SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT).
The Fourth Department, reversing Supreme Court, determined a matter concerning the proper pay for a teacher was arbitrable under the collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The school districts (petitioner’s) motion to permanently stay arbitration should not have been granted:
… [R]espondent (union) filed a grievance on behalf of one of its members, a teacher, alleging that petitioner had violated the provisions of the CBA that require petitioner to maintain salary schedules in an ethical manner, to adjust teacher salaries based on graduate credits earned, and to abide by the salary schedules. …
It is well settled that courts must apply a two-part test to determine whether a matter is subject to arbitration under a CBA … . “First, the court must determine whether there is any statutory, constitutional or public policy prohibition against arbitration of the grievance’ ” … . If there is no such prohibition, the court must examine the CBA to determine “whether the parties in fact agreed to arbitrate the particular dispute” … . …
… [T]he arbitration of disputes concerning public school teachers’ salaries is not proscribed by law or public policy, and thus only the second prong is at issue … .
… The dispute concerns whether petitioner placed the teacher at the correct step of the salary schedule and paid her properly based on the graduate credits that she earned, and thus it is reasonably related to the general subject matter of the CBA … Issues concerning whether the CBA supports a grievance arising from the initial placement of a new employee on the salary schedule, as opposed to the proper payment of an existing employee, “are matters involving the scope of the substantive [CBA] provisions and, as such, are for the arbitrator” to resolve … . … [T]he clause in the CBA stating that an arbitrator has “no power to alter, add to, or detract from” the CBA does not render the dispute nonarbitrable … . Matter of Thousand Is. Cent. Sch. Dist. v Thousand Is. Educ. Assn., 2017 NY Slip Op 06759, Fourth Dept 9-29-17
ARBITRATION (EMPLOYMENT LAW, SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT))/EMPLOYMENT LAW (TEACHERS, SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT))/EDUCATION-SCHOOL LAW (TEACHERS, SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT))/TEACHERS (EMPLOYMENT LAW, SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT))/UNIONS (TEACHERS, SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT))/COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (TEACHERS, SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE DETERMINED THE PROPER PAY FOR A TEACHER WAS ARBITRABLE UNDER THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT (FOURTH DEPT))