The IFO negotiating team worked through the summer converting new Delegate Assembly resolutions to contract language and refining language from continuing contract goals to prepare our opening proposal for the 2021-2023 contract. While some DA resolutions are fairly straightforward to convert into contract language, there are always DA resolutions whose appearances are deceptive and end up requiring many hours of discussion and work to come up with language to operationalize the resolution objective.

The combination of the effects of the pandemic and the late adoption of the higher education budget by the Minnesota Legislature caused a significant delay in the beginning of negotiations with the employer’s team. Our negotiating team met with the MinnState negotiation team in July and again in August; and we have additional meetings scheduled on August 26 and 27, September 17 and 18, and October 26 and 27. At this time, the teams are discussing issues of mutual interest using the framework of interest-based bargaining (IBB): issues with compensation of coaches, achieving the goal of closing the academic equity gap in the Chancellor’s 2030 Equity Initiative, and clinical and special instructional situations. IBB is a collaborative process where both sides agree to try to resolve an issue. Its collaborative nature makes progress slow, however, we have been successful in using IBB in past rounds of bargaining to significantly improve many contractual provisions.

At the end of the IBB process, the parties will move into positional (i.e., traditional) bargaining. At the time of this writing, the goal is to sufficiently complete the IBB process by the September meeting and begin positional bargaining.

Even though the team has three first-time representatives, we have been very productive -- by historical standards, we have been moving at Olympic sprinter speed.