Now, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief.
Thursday’s signing of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Silliman University Administration and its Faculty Association ended over a year of negotiations. People involved in the negotiations say this was the most contentious CBA ever.
Like our local and national elections, CBA negotiations at Silliman are held every three years. This barely gives both parties some breathing space and soon, they’re back at each other’s throats again.
The basic mind-set in these negotiations, or in any union-management negotiations for that matter, is that the workers would always want more pay and benefits while the management would always try to find ways of keeping the status quo. Thus, there is a built-in stereotype that unless the workers unionize, they can never expect to get better working conditions. Both faculty and management appear to be mutually suspicious of the other.
In this day and age when conventional ways of doing things are being replaced by technological advances, unionism–a movement sparked by the industrial revolution in 1886–continues to be relevant to many workers today.
The challenge facing management is to make unions irrelevant by ensuring that the workers are motivated to continue to perform. There is, for instance, no law prohibiting management from giving benefits not included in the CBA.
This is easier said than done, of course. But unless someone changes the rules of the game, the song will always remain the same.
