Now that our new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) has been ratified by the Nassau County Legislature, you may be wondering, especially since the contract’s provisions are now in effect, when you will get to see the document in its final form. There is one more stage we have to go through before we can make the contract available to you, either digitally or in hard copy: proofreading.
The NCCFT CBA is a complex, nearly 120-page document. As in any negotiation, some new language was added, some old language was deleted, and some existing language was changed. We need to make sure, before it is made available for public consumption, not only that the changes to the contract language match precisely our understanding of what we negotiated, but also that—in the process of producing the new document—no other additions, changes or deletions were inadvertently allowed to creep in. Human error, after all, is an unavoidable reality in processes like this one, and we’re sure you can appreciate our desire to avoid the kinds of trouble that might ensue if we were to circulate a (however clearly marked) draft of the contract that contained such errors.
So, before we can approve the contract for distribution, we need—and you can be sure the administration is doing the same thing—to read carefully through the whole document, with more than a single pair of eyes. Then we have to sit down with the administration one more time to make sure, as they say, that all the t’s are properly crossed and all the i’s are properly dotted. Once both sides agree that has been done, the contract will be sent to the printer and we will make a digital copy available to you here on our website.
Meanwhile, we want to emphasize that the new contract is in effect. The new provisions are contained in the summary MOA that we distributed before the ratification vote. If you have any questions about how those provisions apply to you, or about any aspect of the contract at all, please contact the NCCFT office directly at nccft@ncc.edu or 2-7198. As per our usual policy, we will not discuss this issue over email.
2 Responses
None of the above explains why a pdf marked as “draft” could not be distributed. Members are referring to the contract all the time. We need to have at least a draft of what we are currently operating under. I find this unacceptable.
I have been here for 28 years and we’ve always gotten the MOA that we can refer to until the new contract is printed. From what I understand, everything else stays the same except for the new negotiated items which everyone should have gotten or can now get from this blog site. I really don’t understand why this is so unacceptable now when it seems to be SOP. I think it’s pretty easy to refer to the summary MOA and the old contract, but maybe that’s just me…