As discussed at our most recent membership meeting, our negotiating team is taking a new approach to bargaining this time around - it’s called interest-based bargaining”.
Although we engaged in conventional collective bargaining for our first contract, we can see the benefits of interest-based bargaining. Instead of presenting proposals and counterproposals and arguing our positions until we reached a settlement that we could recommend to you for ratification, we are going through the contract article by article attempting to improve upon the existing language.
As a result, some articles are signed off unchanged while others undergo minor or major changes. We are also attempting to correct typos and grammatical errors throughout the process.
So far, we have been meeting on a fairly regular schedule – every other week. The team also meets in between sessions to prepare for upcoming sessions. As you already know, we cannot disclose details due to the confidential nature of collective bargaining, but we can say that we are moving at a decent pace and hope to begin bargaining the economic portion of the contract fairly soon.
As always, we thank you for your support and patience and can assure you we are doing everything possible to bring you a fair and equitable contract as soon as possible.