EDITORIAL
Everyone wins, maybe, on teacher bonuses

The Hawai'i Labor Relations Board has delivered a truly Solomonic decision in the rancorous and totally unnecessary dispute between Gov. Ben Cayetano's administration and the teachers union over bonuses.

That is, the board decided that, money aside, both parties are right. As Cayetano has maintained all along, the state intended to pay teachers with advanced degrees a one-time bonus. The union had insisted his negotiators agreed to bonuses in each year of a two-year, strike-ending contract.

The state argued that it orally agreed to pay the bonus for one year only, but that the union staff changed the agreement while typing up the contract. State officials, exhausted by round-the-clock bargaining, didn't notice the change until after union members had ratified the contract, they said.

The union maintained that what was typed up was what had been agreed to, and it demanded bonuses in both years.

The dispute ended up before the Labor Relations Board, which ruled that Cayetano was right that the state intended a one-time bonus, but that the teachers were right, too — that the state in effect had committed to paying the teachers something in the way of a bonus in the second year, because it failed to object to the language as typed up by the union until after the contract was ratified.

The good news is that the egos of the principal players are spared because no loser has been declared.

Ah, but what about the money?

Since there now is no dispute over the first-year bonus, if there ever really was, there's no reason not to pay it immediately. The board has ordered the two sides to negotiate some sort of second-year bonus, and this issue should quickly be settled.

Cayetano has always argued that the bonus dispute was about principle; he felt honor-bound to take it to the wall. But the practical effect of his approach was to alienate thousands of teachers. We've argued that his stand, right or wrong, was not worth dragging down classroom morale and hindering efforts to correct a teacher shortage.

We hope Cayetano is satisfied with the validation he claims to have received from the labor board and can proceed to a quick settlement with the teachers. He has the option, of course, to make the second chapter of this saga as painful as the first, with equally baleful results.

How big the second-year bonus should be, unfortunately, is a question much more complicated than it was when the strike was settled. Mainland and Japanese recessions and the effects of Sept. 11 have put the state in a serious budget dilemma. Although the bonus money will come out of federal impact funds, that is money that otherwise would go to ameliorate the $35 million budget cut the governor has ordered for the Department of Education.

More than 6,400 of the state's nearly 13,000 teachers were eligible for the bonuses, estimated to cost $6 million to $10 million in the first year. Can the state find a sum of similar size for the second-year bonuses? We hope so. That the teachers deserve it has never been in dispute.