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Editorial: Biased on bargaining?
Op-Ed · March 09, 2017
The West Branch Education Association and West Branch Board of Education made the right call to swiftly approve a new, two-year contract before passage of new collective bargaining laws passed by the state.
By doing so, they avoided having to answer questions based more on public perception rather than actual facts. While the teachers union and school board likely knew the contents of the bill, citizens who read about it in some Iowa newspapers may have been confused.
The bill is clearly designed to make it harder for unions to survive in the public sector, but we are not going to debate here whether that is good or bad. Our problem centers around, unfortunately, fellow media outlets.
Numerous media outlets, from print to online to television, either through bias or laziness, reported that governing agencies like school boards, city councils, county board, etc. and unions would be “prohibited” or “banned” from negotiating anything other than base salaries.
These word choices made bargaining topics the centerpiece of the controversy.
However, those words were simply not true.
By reading the bill, it is easy to determine that the two sides are free to talk about anything which they mutually agree to discuss.
The bill does empower the governing agency to reject discussing subjects other than base pay, but where the two sides maintain a healthy relationship, like they do in West Branch schools, no part of the law restricts those talks.
It angers us that the media, suffering from considerable trust issues as it does with readers and viewers, would sacrifice the fundamental practices of verifying information or eliminating partiality.
Hopefully in far shorter time than the two years of the WBEA contract, the new collective bargaining bill will be fully fleshed out and weighed on its true merits, not misinformation, so legislators and citizens can determine its fate with sober judgment.
Perhaps the news organizations that allowed their politics or apathy to trump their news judgment will heed this rebuke and do the same.
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