Supreme Court sides with faculty in salary dispute

In an Aug. 13 opinion, The Nebraska Supreme Court sided with the State College Education Association (SCEA) and resolved a yearlong salary disagreement over the 2009-11 contract.
The opinion upheld a Special Master’s selection of the SCEA final offer of an 11 percent salary increase over two years.

As The Eagle reported last September, The Board of Trustees of the Nebraska State Colleges moved salary negotiations with the SCEA to a Special Master after reaching an impasse.

In a February 2009 decision, the Special Master upheld the SCEA’s final 11 percent offer.

The Board appealed to the Commission of Industrial Relations (CIR). The CIR upheld the Special Master’s decision in a May 2009 opinion.

Following the May 2009 decision, the board appealed and filed a petition to bypass the Court of Appeals. The petition was granted, moving the case to the Nebraska Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court opinion states “the Special Master concluded that the SCEA’s final offer of 11 percent did a better job of moving all unit members toward comparability and keeping them comparable for the duration of the contract than did the Board’s offer of 4.33 percent.”

Last September, Chancellor Stan Carpenter said, if the courts side with the Board, an estimated $1 million per annum over the course of two years would be saved.

On Sept. 11, 2009, he said, “We think we’ll win.”

The opinion states, “the CIR did not err in finding that the Special Master’s order was not significantly disparate” from the prevalent rates of pay in the array of comparable institutions.