Contract question

I wanted to express my positive reaction to the five-year contract just agreed to between the teachers' union and the Pittsburgh Public Schools. This will give a long-term application for the new guidelines concerning teacher performance and also give the teachers the ability to have stability in their incomes for the upcoming five years.

I believe strongly in the necessity of unions to represent the economic interests of workers in our economic structure.

However, I have a "help-me-understand" question. I have always wondered, as I read the papers over different issues of our day, about who actually monitors the performance of union workers on a day-to-day basis? Do the union themselves perform on-the-job performance reviews of their workers that would include all the usual work-related gauges, or is this strictly done by their employers (for example, the school board, Port Authority or a municipality) or are performance reviews normally done jointly by employer and union?

I ask this so I can better understand the critical and important working and economic relationship between employer, worker and their unions in our day and age.

DAVE BORLAND
Mt. Lebanon