What does HB 229 mean for Montana's higher education faculty? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are faculty members, and all of them are bound to be a bit speculative. But from the point of view of faculty unions, one question in particular stands out: if HB 229 passes, what will it mean to bargain with a new employer in a new context? If we examine the history of collective bargaining, can we anticipate that HB 229 will strengthen or weaken unions as agents of the faculty's interests and concerns? These comments address those questions.
In the summer of 1993, the Council of Faculty organizations of the Montana Federation of Teachers had become convinced that the traditional pattern of bargaining had serious limitations. In that pattern, unions had bargained with representatives of the Commissioner of Higher Education, local administrators and students. Contracts typically covered two year periods coinciding with the state's budgetary biennium, and although negotiations usually started well before contracts expired, they almost always fell far behind the budgetary cycle. Not until after the legislature and governor had reached agreement on a budget did salary talks get serious. By then, of course, budgets were substantially fixed and management had little financial latitude to respond to union demands. Unions were not talking to the people with the money, and they were talking after the major money decisions had been made.
To address these issues, the Council proposed to Governor Racicot a new approach to collective bargaining. Under this approach, which ultimately was called "collaborative negotiations," the parties represented at the table would be expanded to include the Governor, the Board of Regents, and the Legislature. Negotiations would occur before the budget cycle began. All the parties at the table would have equal status, all would be required to make commitments to certain actions, and the scope of negotiable issues would be expanded beyond the traditional "wages, hours and working conditions." Negotiations would be mediated and interest-based, rather than positional. For the Governor, this arrangement implied both greater managerial influence on the University System through collective bargaining and a financial commitment to the system that would be reflected in the executive budget. The Governor considered and accepted the proposal for collaborative negotiations, and by September of 1993, the process was underway on the UM campus.
In some respects, the move to collaborative bargaining was the product of special circumstances. One of these was the willingness of the unions to experiment with new ways of operating. Another was the fact that the Governor was committed to "reinventing government" and had a record of support for and constructive relations with the public employees where cooperation would be essential in making that a reality. A third factor was that the Regents and Commissioner were in the throes of restructuring the University System and that entailed a host of financial and bargaining issues. And finally, the financial crisis of the system had become too embarrassing to be ignored any longer: by any sort of national comparison of financial health, Montana's universities and colleges consistently scored at or near rock bottom.
The agreements that resulted from collaborative negotiations are ambitious in both goals and scope. They call for substantial raises for faculty and the infusion of new funds for a variety of academic support functions (libraries, computers, and the like), financed heavily by increased tuition. They also commit faculty to specific productivity gains, and both the faculty and administration to a variety of initiatives to improve student outcomes and reduce the time required to obtain degrees. The agreements are now in force and faculty and administration are working towards the implementation of their many provisions.
In abolishing the Board of Regents and placing control of the higher education system in an education department within the executive branch, HB 229 attempts to accomplish one of the same things that collaborative negotiations did: a tighter linkage between the university system, the Governor and the political, and especially budgetary, processes which determine the fate of higher education. Thus the experience of collaborative negotiations may be instructive in assessing HB 229, and HB 229, in turn, may have important implications for how bargaining will be conducted in the future.
In one sense, the experience of collaborative negotiations indicates that picking apart the implications of HB 229 can easily go too far. While changes in structure no doubt influence the behavior of institutions, the power, values, and intentions of political leaders can overcome structural barriers, or effectively blunt the intended impact of structural change. The parties to collaborative negotiations found a way to bridge the structural gap that existed between them. In particular, the Governor discarded the conventional structure and process of budget setting when he agreed to sit down with a group of employees to bargain over the pay rates, budgets, and programs of the agency for which they worked. By the same token, there is no assurance that future governors would not revert to traditional bargaining patterns, even if higher education was managed in the executive branch; certainly the historic pattern of bargaining in other executive branch agencies gives little reason for confidence on that score.
One desirable outcome which HB 229 would tend to assure, and which collaborative negotiations sought to promote, is an end to the budgetary squabbles which the Governor and the University System traditionally staged at every legislative session. In the last session, the Governor, the campuses, the Commissioner, and the unions presented an uncommonly united front in Helena. and enjoyed uncommon success in achieving their budgeter goals. By contrast, in previous sessions the disarray in higher education ranks contributed to the legislature's prompt scrapping of favorable budget proposals. But it is possible to overplay the benefits of this newfound unity. There were some special circumstances, which cannot necessarily be replicated in the future, which contributed to the budget victories.
One of the reasons the common front on the budget worked so well was that for the first time in a long while, the Governorship and both houses of the Legislature were held by the same party, which reduced partisan bickering. Also for the first time in recent memory, the state budget was not in crisis; the Governor's solidarity with higher education was a little more affordable than it usually is. Finally, and critically, very large tuition increases were a key component of the higher education budget. This was revenue that provided the system with badly needed resources, but let the state budget off the hook: we now read that in terms of state support, Montana is once again in the national basement. And privatization of a state function, the usual centerpiece of "reinventing government," moved a step forward.
We are living with the consequences already. The Regents' extremely cost-conscious Phase II Restructuring Plan is heavily influenced by projections of current trends which find that within a decade or so, state support will be gone and Montana families will be tapped out on tuition.
HB 229 would remove an independent Board of Regents and Commissioner from the budget process, and it seems reasonable to assume the Governor's Budget Office would at least partially fill the vacuum left behind. While this would give the faculty and the campuses more direct access to the Budget Office, it would give the Budget Office greater influence over the outcome, and this is a cause for profound concern. In collaborative negotiations, the unions, at any rate, felt the Budget Office tended to deny the value of any higher education activity outside of classroom teaching. If research, service, and non-classroom instruction are to be supported, it will be by strong, independent voices outside the Budget Office. Indeed, faculty support for or opposition to HB 229 should turn critically on whether the Regents are willing and able to provide that voice.
The evidence from collaborative negotiations on this score is modestly optimistic. In the negotiation of workload, curriculum, and other academic issues, the Regents' and Commissioner's representatives were responsive to faculty concerns and seem to share many of the faculty's academic values, although they have allowed alarming gaps to develop in their knowledge and understanding of important issues. This led, at times, to Regential initiatives that were not well thought out. Faculty, who were forced to operate in the dark on such issues as well, were not in a position to respond effectively. In any event, the evidence from the bargaining table is that the Regents' view of higher education is far more expansive and protective of traditional academic values than is the Budget Office's.
Since the conclusion of negotiations, however, the faculty's faith in the Regents has been shaken by Phase II Restructuring, which involves a number of Regential initiatives which appear to usurp the faculty's traditional role in academic affairs and threaten the integrity of academic programs. While the Regents and the faculty are still "talking" about these initiatives, they nevertheless seem to enjoy a great deal of forward momentum.
Higher education in Montana operates in a complex and rapidly changing environment. Declining public support and growing tuition levels, low graduation rates, the public's demand for ready access to four-year programs, the business community's interest in vocationally-oriented academic programming, changing information technology, an increasingly competitive market for education "products" provided on the Internet, and enrollment based funding (such as it is) all tug higher education in different directions and pose serious challenges to the way we think we should do our job. There is plenty here about which faculty should be seriously concerned. The Regents are caught in a network of competing claims from competing constituencies; those of us who vote against HB 229 will do so because we hope, in the end, the Regents will resolve those claims in a way which protects and enhances the integrity of higher education in Montana. Or somewhat more pessimistically, we may oppose HB 229 because we think that no matter what the Regents do, it won't be as bad as what will happen when governors and budget directors are in charge.
Regardless of the outcome on HB 229, collaborative negotiations should continue. With or without the Regents, and whatever the distinctive stamp put on the issues by political and educational leaders, vital faculty interests and concerns are in play right now and will be even more so in the future. Placing the university system in the executive branch, while it provides the political access promoted by collaborative negotiations, also raises our exposure to some very threatening political forces. In that environment, faculty cannot count on anybody to protect their interests except themselves. Collaborative negotiations, by expanding the scope of bargainable issues and by bringing all the influential stakeholders to the table, provide an effective vehicle for faculty to enhance and protect their interests.