Impacts of Collective Bargaining Agreement to the Public Essay

Literally, collective bargaining refers to means employed by a government in the shaping of finances and standards of its employees. This largely aids in counteracting inconveniences at work that actually result from strict and undefined laws. It also helps in the betterment of working conditions of the employees. Either, collective bargaining is commonly associated with labor unions represented few workers and a chairperson. In addition, the union grafts and implements reforms which in turn; improve on working standards of the employees, and address satisfaction of its members equally (Berman et al. 2012).

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Teacher unions are vital and essential in ensuring structural and pedagogical reforms that pertain education. In addition, the unions play a major role in ensuring that teachers working conditions are administered rightfully and properly through various ways. Nonetheless, the unions address issues revolving around corruption, child labor, inequity, and violence. Change either, requires motivation, education, consultation, and buy-in from both staff and teachers through unions and organizations representing them (Goldhaber, 2006).

Collective bargaining and social dialogue is an instrument that facilitates effective services and better working conditions that in turn dignify education stakeholders- teachers. Nevertheless, collective bargaining and social dialogue hold various advantages with an aim of facilitating and enhancing social recognition, motivation, respect, and decent working conditions. It also looks into core principles of the public in terms of governance and the quality of services offered to the public (Pynes et al. 1993).

Over the years, involuntary transfers of teachers have dominated the education system in most parts of the world. This is because of weak unions representing the teachers, or totally non-existence of unions then. However, the issue has been boldly combated by the introduction of teacher unions that have responsively enacted measures that have seen teachers' rights respected and the education voice of democracy heard. Through these, teachers have seen and experienced far much better handling in terms of transfers, the unions have further delved into issues that specifically address and oversee circumstances under which a teacher requires a transfer letter to another institution. The unions oversee the districts transfer policy and in cases where there is an absurdity, they investigate cases of involuntary transfers. Involuntary teacher transfers occur when a school or a district initiates a transfer instead of a teacher. This effect poses adverse disadvantages to students as they lag in terms of catching with the pace of new teachers and their different teaching modes, either, the teacher-student relationship is broken and this slows the learning rate of the student (Pynes et al. 1993).

Teacher unions also look into grievances for teachers whose evaluation procedures have failed to be followed by a school district. School districts, therefore, ought to keep teacher performance records and evaluation confidential. The unions either, through the education department, expand the public school's information system in order to collect and analyze data on both students and teachers performance academically (Carrell et al. 2004).

School district administrators and local school boards possess significant discretion over the establishment of policies affecting teachers, students, and learning processes. However, district policies are not drafted in vacuums. Either way, states hold and control plenary power over the system of education and choices to ceding authority to districts provide a frame for both districts and teachers with an aim of creating policies that affect the teachers and their working conditions (Carrell et al. 2004). Whether and how the states delegate plenary power on both education and teaching profession significantly varies among states. The obvious distinction between states that allow teachers to bargain with districts over terms of employment and the ones that do not.

Provisions that are contract based regulate the working conditions of teachers making principals powers less latitude in the management of their own buildings. Generally, collective bargaining agreements for teachers encouraged and facilitated standardization of schools and in turn, leaving school heads with less authority to run their institutions. Uniformly, the school heads cannot instruct teachers on what to do with district-wide laws and regulations limited and restricted their options of management hence reducing the school's independence and responsiveness. In most cases, collective bargaining agreements give approximately ten percent of districts in America, for instance, a flexibly scaled rating that escalates from "highly restrictive" up to "highly flexible" giving all the districts a "low flexible rating" (Koski et al. 2007).

On the other hand, research has shown substantial flexibility in collective bargaining agreements. This is because of structural and cultural reasons that comply with restrictive versions of contract-based provisions for instance; concerns insufficient evidence generation to suffice decisions challenged by teachers, a delegation of heavy workloads for principals and concerns about generating confrontational situations between principals and teachers. Nevertheless, an in-depth analysis of six districts in America, according to (Johnson, 1984), evidently justifies allegations that, while collective bargaining agreements delegate greater authority to teachers, district administrators and principals rarely report feeling constrained in policymaking. In fact, most district contracts were implemented differently across schools in the districts, therefore; teachers and site administrators established and maintained labor relationships.

Although examinations of individual provisions within collective bargaining agreements highlight particular document patterns and provisions of ways by which collective bargaining agreements constrain administrators until recently, very little attention is paid to the means by which the contracts or sub areas of contracts make up sets of provisions and their ability to limit administrator flexibility. (Eberts et al. 1983) have severally attempted to statistically base their approaches for purposes of compiling multiple collective bargaining agreement items into a measure of restrictiveness for the contracts. They actually used a sealing technique in order to generate a measure of the strength of a contract based on the challenge of negotiating each in a set of eighteen items within contracts in the New York Union, during the late 1970s.

In general, while collective bargaining agreements restrict in various ways that constrain them from enacting educational reforms and from structuring school and also district operations, however, these contracts are less restrictive compared to suggestions of many. Moreover, collective bargaining agreements may constrain administrators and equally protect teachers in ways that are beneficial hence enhancing professional working conditions for teachers. However, with the passing of time, there has been development and improvement in the methods employed in the measuring of constraint inherent levels, what predicts contracts that are stronger, and the relationship of the outcomes of interest with contract restrictiveness (Koski et al. 2007).

The opposition of unions to change not only inhibits reforms from inception, but also restricts the move by administrators to respond and implement initiatives that have been legalized - become law. It further elaborates why prominent aspects pertaining contracts of teachers- seniority provisions and no evaluation on performance chief among them and have therefore remained for decades to public school operations. Such operations are however vital to both unionizations and to teachers bargaining side.

Recent policies explicitly directed at teachers limits co-operations of unions and engender resistance, for instance, development of teacher evaluation systems that are a test based in various districts and states together with reformation efforts for the tenure system of teachers. To that end, the teachers' unions have boldly taken steps that have seen restrictions on them lifted. The efforts of the unions have weakened the districts and are therefore unable to make and carry out policies and systems which are basically counter to preferences of the unions. For instance, a teachers union in Los Angeles- United Teachers of Los Angeles refused to work in corporation with Los Angeles Unified School District in an application for a Top grant race which would have otherwise helped the district financially in exchange for data systems` implementation together with programs built to facilitate multiple measure evaluation in the level of effectiveness of the teachers. Similarly, the Chicago public schools and Milwaukee public schools were forced to repay their 2010 Teacher Incentive Fund Money since they failed to obtain the cooperation of the teacher's unions (McCann, 2012).

The notion of teachers unions as obstacles hindering development in education reforms is sometimes viewed and portrayed negatively by the media. For instance, unions often receive more coverage from mainstream media outlets in instances which they worked rather than in opposition to various reforms. On the other side, unions tend to retain their support from perceived or real threats to the system of public schools and to teaching careers in general. For example, unions of teachers may opt to retain its powers just by a strike, no matter how less intense it is. Perception too matters a lot apart from media portrayal, principals who tend to perceive the direct influence of unions on matters concerning district policy- teacher hiring, curriculum, salary- are likely to perceive their own influence as correspondingly diminished. Such perceptions in turn result to administrators seeking their own explanations for their inactivity especially in environments where unions are blamed for entirely failing to promote innovation in America's public schools. However, recent empirical evidence shows the correlation of union strength with district policy differences as reflected in provisions of teacher contracts. Nonetheless, drawing on school administrator surveys as well as local board election results, have similarly shown that stronger unions tend to work under bargaining terms that are most restrictive to working conditions such as class size, staffing policies and teacher evaluation (Berman et al. 2012).

At local levels where bargaining tends to occur, unions influence negotiations by determining the priorities of the school district itself and not stressing provisions of particular contracts. Arguably, unions are active in the election of school board officers. Since the school board elections see the very low turnout at the ballots, the fact that teachers tend to vote in masses at districts where they reside from and work, clearly shows that teachers play a major role in the selection of their employer- school board (Koski et al. 2007).

Either, there are venues by the teachers that influence school boards and their corresponding elections; by carrying out campaigns in favor of their supported candidates in terms of provision of human endorsements and working for favored candidates for purposes of fundraising and voter mobilization and mobilizing members of the union to take part in voting of school board members. In addition, collective bargaining agreements strengthen unions of teachers by giving them much influence on how the government does the allocation of their resources. Most bargaining laws a...