Tech faculty contract near approval

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

April 25, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

Only one hurdle remains for Minnesota technical college faculty awaiting their first-ever statewide contract, United Technical College Educators President Bruce Hemstad said Thursday.

The UTCE members on 34 campuses throughout the state approved the historic contract with the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system April 18, and the MnSCU Board of Trustees added its approval Wednesday, leaving yet only legislative approval.

And that is expected to come sometime before the session ends in mid-May, Hemstad said.

The contract will be discussed Monday by the Joint Subcommittee on Employee Relations, and if found favorable, will be forwarded to the full bodies of both the state House and Senate.

"We don't anticipate at this point there are going to be any blocks in the road," Hemstad said. "And the (UTCE members) are relieved it's over. Time and frustration definitely have taken their toll."

More than 1,500 of the state's 2,200 technical college faculty voted in the election, and they approved the contract by a 75 percent margin.

UTCE and MnSCU had grappled over issues of salaries and workloads for more than two years, which left the faculty without contracts since the technical college system merged with Minnesota's state universities and community colleges in 1995.

The agreement was the first MnSCU proposal the faculty brought to a vote in the two years, and had been described by Jack Rhodes, MnSCU's director of communications, as the state's "last, best offer."

Hemstad said people outside of the negotiations could never understand why it took two years to negotiate a contract, but he said what they didn't understand is that a contract had to be written from scratch.

Prior to the merging of Minnesota's three higher education institutions, technical colleges contracted with local school districts and were considered part of that school district, which meant a different contract was negotiated for each of the 34 technical colleges in Minnesota.

"We literally created a new document -- word for word -- sentence for sentence," Hemstad said.

The majority of faculty members think of the contract as a compromise, and there was a definite segment which did oppose the contract, he said. But overall UTCE members believe the contract is a good starting point for the next round of negotiations, beginning in about six weeks.

"It would have been nice to have the normal amount of breathing room between contracts," Hemstad said. "But there is some relief that we don't have to start from scratch."