Negotiaton Analysis

The Board felt that the issues of teachers would be on the following lines

ľ Agreeing to layoff of staff, transparency about identifying teachers to be laid off, notice period for layoff, review procedure for laid off people, facility for recall.

ľ No increase in pupil/teacher ratio, increase the length of work day, elimination of prep time, reduction of duty time, taking up emergency assignments.

ľ Transparency about performance evaluation, and need to feel included while developing a systematic evaluation procedure.

ľ Retrospective salary benefits, with cost of living benefits.

ľ Need to redeem accumulated sick leave at the ti

me of leaving service, provision of higher duration of childbirth leave, salary granted for civic duty leave.

We had not planned to use it but brought it up while discussing maternity and paternity benefits as well as arbitration issues. We said that all government employees had a non-binding arbitration clause and that most government and private sector employers gave only six weeks of maternity leave. We actually used a combination of authority and social proof on these issues to strike a favorable deal.

We had planned to use authority when it came to legal issues and explanation of rules and procedures. For example, while discussing the benefits, the teachers tried to bring up the issue of legal obligation. We forcefully drove home the point that there was no legal obligation on the part of the board to offer any of the benefits and demonstrated it through some internet searches. We also used authority while discussing the teacher work load and salary in neighboring districts. We were also quite authoritative when it came to issues of management prerogative.

Our analysis showed that we could run the school system with 343 teachers giving us a ratio of 35 students per teacher. Based on this analysis, we fixed the maximum number of teachers to be laid off as 32 given the starting strength of 375. However, we were open to no reduction at all if the teachers were willing to take the requisite pay cut. Since the reduction in force (RIF) was due to financial issues, the board wanted to maintain total control over the process. The only concession available to teachers was an advisory role. The board decided to have non-binding arbitration that it was willing to accept for other disputes also. The board was willing to compromis

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