BART unions sue over contract dispute Family leave 'mistake' at crux of new dispute

BART unions sue over contract dispute
Family leave 'mistake' at crux of new dispute
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-unions-sue-over-contract...

Sam Wolson, Special To The Chronicle

Antonette Bryant of the union ATU speaks to the BART Board of directors during a meeting at the Kaiser Center were the board will consider rejecting the tentative agreement it reached with its two largest unions in Oakland on November 21st 2013.
By Michael Cabanatuan

December 4, 2013

After six months of contentious negotiations, two strikes and, finally, a hard-won labor agreement, BART's two largest unions are not about to give in.

The unions representing most BART employees filed suit Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, seeking to have a judge order the transit agency to abide by the tentative deal that was reached Oct. 21.

The unions are not ruling out the possibility of shutting down the transit system, which carries more than 400,000 passengers a day, for a third time, "but we have not scheduled or planned for a strike," said Kerianne Steele, an attorney for the Service Employees International Union.

Members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and SEIU Local 1021 ratified the tentative agreement in separate votes, but the BART Board of Directors on Nov. 21 approved only part of the deal, leaving out a provision giving employees six weeks of paid family leave that they said they hadn't meant to include.

"We absolutely felt there was no other recourse," said Antonette Bryant, president of the ATU local. "When you make a mistake, you stand up and own it. ... We filed a lawsuit to have the court tell them they must take the complete package."

Put it to a vote

BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said in a statement that the unions should allow their members to vote on what she called "the corrected agreement" instead of taking legal action.

"This unnecessary action will only delay resolution to BART's labor contract," she said. "A lawsuit is not needed to correct a mistake. When mistakes are made in contract negotiations, they are corrected administratively by the parties, acting in good faith. Fortunately, this mistake was caught in time before the mistaken language was brought before the district's board for ratification."

Unfair labor practice

The litigation filed Tuesday is an amended version of an existing unfair labor practice suit that contends BART failed to properly bargain on other issues. The new addition, however, does not ask the court to order BART to simply negotiate, as is typical in such suits. Rather, it asks the court to rescind the board's partial approval, order it to honor the full agreement, and then begin any bargaining over possibly deleting or altering the family leave provision.

"The parties reached a total package agreement on Oct. 21," Steele said, "and everybody understood that agreement included all tentative agreements, including (family leave)." The agreement ended a four-day strike, the second in four months. Steele said the unions don't expect a quick ruling from the court.

Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Kerianne Steele, an attorney for the Service Employees International Union, says BART workers haven't ruled out another strike.
Changing the contract

The suit names the BART district, the board and each of its nine members. It charges them with violating state law by refusing to ratify a complete contract that its representatives negotiated, by failing to execute an agreement that was negotiated with their knowledge and oversight, and by unilaterally changing the contents of a negotiated agreement and offering it to the union "on a take-it-or-leave-it basis."

"The Board of Directors is not in any position to cherry-pick which parts of the contract it intends to honor and which it does not," said Kate Hallward, an attorney for SEIU. "We have a complete and final agreement, and they need to honor it."

David Rosenfeld, a law school instructor at UC Berkeley and a veteran labor lawyer who works for unions, said the notion of negotiating a contract and then approving a revised version is unheard of.

"It's totally unprecedented for an employer to later come back and say, 'We need to amend this, we made a mistake,' " he said. "You can't just back out of a deal you've agreed to because you decide later you don't like it."

Included in error

BART officials contend that they never intended to agree to a section of the contract that gives employees up to "six weeks of paid time off to take care of a seriously ill child, spouse, parent or domestic partner or to bond with a new child." The district already provides up to 12 weeks of family medical leave, but it's unpaid, with workers using vacation days, sick leave or other accrued time off.

Union representatives say that BART negotiators not only signed off on a tentative agreement of the provision but that it was included in the overall tentative contract reached Oct. 21 and in several documents reviewed and approved in the days after the agreement was reached.

Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Antonette Bryant, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, says BART must "stand up and own" its mistake.
BART officials have said they'd like to negotiate over the family leave provision, but union representatives say the transit district's only message to them has been: "Take it out, and we'll ratify it ... take it or leave it," Steele said.

She said the unions believe they could reach an agreement with BART if they show "a serious willingness to talk. We have not heard from them. They've not had the intention to talk."

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Henry K. Lee contributed to this report. Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail:mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan