Kamehameha
teachers ratify
new contract

The vote was overwhelmingly
in favor of the first labor pact

By Mary Adamski
Star-Bulletin

Kamehameha Schools teachers gave overwhelming approval to a labor contract that provides modest raises and empowers them to challenge school administration when it curtails freedom of expression on "confidentiality" grounds.

The first collective-bargaining agreement negotiated by a faculty union at the private school was ratified in a 183-2 vote yesterday on campus. The turnout amounted to 81 percent of the 233 teachers and librarians eligible to vote, said Dean Choy, attorney for the Kamehameha Schools Faculty Association.

The contract provides pay raises of 1.8 percent retroactive to last August and 1.15 percent at the beginning of the next school year. The faculty was excluded from the pay raise given other employees at the beginning of the current school year.

The pact also reinstates the annual $1,750 stipend paid to the chairman of each elementary grade. The contract will end in June 2000.

Choy said that "a significant change to ensure fair treatment . . . is the establishment of a bonafide grievance procedure, where a neutral party is authorized to settle disagreements. Having a neutral arbitrator will insure fair decisions will be made henceforth."

Another provision "goes to a freedom of speech issue," he said. It was drawn to remedy the past threat of discipline or dismissal that curtailed employees from discussing matters the school administration or Bishop Estate trustees deemed to be confidential or proprietary.

Choy said the contract gives teachers the right to grieve when they consider that the employer has used the confidential label too broadly. The grievance procedure would settle that issue before disciplinary action could be taken against a teacher who spoke out.

A majority of the faculty voted in March 1998 to organize a union. The organizing movement arose amid the groundswell of dissatisfaction from alumni, parents and others about the leadership of Bishop Estate and Kamehameha Schools, which has led to the state investigation now under way.

Faculty negotiators announced the tentative contract agreement earlier this month. They said that throughout the year of negotiations they faced adversarial, punitive and delaying tactics by Bishop Estate.

William Puette, director of the University of Hawaii Center for Labor Education and Research, was brought in as a neutral overseer of the vote and count.

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