In a major escalation of a long-running contract battle, Mt. Hood Community College has warned that it plans to replace its full-time faculty members if they take part in a strike being threatened by their union.
In a statement issued this week, the administration of the two-campus public institution in Oregon said it has stepped up a recruitment campaign intended to find “qualified permanent replacements” for any faculty members involved in a labor walkout.
“We hope we don’t have to follow through with our hiring plan, but we are prepared to hire qualified full-time faculty within a very short time frame,” the college’s president, John J. (Ski) Sygielski, said as part of the college’s statement. “Our goal has been and remains to minimize disruption of class schedules and be back on track soon after a strike is executed.”
The college’s threat came in response to a vote this month by the Mt. Hood Community College faculty association, which represents the institution’s nearly 160 full-time faculty members, to authorize a strike if no contract agreement can be reached.
Gail M. Rasmussen, president of the Oregon Education Association, which counts the Mt. Hood union as an affiliate, said Wednesday she knew of no previous strike by community-college faculty members in that state, and similarly was not aware of any attempt by a public college to replace striking faculty members. She called the college’s threat to fire faculty members “an unprecedented scare tactic.”
For its part, the college’s full-time-faculty union has responded to the threat to replace any members who strike by issuing a statement accusing the college’s governing board of “engaging in a destructive pattern of behavior that will serve only to drive students, faculty and staff from our institution.” In an interview on Wednesday, Sara E. Williams, a mathematics instructor who is the college faculty association’s president, said, “Our students know that the full-time faculty here are not replaceable, and it is devastating to the college that the board does not know that.”
A Reapplication Process
The college’s statement said its governing board, the Mt. Hood Community College District Board of Education, was unanimous in its support for the plan to replace striking workers.
The board’s chairman, Brian J. Freeman, said on Wednesday that he was unable to recall any formal board vote on the matter but that the administration could take action without one. “We have discussed this issue going back a couple of months,” he said. “If a strike comes along, we ask our administration to be prepared.”
Under the college’s plan, Mr. Freeman said, striking faculty members “would not necessarily be fired.” But, he said, they would be replaced and would have to reapply for jobs if they chose to come back to work there because the college would not regard them as having any right to bump their replacements and get back their old positions.
Ms. Williams said the full-time-faculty union is likely to go to court to fight any effort by the college to fire its members for striking.
Randy Stedman, a professional negotiator who is representing the college, said on Wednesday that Oregon law allows community colleges to hire replacement workers and that there is legal precedent in that state for public agencies to take such actions.
Mr. Freeman, the board’s chairman, affirmed that stand, saying, “We believe we are on sound legal ground.”
But Michael J. Tedesco, an adjunct instructor of law at the University of Oregon who, in his private practice, represents the American Federation of Teachers, argued Wednesday that “you cannot be fired for going on strike in this state” and that Mt. Hood Community College would be able to have a state court block any strike that was, in fact, illegal. He said that state law requires public employees’ unions to take certain steps before going on strike—to go through specified negotiation, mediation, and cooling-off periods—but that the Oregon Education Association has plenty of experience in that area to walk its locals through the process. “This is not something where someone said, Uh-oh, I feel like going on strike today,” he said.
No Contract Since August
The full-time faculty members who belong to the Mt. Hood Community College faculty association account for just over a fourth of all faculty at the institution. They include both tenured and probationary faculty members, and, according to Ms. Williams, have an average of 13 years’ experience each. (Part-time faculty members at the college have their own union local and are working under a contract firmly in place.)
The college and the full-time-faculty union have been involved in often-heated collective-bargaining negotiations for more than a year, and the union’s members have been working without a contract since the end of August.
The college says it faces a $5.8-million shortfall in its budget for the coming fiscal year, and it has accused the union of refusing to even entertain compromise on financial matters. The college has characterized the offers it has put on the table as generous compared with the pay packages at comparable colleges. On April 4, the college filed an unfair-labor-practice complaint with the State of Oregon Employment Relations Board accusing the union of making false statements overstating to its members what concessions it has offered.
Mt. Hood’s board said in the statement issued this week that it plans to go ahead and put in place the terms of its final contract offer to the union, but it will not do so until after the college’s spring term ends in June. The statement quotes Mr. Freeman as saying, “Hopefully, by not implementing the final offer this term, we can reduce faculty angst and enhance students’ ability to complete their term uninterrupted.”
