This chapter shall be known as the Vermont Municipal Employee Relations Act. It is the purpose and policy of this chapter to prescribe the legitimate rights of both municipal employees and municipal employers in their relations with each other; to provide orderly and peaceful procedures for preventing the interference by either with the legitimate rights of the other; to protect the rights of individual employees to self-organization; to allow individuals to form, join, or assist employee organizations and to bargain collectively; to define and proscribe practices on the part of employee organizations and municipal employers which are harmful to the general welfare; and to protect the rights of the public in connection with labor disputes. (Added 1973, No. 111, § 1.)