STATE LEVEL COLLECTIVE
BARGAINING HISTORY
The Missouri Supreme Court
confirmed in its ruling on
Independence NEA vs. Independence School District that public
employees, including teachers and education support professionals, have a
constitutional right to bargain collectively with their employers.
The ruling supports Article
1, Section 29 in the Missouri Constitution, which provides “That employees
shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through
representatives of their own choosing
The case began in 2003 when
the Missouri National Education Association employee groups in the
Independence School District filed a lawsuit against their school district,
which unilaterally rescinded the employees’ contract. When the Trial Court,
in 2006, decided in favor of the district based on
Springfield vs. Clouse
and Sumpter vs. City of
Moberly, the Independence MNEA groups took their case to the
Missouri Supreme Court..
The ruling reverses a 1947
decision, Springfield vs.
Clouse, whereby the Court ruled that the constitutional language
did not apply to public employees, and the 1982 decision,
Sumpter vs. City of Moberly,
whereby the Court ruled that meet-and-confer agreements were not legally
binding.
Date issued:
May 29, 2007
Proposition B:
April 21, 2004
Our
firefighters and paramedics lost the ballot issue to secure a constitutional
change to give our members the right to collectively bargaining in November
of 2002. This was the last giant step in the struggle to secure our
bargaining rights. Until 1947, public employees felt they had the
constitutional right to bargain collectively as Article XIII of the state
constitution gave blanket coverage of “the employees' right to bargain
collectively with representatives of their own choosing”. This is the year
when the Springfield-Clouse case came down from the Missouri Supreme
Court and stipulated that the language in the state constitution that said
employees have the right to collectively bargain was only meant for the
private sector and could not be applied to public employees. This was
digested slowly by public employees and finally in 1959 the Meet and Confer
Law was passed and amended in 1960 giving us the law we presently live
under. This allows certain public employees to meet with the employer and
discuss wages, hours and conditions of employment. The next step is to
reduce the results of the discussions to writing and present them to the
public legislative body for rejection, modification or adoption into
ordinance or resolution form. After memorandums of agreement were negotiated
by public employee unions and were passed into ordinance form they were
considered binding until 1981 when the Supreme Court dealt another telling
blow to public employees in the Moberly Decision. This decree
stipulated that since these memorandums of agreement were negotiated absent
collective bargaining, they were no more binding than any other public
ordinance and thus could be changed without mutual consent by the
legislative body through the same legislative process that they used to
adopt the original ordinance at a regular city council meeting!
Since the early
seventies, public employees have met in Jefferson City to try to draft a
proper collective bargaining bill to include all public employees. These
first attempts proved futile as each group needed certain provisions or
could not accept other provisions because of mandates by their membership at
convention or their international union prevented them from accepting
certain provisions such as a no-strike clause as in the case of the teachers
unions. Throughout these meeting of the public employee steering committee a
constant overriding theme prevailed, we must put a bill in to be heard and
we did. In the early eighties, Senator Panethiere (D) Kansas City , almost
passed his bill in the Senate but fell short by one vote. It never made it
to the House of Representatives where Earl Schleff (D) St. Louis County was
at the ready. Although we have always had a democratic majority in both the
House and Senate, we were unable to garner enough votes to pass a bill and
this led to much frustration in the labor community. It was apparent that
public employee collective bargaining was only a real priority to public
employees and not to private sector workers who already enjoyed this right!
In 1990, the
frustration was at such a level that the public employee steering committee
decided not to put a bill in since they felt it had no chance of passing.
The firefighters seized the moment and put their own bill in as an amendment
to the Fireman's Arbitration Statute allowing negotiations for
contracts with binding arbitration. This bill was received well by the
legislature as no other labor group contradicted the bill as in the past
with their special needs. You see, if you answer all the questions about the
bill and take all the problems away from the legislators, you have a good
chance of passage. Even then, it took two reconsideration votes in the full
Senate and one reconsideration vote in the House ( something that is
unprecedented) to pass this bill. For the first time in the history of our
struggle for collective bargaining rights, a bill passed the legislature and
was on the governor's desk for signing. Unfortunately, the governor was John
Ashcroft and he vetoed our bill during the IAFF Convention in St. Louis
citing the problems with the constitutionality question cited in the
Springfield-Clouse and Moberly decisions. This was a bitter
setback for us and it served as a wakeup call to the rest of the public
employees unions never to let us put a bill in of our own. Since then, we
have been included with the rest of labor in a bill that does not have the
votes to pass in either house.
After the last
serious attempt to pass this bill in the Senate in 1998 and the House in
1999, it was apparent that the votes are not in either chamber to pass
collective bargaining. At the steering committee meetings talk of a
referendum popped up but labor could not get the backing of their own
international unions so they quickly backed out of this idea. All but the
firefighters! It was 1990 all over again and we had another chance to go on
our own with the blessing of the rest of labor. This was too good to be true
and we took full advantage of this opportunity. Following MSCFF convention
mandates, we filed our petition. After the initial signature campaign began
it was apparent that the time frame for the November 2000 ballot was
unreachable and we decided to wait until November of 2002 to pass our
measure, giving us a full 17 months to collect signatures.
The reasons for
our referendum were twofold: First, we could not pass the bill in the
legislature and secondly, if we had done so, it would have been
unconstitutional. Remember the Springfield-Clouse decision says collective
bargaining is just for private sector employees and Moberly says because of
this stipulation our contracts cannot be truly binding. Our only recourse is
to change the constitution to allow our members to have the right to
collectively bargain and negotiate binding contracts with binding
arbitration. I would be remiss to suggest that the right to collective
bargaining infers an automatic contract. Nothing in any collective
bargaining legislation in any state or the Wagner Act itself guarantees that
the employer must enter into an agreement. We still have to use our
political savvy to gain these contracts, make no mistake about it. But
simply put, without the passage of the referendum language, these agreements
would not be worth the paper they are written on!
Secretary State
Matt Blunt delayed our petition and by the time the courts allowed us on the
ballot, we did not have the time nor could we raise the necessary funds to
get to the rural areas and educate the people about our referendum and it
costs us big. We lost by 1 per cent and our Council has suffered through
membership loss with some members not being able to get over the loss of the
referendum. Our Council has a renewed strength now and we will continue to
advance our fight for collective bargaining when the time is right. We will
never stop fighting!
I hope this
brief history serves both to educate union members of the firefighters'
trials and tribulations regarding this struggle for the rights we deserve
and to refresh our memory of why we still fight the fight because we truly
believe that we should not accept anything less than first class
citizenship!
