Quick, if delayed, deal raises questions

Enterprise-Record 4/5/07

When a 23-month-old labor dispute can get settled in a little over a week when push comes to shove, you have to wonder why it took so long.

The State University system and its faculty union reached a tentative agreement over the weekend -- announcing it Tuesday -- after nearly two years of fruitless talks.

The union is saying it got everything that it wanted, although the numbers reported seem to be lower than those bandied about a couple of weeks ago. The university system administration doesn't seem bothered either, although $400 million dollars is going to have to come from somewhere in the next four years.

Guess where.

The numbers in this dispute have always been funny. To an outsider, what was offered and what was sought seemed about the same. Both sides agreed all along that a raise was needed. The dispute seemed to be over how that raise was structured and guaranteed.

But with the two sides so close, it still took two years and a rising level of acrimony, to actually strike the deal. Why?

The agreement came in the face of scheduled two-day rolling strikes at the 23 campuses in the system, but that's not likely what drove the settlement. Two-day strikes would be an annoyance more than a crisis for the university system.

The agreement came after an independent fact-finder issued a report on the university system's finances. If that's all it took, why wasn't it done earlier?

It seems sometimes that we all just like to fight. We stake out positions, beat our chests and bluster, when a little quiet give-and-take would probably get a better result faster. The only problem is that afterward, we wouldn't be able to declare a winner and a loser.

Whatever. We're glad the deal's been made, and hope it gets ratified by the union and the university's Board of Trustees.

And next time this comes up, let's start with what worked, and get it done sooner rather than later.