PTRAFT001 - Costing Out Contracts

Course Description

Costing Out Contracts is an essential element to effective collective bargaining:

• It frees our members from relying solely on what management provides us.

• It educates us on the cost of demands, either raising or tempering expectations accordingly.

• It helps us to design fairer compensation structures?.

• It acts as an organizing tool? in our negotiations.

This course focuses on the methodologies and tools of costing analysis. You'll learn and practice the essential tasks through the course. In the end, you'll work through an authentic bargaining scenario relevant to your constituency, whether it's K-12, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, healthcare, public employees, or higher education.

Faculty Author

• Jewell C. Gould is a retired AFT staff member with 43 years' experience starting in Kansas City, then with the Missouri Federation of Teachers, and then at the national AFT level, where he served principally as the Director of Research from 1986 until his retirement from full-time service with the AFT in 2014. During his long tenure, Gould supported bargaining of contracts for all divisions and affiliates across the nation and overseas. He has developed training programs on aspects of negotiations including fiscal analysis and has organized a number of AFT Bargaining conferences for affiliates. He has served as AFT representative to Education International, American Education Finance and Policy Association, and labor representative to Bureau of Labor Statistics data review committee. Gould now serves as a Senior Consultant to the AFT.
• Steven Williams is a consultant to AFT. He is a former Director of the Center for Collective Bargaining, where his primary role was to conduct financial condition analysis of K-12 school districts, institutions of higher education, and hospitals. He also focused on models of compensation, health benefits, and labor management partnerships. Under Williams's direction, the Center for Collective Bargaining provided research which supported collective bargaining goals and contract campaigns, allowing local union affiliates to participate as equals with employers in decision making. 
• Sumner McRae works in the Center for Collective Bargaining with the AFT's Research and Strategic Initiatives department, where she provides support to locals in contract negotiations, as well as training to affiliates on fiscal analysis, costing of salary and benefits, and contract language. McRae is also involved in the AFT's work on labor management and collaboration and educator workplace stress, including coordination of the biennial Educator Quality of Work Life survey.

Benefits to the Learner

• Develop a strategy for building your analysis team

• Request and analyze appropriate data from management

• Build and use a salary costing worksheet

• Analyze changes to base wages and additional compensation

• Cost-out changes to health benefits

• Work through an authentic bargaining scenario

Target Audience