Collective Bargaining Contracts Vetoed By Swift

By David MacKenzie

UMass Boston employees received a shock in the first week of August when their long-delayed pay raises were vetoed by Governor Swift and the legislature did not vote to override the vetoes. The vetoes affected nearly all of the collective bargaining units on campus and dashed hopes for pay raises that were 18 months or longer overdue. This was terrible news for all of us.

This unfortunate action was one of many taken by the governor to balance the state operating budget for FY 2003, which most observers agreed was at least $300 million out of balance when it arrived on her desk. The budget reflects many other painful decisions, such as those to eliminate health care benefits for the most vulnerable, reduce local aid to cities and towns, and drastically cut funding for our court system.

The university administration regrets that the months of negotiation and waiting have come to this, and wishes that there were an easy way out of the difficulties everyone now faces. We have been asked why we don’t simply fund the pay raises out of existing revenues. Doing so would be unwise and impossible for the following reasons:

Funding pay raises for this year and the last out of our own revenues would be a budget hit of over $10 million at the same time as we are absorbing state appropriation reductions of $7.4 million over the same two years, as well as a loss of $1.2 million in library materials funding. We simply cannot afford to do this.

Reducing our workforce to meet the cost of the pay agreements would mean laying off 150 to 200 of our employees, an unacceptable result. We have already suffered comparable losses in employee-power from early retirements and layoffs in the past year.

If we did take such drastic steps and paid for the raises without funding from the legislature, we would be setting a precedent that the legislature would use to avoid funding our pay raises whenever there were hard budget choices to be made (which happens almost every year). If that were to become our way of doing business, then raises would always mean layoffs, and the university would go into an unending downward budget spiral.

I should add that not paying for raises when the money is not appropriated by the legislature is provided for in the collective bargaining agreements themselves. Everyone at the bargaining table knew that if the contracts were not funded by the legislature, then the raises would not get paid. For example, Section 30.1 of the faculty contract provides as follows: "The cost items contained in this Agreement (including Articles 26.1 through 26.8, 26.13 and 27.9) are specifically subjected to additional, complete and identifiable appropriation by the General Court and shall not become effective unless the appropriation necessary to fund fully such cost items has been enacted in accordance with Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 150E, Section 7 and allocated by the Governor to the Board of Trustees, in which case the cost items shall be effective on the dates provided in this Agreement." Similar language is in all the contracts. Hence, the university administration is not in violation of the contracts by not paying for raises when they are not funded by the legislature.

The university administration continues to support the funding by the legislature of the contracts that both sides negotiated in good faith. A lot will probably depend on the fiscal health of the Commonwealth. Certainly if the initiative petition to repeal the income tax actually passes this November, when it will appear on the ballot, there will be no hope of funding for the agreements. If that initiative petition passes, the university could suffer the loss of all its state support, making the pay raise issue moot. Even without the repeal of the income tax, if the state budget continues to be in deficit for the next several years, at some point it will be in everyone’s interest to sit down and renegotiate the contracts.

David MacKenzie is vice chancellor for administration and finance

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