State should drop irrelevant labor issues

The Cayetano administration would do well to drop its distracting complaints against the teachers union before the Hawai'i Labor Relations Board and focus on the real goal: a decent pay raise for teachers.

The HSTA has said the state's complaints are without merit and called them a tactic to stop a strike.

State Attorney General Earl Anzai said that is "twisting things around."

"We're not filing these complaints to stop a strike," he said, calling that notion "absurd."

"We're filing these things because of their prohibited practices."

Who's twisting things around? The only thing the state can hope to gain by filing these complaints is delay or prohibition of a strike.

The state has accused the teachers union of negotiating in bad faith and of threatening to photograph teachers who cross picket lines.

The teachers have since agreed not to take photos in the event of a strike. That's their judgment call: It's assuredly a hard-ball tactic to ensure solidarity on the picket line, but there's little doubt that it's a constitutionally protected right.

But the bad-faith bargaining charge is nonsense. Anzai is claiming "Gotcha" because HSTA President Karen Ginoza said in a television interview that she had not "broken down" the state's latest offer before rejecting it.

Ginoza didn't feel obligated to analyze the details because the latest offer in total wasn't worth a single dollar more than the previous offers.

The focus of the labor dispute between the teachers and the state must shift from the HLRB to the bargaining table, where the state's chief negotiator, Davis Yogi, has painted a picture quite different from that painted by Anzai:

"I never thought they were negotiating in bad faith," said Yogi.

They're not negotiating in bad faith. They don't want a strike, they want a pay raise — which is clearly in the public interest. It's time to end the sparring and get the job done.