House Education and Labor Committee Hearing on First Contract Negotiations: Post-Doc Bargaining at Cal
In our Weekend Round-Up this past weekend, we noted that the House Education and Labor Committee had held a hearing on April 30, 2010 in Berkeley, California for the expressed purpose of:
exploring the challenges in first contract labor negotiations by examining the difficulty of reaching a first contract agreement in negotiations between the University of California and its post-doctoral scholars’ union.
The prepared testimony of the witnesses was previously posted online. Earlier today, the Committee made available an mp3 file of the hearing.
While the Employee Free Choice Act itself was not an overt focus of the hearing -- NAM's ShopFloor.org blog pointed out "negotiations concerning state employees are governed by state labor laws, not the National Labor Relations Act" -- it cannot be lost on any that "Facilitating Initial Collective Bargaining Agreements" has long been one of the express goals of that proposed legislation. We might reasonably expect some of the testimony from this hearing to be cited if and when the Congress takes up amending the NLRA again in the future in whatever form.
