Today’s action of rocking the boat a little was designed to send a message to the captains in charge of the boat that the people manning the oars are unhappy. The captains may not have known this before. Unless you are actually sitting at the negotiations table, you don’t really know what is going on and that is true for management as well as the workers. Joe could be telling the Board that everything is going well. I am sure he wants to look like he knows what he is doing and that he has things under control. I hope that this gentle rocking is enough to attract attention and to get a reasonable offer for the people manning the oars. Unfortunately, in NJ we can not legally strike, but we can rock harder if necessary.

Very few full-time faculty attended today’s in-service workshops. The Culinary Faculty felt they had to attend because it was a contractual day, but all of them wore large red buttons that said “Settle Now!” One culinary faculty felt slighted that there was no mention of the Academy of Culinary Arts’ silver anniversary. The Academy is celebrating Twenty-five years of successfully graduating skilled workers for the hospitality industry of Atlantic and Cape May Counties.

The Department of Labor has a web site of consumer price indexes. http://www.dol.gov It would take weeks to read all the information on the site and it is only an approximation of the increase in living costs. If, however, you know what has been happening to the price of energy, houses, text books, and medicine, you know it is getting more expensive to live. The adjusted CPI for urban and clerical workers in the Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City area for 2005 was 4.1 percent and for the first half of this year was 4.3 percent and going up. The articles I have read state that the trend of increasing CPI will continue and the next year will be 5 something. A four or five percent raise may allow you to continue treading water, but definitely will not allow you to change your lifestyle. In any event, the offers that were on the table yesterday for support staff were 2.0 and 2.5. I don’t remember the details, but they do not matter because you would never vote to accept that percentage anyway. In addition, I faint when I see my own blood.

Will Parsons, Coordinator of the Unity Negotiations Team