Kenai Peninsula Borough School Dist. v. Kenai Peninsula Ed. Ass'n
| Decision Date | 09 December 1977 |
| Docket Number | 2492 and 2563,MATANUSKA-SUSITNA,Nos. 2470,s. 2470 |
| Citation | 572 P.2d 416 |
| Parties | 97 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2153 KENAI PENINSULA BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT and Kenai Peninsula Borough, Appellants, v. KENAI PENINSULA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, Appellee. ANCHORAGE BOROUGH EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, Appellant, v. GREATER ANCHORAGE AREA BOROUGH, ANCHORAGE BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT, Appellee.SCHOOL DISTRICT, Appellant, v.EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, Appellee. |
| Court | Alaska Supreme Court |
Allen McGrath and John R. Snodgrass, Jr., of Graham & James, Anchorage, for School Districts.
John R. Strachan, Anchorage, for Education Associations.
Before BOOCHEVER, Chief Justice, and RABINOWITZ, CONNOR, ERWIN and BURKE, Justices.
These cases present important questions of labor law and constitutional law concerning the collective bargaining requirements for teachers in the public schools. Two of these cases are before us because the teachers' associations (the unions) have sued school districts and boroughs (the school boards) to compel collective bargaining in good faith under AS 14.20.550. In the third, a school board seeks a declaratory judgment that certain issues are not bargainable. The school boards, while not disputing the unions' right to collective bargaining on a number of employment-related issues, contend that they should not be forced to bargain collectively on various items which they regard as affecting educational policy. Educational policy, the school boards contend, must be determined only by the public through the legislature and, by delegation, through the school boards. We will examine the more specific issues later in this opinion. They include such items as class size and the use of teacher specialists and para-professionals. Of the three trial courts which passed on the matter, one ruled in favor of the school boards, 1 one ruled in favor of the teachers' union, 2 and one split the various items, ruling for the board on some and the unions on others. 3
To facilitate the understanding of our more detailed legal discussion later in this opinion, we will summarize at the outset the contentions of the parties. The statutes at issue in this litigation are AS 14.20.550 and .610, which provide:
The boards contend, using labor cases from the private sector, that the requirement of collective bargaining in good faith is a term of art in labor law. Unlike a simple "meet and confer" requirement, to negotiate in "good faith" entails a duty to make concessions. Thus, management does not have the final decisions on matters subject to good faith collective bargaining, since if management adheres to its determined policies, it violates the law.
The school boards contend that the submission of educational policies to a good faith collective bargaining requirement would remove the final decisions on such matters from the boards, contrary to the intent of the legislature expressed in AS 14.20.610. The boards contend that to require bargaining on questions of educational policy would also contravene the Alaska Constitution, art. VII, § 1, which makes education the exclusive domain of the legislature. 4 See Macauley v. Hildebrand, 491 P.2d 120 (Alaska 1971). Delegation of part of the decision-making power on educational policy to labor unions is unconstitutional, they urge, because the union is a private organization, unaccountable to the public. The union can use the power for its own ends, and is under no duty to foster educational policies which are in the general public interest.
The unions argue that such delegation is perfectly proper, and that there is no delegation of decision-making power inherent in a labor negotiations requirement. They further argue that they represent professional employees, and that their participation in good faith collective bargaining labor negotiations is an attempt by the legislature to provide professional advice to school boards on the management of the schools. They assert that this is a legislative policy judgment, in no way inimical to the Alaska Constitution. Also relying on labor cases, they discount the importance of any "management prerogative" to determine educational policy under AS 14.20.610, and assert that labor's concerns with working conditions override any management prerogative as to basic policy.
The unions argue that the Alaska teachers' collective bargaining statutes are more comprehensive than those found elsewhere, and hence the scope of bargaining should be interpreted broadly. The school boards assert that the Alaska Constitution as interpreted in Macauley v. Hildebrand, supra, is more adamant than provisions in other states in placing education firmly within the legislative prerogative. Therefore, collective bargaining must yield across a wide range of issues affecting educational policy.
If we were to look to the law concerning bargaining between labor unions and private employers, we would conclude that the scope of negotiable issues is broad. The law relating to the private sector has always contained, and still does contain, uncertainties. But the general trend has been to require that employers bargain in good faith on a wide range of items with respect to wages, hours, and other conditions of employment, without regard to whether the employers consider the items bargained for to be within the prerogatives of management. 5 Moreover, some cases hold that for an employer or a union to avoid being found to have bargained in bad faith, the parties must make some reasonable effort to compose their differences. While the good faith standard of collective bargaining does not compel either party to make concessions, intransigent positions, adopted in an effort to avoid any agreement, are disfavored. 6 Thus a legal determination that a matter is subject to good faith collective bargaining may narrow the policy-making powers of an employer by curtailing any absolute directives on his part.
When we turn to employment in the public sector, and particularly in education, the question of what is properly bargainable is thrown into more doubt. If teachers' unions are permitted to bargain on matters of educational policy, it is conceivable that through successive contracts the autonomy of the school boards could be severely eroded, and the effective control of educational policy shifted from the school boards to the teachers' unions. Such a result could threaten the ability of elective government officials and appointive officers subject to their authority, in this case the school boards and administrators, to perform their functions in the broad public interest. 7
Recently the United States Supreme Court had occasion to comment upon the differences between collective bargaining in the public and private sectors. In Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209, 227-28, 97 S.Ct. 1782, 1795-96, 52 L.Ed.2d 261, 279-80 (1977), the Court, speaking through Mr. Justice Stewart, observed:
"A public employer, unlike his private counterpart, is not guided by the profit motive and constrained by the normal operation of the market. Municipal services are typically not priced, and where they are they tend to be regarded as in some sense 'essential' and therefore are often price inelastic. Although a public employer, like a private one, will wish to keep costs down, he lacks an important discipline against agreeing to increases in labor costs that in a market system would require price increases. A public-sector union is correspondently less concerned that high prices due to costly wage demands will decrease output and hence employment.
The government officials making decisions as the public 'employer' are less likely to act as a cohesive unit than are managers in private industry, in part because different levels of public authority department managers, budgetary officials, and legislative bodies are involved, and in part because each official may respond to a distinctive political constituency. And the ease of negotiating a final agreement with the union may be severely limited by statutory restrictions, by the need for the approval of a higher executive authority or a legislative body, or by the commitment of budgetary decisions of critical importance to others.
Finally, decisionmaking by a public employer is above all a political process. The officials who represent the public employer are ultimately responsible to the electorate, which for this purpose can be viewed as comprising three overlapping classes of voters taxpayers, users of particular government services, and government employees. Through exercise of their political influence as part of the electorate, the employees have the opportunity to affect the decisions of government representatives who sit on the other side of the bargaining table. Whether these representatives accede to a union's demands will depend upon a blend of political ingredients, including community sentiment about unionism generally and the involved union in particular, the degree of taxpayer resistance, and the views of voters as to the importance of the service involved and the relation between the demands and the quality of service."
In a concurring opinion in that case Mr. Justice Powell noted the similarity between a public sector union and a conventional...
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