On Friday, Gov. Neil Abercrombie critiqued the Hawaii State Teachers Association leaders, saying they were out of touch with their membership when they presented the recently rejected contract offer to teachers.

It’s funny, he was right — and, yet, he bears far more responsibility for the impasse we find ourselves in than the union leadership. HSTA leaders seem to be the ones most concerned with the possible loss of the $75 million Race to the Top (RTTT) grant, to the point that they forgot whom they represent.

The mistake the HSTA leadership made was in trying too hard to be the "good guys," something teachers frequently do because teachers want what’s best for the kids often at their own personal sacrifice.

As a result, the HSTA board of directors ended up trying to sell a state-sponsored pig-in-a-poke of a contract to teachers, something that would be hard to do in any event, and was impossible when that poke also stunk to high heaven.

Make no mistake, that is exactly what it was and did: pay raises tied to an unknown evaluation system, no improvements over the contact period covered by the state’s "last, best and final offer," and, in the far future, step increases of 1.1 percent of a teacher’s salary (step increases traditionally have been 3-plus percent).

It wasn’t HSTA that imposed a last, best and final offer on teachers; it was the governor. And it wasn’t HSTA that purposefully put a poison pill into the Hawaii Government Employees Association contract in the form of a "most favored nation" clause, which the state now claims makes any concession to HSTA "too expensive" — that, too, was the governor, with the collusion of HGEA. And which, in my opinion, proves the crux of the HSTA lawsuit against the state: that the state never intended to negotiate a contract with HSTA but intended all along to impose exactly what it did.

Bottom line: If state officials really hope to save the RTTT grant, they are the ones who need to figure out how to dig themselves out of the labor hole they dug us all into with the poison-pill they signed with HGEA, and they need to recognize that teachers have had just about enough.

The governor and the Legislature keep saying their goal is no loss of instruction, but when they finally push us to strike, what do they think is going to happen? That is where we are headed.

The governor used to blame HSTA leadership for the problem, saying that teachers would have approved the state’s last, best and final offer. Now he knows better, so he blames HSTA leadership, saying it didn’t present the contract accurately to teachers. The problem is, it did, and teachers said "no."

Hear us, Gov. Abercrombie: No.

HSTA leaders have heard us, and they are done bending over backwards to try and accommodate you.

If you want an end to the labor problem you have caused, come back with something that actually halts the continued decline in a teacher’s standard of living, one that has already gone unchecked for four years. Otherwise, governor, you think you have a labor problem now?

As the Bachman Turner Overdrive song says, "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet."