VT Law Superceding Master Agreement Vermont

[VTteacher]

In the state of Vermont, can a Vermont statute supercede a master agreement (labor agreement) already in place?? I am a teacher in a school district that has a set number of student contact days and inservice days in our master agreement. Can a new state law overerride that agreement??

Thanks

[DAW]

This is going to be a soft answer, but I would say "of course". It has been a long time since I have taken a contract law class, but an agreement between parties cannot make a law go away. New laws get passed all the time and employers scramble all the time to come into compliance with the new laws. The fact that there is an old contract that says something else does not protect the parties from having to follow the law.

The obvious exception would be if the law was unconstitutional or somehow invalid on it's face. For example, California has a medicinal marijuana law which is perfectly valid as far as California law is concerned, but has no legal force as far as federal law is concerned. I can think of state laws regarding employer medical coverage that have run into preemption by the federal ERISA law for example.