Tech faculty voting on contract

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 17, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

Northwest Technical College-Bemidji faculty, and other technical college faculty throughout the state, vote today on their first-ever union contract, an action which may end a two-year negotiating stalemate with the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.

NTC-Bemidji's union representative, Karen Sollom, said Wednesday a tentative contract was indeed approved by the faculty's union -- United Technical College Educators -- executives Monday, and that Minnesota's 2,200 technical college faculty would vote by electronic mail today.

She said a vote count could be done as early as Friday, but it might take longer as voters are also being mailed by union members to confirm their electronic votes.

Sollom declined to comment on whether it seems the faculty would accept the MnSCU proposal because talking publicly about the vote would be a violation of the negotiating agreement.

"We're keeping our fingers crossed," said MnSCU Communications Director Jack Rhodes about the contract vote. "Getting a contract (settled) would be a very important and historical moment for this system because it is the first contract ever. There are some very difficult issues."

UTCE and MnSCU have been grappling over issues of salaries and workloads for more than two years, leaving the technical college faculty without contracts since the system merged with Minnesota's state universities and community colleges into one system in 1995.

This agreement represents the first MnSCU proposal the faculty have voted on in the two years, and was described by Rhodes earlier this week in the Detroit Lakes Tribune as the state's "last, best offer."