The popular narrative of Wisconsin's collective bargaining battle started out being about money. Should public employees pay more toward their healthcare? Can school districts offset state aid cuts using the additional revenue from employee healthcare contributions? Does collective bargaining have a cost? This article gives an overview of…

This article examines national conservative political advocacy groups' growing interest in local politics, and analyzes how they form alliances and gain political power. Following efforts to restrict collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees, Kenosha school board members' attempts to legally protect teachers' rights provoked concern…

This article examines the legal and political significance of teacher unionization in rural and suburban school districts between 1960 and 1975. While most historians focus on the growth of unions in urban areas, strikes in outlying districts played a determinative role in the development of public sector labor law, particularly in the arbitration…

The literature on collective bargaining in public education typically argues whether such bargaining is good public policy or bad, sound or unsound, and so forth. No studies to date have measured the actual impact of differing kinds of collective bargaining legislation on local school boards' decisionmaking powers. This study examined whether two…

This reference book on collective bargaining is specifically designed to meet the needs of Wisconsin school boards as they conduct collective bargaining with their employees. The first four chapters supply background information necessary to understand Wisconsin's Municipal Employment Relations Act. Chapter 4 explains the scope of bargaining and…

The collection of readings and ideas in this booklet are intended to help school districts in developing and maintaining a public relations program. The first section, concerning policies and programs, contains articles about the need for good public relations programs and how to establish them and sample memorandums concerning school…

Surveys of Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin school board members indicate significant impact of state collective bargaining legislation on perceived ability of board members to perform legislatively prescribed duties. (Author/JBM)

Examination of arbitration decisions in Wisconsin teacher wage disputes, 1977-86, found that wage increases agreed to earlier by comparable school districts had a substantial impact on the arbitrators' decisions. (SK)

Examines the use of final-offer arbitration in public sector collective bargaining in five states. (PKP)

This paper, addressed to public school employers, discusses lessons to be learned from the Wisconsin Legislature's passage of a 1978 law known as mediation-arbitration, which allows employers and unions to agree to an alternative voluntary impasse procedure to the one set forth in the statutes. First, the paper discusses the history of the agency…

The purpose of this bulletin is to describe the current status of proposals for formalizing negotiation procedures between teachers and their boards of education, indicating some potential trends. The entire issue of collective negotiation by teachers remains of relatively recent origin in terms of interest on a national scale, and the directions…

Describes how the funds and fury of a State teacher union failed to force a rural school board to give in to the demands of illegally striking teachers. (Author)

In one case, the Supreme Court upheld the right of school boards to fire teachers who strike illegally. (Author/IRT)

As faculty and other public sector unions become more sophisticated in collective bargaining, they tend to lay a greater variety of demands on the table. This, in turn, forces the employer to ask, Do I really have to bargain about these subjects? As more employers refuse to bargain, more unions charge them with failing to bargain in good faith,…