing, and other
levers of influence can be used to stretch the funds believed to be available to some
degree, but not to extremes.
3. Ensure accurate costing of our own proposals. Misestimating what they have or
what ours costs by $10 or $20 million dollars is not problematic, but getting it wrong by
$50 or $100 million, (as happened in this negotiation) can be a disaster. Bottom line: it’s
better to be a little conservative than shoot for the moon.
4. OEA should be asked to provide additional training and support for Uniserv
professional staff in the area of financial analysis and provide support for local
presidents on issues of democratic union governance.

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It is my hope that these observations and insights can inform PAT leadership in reviewing and
augmenting the PAT bylaws as needed, with the goal of achieving maximum gains at the
bargaining table while preserving the democratic ideals of our union.

Steve Lancaster

PAT Bargaining Chair 2014-2023

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Exhibit A