Labor Relations Fundamentals for Community College Districts

the bargaining agreement and therefore, bear a definitive responsibility for knowing the content of the agreement. The labor agreement contains important rights and responsibilities for both employees and supervisors that ideally facilitate a productive work environment. Failure to carry out and exercise the fundamental rights of management erodes the rights of the college and/or district and can establish unfavorable past practices. An inattentive supervisor can give away or abrogate the basic rights of management by simply allowing abuses to develop and continue. Also, as will be discussed in the next section, a supervisor must be responsive to the management obligation to act in good faith in its labor relations. The first line supervisor is frequently the only management level person with whom the majority of rank and file employees have direct contact. In effect, the supervisor is management . Therefore, she or he is not only responsible for interpreting the bargaining agreement, but is also responsible for communicating, supporting and advocating management’s positions to the work force. The first line supervisor also has the equally important responsibility of ensuring that management rights are preserved. B. M ANAGEMENT R IGHTS IN C OMMUNITY C OLLEGES In community colleges, as in the private sector, assertion of management rights is the primary constraining influence on the scope of bargaining. The extent to which authority is shared between the parties is an indication of the nature of their bilateral relationship and defines the relative scope of “power” of each party. The NLRA extends the duty to bargain to wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment, but does not define what rights are reserved to management. The actual scope of bargaining is left to evolve out of the bilateral relationship between the parties. This private- sector model is generally adapted to the public sector, including community college districts, with respect to the scope of bargaining, particularly in connection with issues relating to the assertion of management rights.

C. T HEORY OF M ANAGEMENT R ESERVED R IGHTS

There may be some confusion regarding the relevance and scope of management rights clauses in a labor agreement.

Management often attempts to seal off areas in which it feels it has managerial discretion (for example, assignment of work, counselors’ case loads, and discipline). In order to fully understand the importance of this issue, supervisors and other managers must have a grasp of the theory of management rights and distinguish between those rights that are exclusive and non- exclusionary - those rights which are part of the basic management rights doctrine - and those enumerated in a management rights clause of the bargaining agreement. Management rights are crucial to the collective bargaining relationship. Inherent management rights include the right to direct operations, the right to direct the work force, and the right to determine the mission of the organization. Except in matters involving threats to individual

Labor Relations Fundamentals for Community College Districts © 2019 (c) Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 21