Good news!

We have a couple of news items that we would like to share with our membership. As many of you know, while the new contract is under negotiation, we remain under the protection and guidelines of the old contract. This has raised some legitimate concerns amongst members because of the scheduled September 1st, 2.1% pay reduction as part of the existing contract. We are happy to report that there will be NO PAY REDUCTION on September 1st. This goes to the heart of the separation. Those cuts were based on public school funding, and as support staff at a college, those cuts should NOT have effected us, and they will not.We realize the anxiety members feel as contract negotiations continue. Confidentiality agreements forbid us from discussing the day to day business of negotiations. Both sides are in agreement that we are in the final stages of negotiations. Since April of this year, the SSA negotiating team has been meeting with the college's negotiating team to revise the old DFSE contract to address the needs of both the college and its support staff workers. This has not been an easy task. As in any negotiation, each side has issues that they feel need to be addressed. Throughout the negotiations, we have been able to come to many agreements with the college's team to strengthen our unit, to remove many items that are no longer relevant to us, and to lay the foundation for future improvements.The college has agreed that we can share this information with our members. Next week, we will be presented with the final piece of the contract puzzle: the proposal on job titles and corresponding pay rates! Once this information is received and reviewed by the SSA negotiating team, we will be in the final stages before presenting a tentative agreement to SSA membership for voting ratification.Does this mean that we will be ratifying the contract in September?It means that this is in the final stages, no more and no less. When all is said and done, it will be up to the membership to review the contract, and make the decision as to whether you are satisfied with its content.There are some things I would ask the members to keep in mind. The contract that we have been working under, and to replace, is a contract that was almost entirely based on the day to day operations of a P-12 school district. There were decades worth of language that needed to be adapted and eliminated. While we did not need to reinvent the wheel, we did need to get it from the Model T that it was meant for to the modern vehicle that it needs to run on. Some of the changes within the contract normally take years to accomplish, and we've done it in months.