Gov: Union Negotiators Agreed To HSTA Contract

Katherine Poythress/Civil Beat

The Hawaii Department of Education on Friday implemented a new two-year contract with the state's 12,700 teachers — one that the teachers union says it did not approve.

But Gov. Neil Abercrombie says that Hawaii State Teachers Association negotiators in fact shook hands on the agreement. The union's board of directors later stepped in and refused to allow teachers to vote on it, he says.

"I think the HSTA negotiators were satisfied that they got the best possible deal they could," Abercrombie said at a Friday press conference, lavishing praise on HSTA President Wil Okabe and Executive Director Al Nagasako for their leadership in bargaining talks. "But when they went to the board, the board refused to pass it on to the teachers to allow them to vote."

Okabe responded that the governor "may not have been fully informed."

"We took the state's last, best and final offer to our Board of Directors," Okabe wrote in an email to Civil Beat. "It was unanimously rejected as unworthy of a vote of our teachers."

Former HSTA executive director Joan Husted told Civil Beat that the union board historically has not submitted a contract to teachers for a vote if the agreement did not first satisfy the board.

Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi and Gov. Neil Abercrombie announced on June 24, six days before the old contract expired, that negotiations with HSTA had reached an impasse, and that the Department of Education planned to move implement their "last, best, final offer" beginning July 1.

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