Vermont-NEA News

Latest on Statewide Health Insurance Bargaining

IMPORTANT UPDATE ON YOUR HEALTH BENEFITS

VSBA Keeps Threatening to Thwart Statewide Health Insurance Talks – And Two Ways You Can Help

 

The Vermont School Boards Association is determined to keep threatening to walk away from the statewide health insurance bargaining table if it doesn’t get its way in banning educators from our team.

As you’ll recall, the first day of bargaining – a day for which your team prepared for more than eight months – was filled with the school board’s team seeking to remove our four colleagues who serve as alternates and advisors. And even though neither the law creating the Commission on Public School Employee Health Benefits nor established labor law prevents the presence of alternates, the VSBA filed an unfair labor practice charge asking the Vermont Labor Relations Board to bar our alternates from the talks.

Since that initial filing, last week the commission met again with our alternates in attendance and the parties discussed their proposals in detail. (Click here to see the proposals.)

But while we were hoping that maybe the VSBA would drop its frivolous and unproductive quest to dictate who we can have on our team so negotiations can proceed in earnest, they doubled-down. In a response to the labor board’s question of whether they even had the authority to render a decision on the VSBA’s unfair labor practice charge, the VSBA said this:

“On the present facts, if the Board chooses not to assert jurisdiction over the matter, Employers’ course may simply have to be determining not to meet with Employees until such time as Employees agree to negotiate without the ‘alternates’ they demand.”

In other words, if VSBA doesn’t get its way, they’re simply not going to bargain. Even though they know that more than 42,000 Vermonters’ health insurance benefits hang in the balance.

Your team has been and remains ready to talk until an agreement is reached. We already know first-hand the chaos caused by the transition to high-deductible plans in 2018. The last thing we need is more chaos.

Here’s where you come in: we need you to make some calls or write some emails to your local school boards and your state senators and representatives.

For your local school board members, reach out to them and have them contact the VSBA and their bargaining team and tell them to stay at the bargaining table and stop playing games with school employees’ health care. (You can find contact information for your school board members on your district website.)

For lawmakers, reach out to them to let them know that the VSBA is threatening to upend the law that legislators created when they established statewide bargaining for educator health insurance. Indeed, the legislature was clear in why it established the commission: “It is the intent of the General Assembly that the Commission on Public School Employee Health Benefits endeavor to transition school employees and school employers to more equitable health coverage statewide in a manner that is fair and practicable for all parties involved.”

Threatening to walk away from talks is neither fair nor practicable. Click here to contact your legislator today.

As always, we will keep you posted on developments that affect the health insurance you, your colleagues (including administrators, superintendents, and other non-unionized staff), and your families rely on.

--Will Adams for the Vermont-NEA / AFSCME bargaining team.

 

 

Darren Allen Apr 18 2019
Your Union Issues