Wed Jul 2, 2008 at 1:46 AMBy: George N. Schmidt The Inside Scoop In Minneapolis New media are going to pose newer and newer challenges for collective bargaining.

It may surprise some people, but I would probably not favor complete "transparency" during negotiations. It's obvious now that those who are actually "at the table" need to have readily nearby people from each of the groups being bargained for and that freaky Control will collapse.

Whether it will be possible to maintain some confidentiality in negotiations in the future may be out of everyone's control, however. At every level, people are grappling with new media and their impact. There doesn't seem to be a major institution (including the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps and many of the intelligence agencies) that has not been forced by new media to confront how to deal with all of the potential available here (from digital cameras that don't leave a flash trace to Wi Fi that can make blogging instantaneous). Abu Graib was just a dramatic example of the impact of new media, and those digital photographs have changed history.

For K-12 education, from the classroom to the principal's office to the bargaining table, the tremendous changes we're participating in will continue.

Now to collective bargaining.

At every point in media development, there has been a Control Freak position. In the 15th and 16 Centuries in the West, it was most clearly represented by the Vatican. Then by the monarchies. Then by the other forms of governance that came and went (including the totalitarian regimes that dominated so much of the last century). Now we have corporatist Control Freak approaches (very pronounced not only in the private sector here in Chicago, but under Richard M. Daley in the merging of the "public" and "private" in ways unprecedented since the 1930s, when the modern corporation emerged in all its glory and power and created new forms of government, which had to be defeated)...

It's obvious that future negotiations will not be subject to the Control Freak approaches that have, to date, characterized the negotiations conducted by the Chicago Teachers Union (or, for that matter, their counterparts from the Daley administration).

Even if the Control Freak approach can limit some information, it immediately "shoots itself in the foot" (to quote Alexander regarding another thread) when it tries to spin fact and control interpretation. No matter how many votes Marilyn Stewart flips to affirm her budget, the only possible outcome to the silliness in CTU over the past six months will be full budget transparency. The budget evasions she used in May and June (along with those mendacious vote counts) will simply lie in political reality like a bad meal in one's stomach.

But does anybody else here think that collective bargaining (which is just a form of contract negotiation) should be completely open and transparent? That might wind up true for some public employment contracts and stuff like that -- by default if there isn't some thought to how things should be reported -- but it may limit how both sides can approach these things in the future.

It's out of all of our hands. In a way, we're like the printers who were turning out more Bibles in a week than the monks in the Scriptoriums (Scriptoria) could produce in a year. One-by-one each of those Bibles had an impact. Then Luther translated the Latin Word into German, etc. The outcomes of that spread of "new media" were very very nasty in many places. And doubtless unforeseen.

Sat Jul 5, 2008 at 3:43 AMBy: George N. Schmidt The Inside Scoop In Minneapolis "...I think anytime the public is footing the bill, there should be complete transparency to the highest degree possible. I also think charter schools should be required to transparently share their contracts with teachers..." (Charlie, Wednesday, July 2).

1. Agreed.

2. Agree in part; disagree in part. Collective bargaining requires some confidentiality.

3. Agreed, but think about how much screaming there will be when the libertarians of deregulation hear that you want the public to know where its charter school dollars are going.

Here is why.

Even the Open Meetings Act allows certain exceptions to transparency. The biggest of these include personnel matters, pending real estate sales, and pending litigation. There are others, but those are the main ones. Imagine, for example, if any public body could discuss, without restriction, every claim or charge that was brought against a rank-and-file employee? We're not talking here about the public officials who are fair game -- from Arne Duncan to Todd Stroger to Mayor Daley -- but just the average working person. There has to be some confidentiality. Ditto real estate sales. If a public body were forced to have "transparency" at all points during pending real estate searches, there would be a lot more speculation than there already is. Etc. Relative transparency -- with constant battles over it -- is not a bad thing. Complete is impossible.

2. "To this highest degree possible..." leaves a lot of room for maneuver. Both parties to any public employee union's collective bargaining negotiations need to have some measured "transparency." During negotiations, there may be any number of serious items on the table, only a small percentage of which involve dollar costs. How many should be transparent, and at which point? The lawyers for CPS during collective bargaining are public contractors (CPS hasn't used its own lawyers for the main work for at least ten years; Daley's outside lawyers at Franczek Sullivan do all city labor contracts) or public employees (before mayoral control, CPS handled its own collective bargaining, at a much lower price than is currently being spent, and got better results). Either way, a determined public could make the case that CPS should reveal more about negotiations during negotiations. But there is a strong argument to be made on the other side.

Within the unions, there are always demands to have "rank-and-file" people at the bargaining table. The President of the Chicago Teachers Union can't possible know the conditions under which every person represented works. A structure should be in place to get that impact information fast. Marilyn Stewart did not have this kind of structure, and arrogantly allowed the negotiations to go on with only her, a major mistake when the results began hitting the members. It's possible, for example, that by agreeing to that infamous reduction in overtime pay, she did not realize she was actually agreeing to a reduction in annual pay for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of teachers (mostly in the high schools). She should have had someone at the table to say "Stop! Now!"

But her infamous record -- from the reduction in overtime pay, to the open-ended increases that will soon come in medical benefits, to the Fresh Start sellout of tenure -- is now becoming clear. It wasn't in August, when she railroaded the vote at that infamous August 31 (no "No" vote) meeting of the House of Delegates and then tried to lie to the press immediately after violating the rights of every union member ten minutes earlier upstairs at Plumbers Hall.

So there is a different kind of pressure on the CTU (a private organization, after all) as to who should be at the table during negotiations, and how much should be reported ("transparency").

3. The scandals coming out of Chicago's charter schools (and not all of them are corrupt, although all of the Aspira ones probably are -- in ways that you will eventually find disgusting and possibly unthinkable) over the past two years and into the next five years will create another backlash for less deregulation and more common sense regulation (and transparency) of charter school operators.

The most basic should be budgtary.

I can go with two mouse clicks from her to the CPS "Position File" (the current list of all full-time and part-time people employed by CPS) and tell you what a "facilitator" in "External Affairs" was budgeted to be paid last school year.

Try to get the same information from any public source for, say, the annual pay of the CEO of Aspira, or any of the top executives he has placed in power over the various Aspira charter schools. For five years, CPS has deliberately (and cynically) buried all charter school budget costs under "contractual and other services" in the proposed budgets (which go up for review each summer) and then simply refused to provide the "Position File" data on the charter schools when requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As the massive corruption at the Aspira charter schools (and the lesser corruptions at the others) begins to unfold before the public during the next year, one of the questions that has to be asked -- and answers demanded -- is how Aspira was able to get away with so much at so many levels for so long.

Privatization and deregulation are the two answers I'll be proposing.

And earlier transparency might have stopped some of the uglier things that the Aspira executives have been getting away with.

But later this summer here's betting that charter school "transparency" will still be ignored by Arne Duncan when he releases the proposed budget for review by the public. While that may have been explicable five years ago (when more of this nonsense was still at the level of Milton Friedman abstractions about "choice" and similar silliness) now that budget crunches will be upon us every year for some time, the lies that have been floated -- and the massive waste that has been tolerated -- at Chicago's charter schools may even cause action from the editors of the Chicago Tribune and the other fans of complete deregulation and massive privatization.