Librarian Bargaining Update #2 June 21, 2011

Consistent with their hope that the Librarians will just get frustrated and give up on our struggle for a decent wage, the Administration today in bargaining offered their salary proposal. Hoping to pressure us into an early and complete retreat, they not only offered us no salary improvement, but set a timeline on when Librarians would get any merit increases they have earned.

The proposal is as follows. If we agree to take no salary increase on or before July 15, Librarians who have earned merit increases this year will get the increases paid(one assumes retroactively) to July 1. If we wait to settle for nothing until after July 15, Librarians will get their increases paid on the first of the month that is at least 30 days after we settle.

If we ignore the new time pressure, there is nothing new here, since they had already warned us that they intended to withhold merit payments if we had the temerity to bargain for salaries this year. After a decade without significant range adjustments for most in the unit, we are simply not going to meet their expectations that Librarians will fold at the first threat.

The Union Negotiating Team put on a spirited presentation on the significant recruitment and retention problems that are being faced at most UC libraries. This included the recent decision of former Negotiating Team member Tony Lin at UCI to leave UC for a higher paying library position at a local community college. (We should note that Mitchell Brown, a former Negotiating Team member has now replaced Tony Lin.) But similar cases were presented for the vast majority of UC campus libraries.

Despite clear evidence that the ULs and AULs are desperately seeking ways to solve the recruitment and retention problems on their campuses, including the strongly rejected attempt two years ago to replace the current rank and step salary scale with a range system that would allow management to advance their favorites on some basis other than merit, at the bargaining table, the Administration continues to pretend that it faces no problems with recruitment or retention.

We also presented clear information about the huge workload increases being faced by the librarians still at UC and the way in which that exacerbates the pressure to seek work elsewhere at higher levels of compensation. We also presented charts with evidence of the over $2 million a year in salary savings the libraries are receiving from the non-replacement of librarians who have separated from UC in the past three years.

We are still waiting for the Administration to respond to our information request from mid-May (over a month ago). The information request includes information on the budget of each UC library and the pay, benefit, and perks delivered to library management employees over the past three years. In the face of ongoing assertions that there is no money in the system for pay increases for Unit 17 Librarians, the foot dragging on responding to our information request increases our belief that the Administration has something to hide with respect to management compensation in the UC Libraries. They have now committed to responding to our request a week before our next bargaining session, which will be July 15 in Oakland. If they do not, we will be filing an unfair labor practice charge against them with the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB).

One never knows for sure what the other side in bargaining is thinking. But there is every indication that, at this point, the Administration is just hoping that the economy and budget of California plus the threat of delayed payment of merits that have been earned (which effects about 1/3 of the members of the unit) will cause the Librarians to simply fold our tents and disappear for another year.

That is not going to happen. We know that UC has made significant concessions to other bargaining units despite UC’s budget problems and that top administrators continue to be showered with extra pay, benefits, and perks despite the problems,which are no doubt to some extent real. We are working hard to demonstrate that it is not just our members, but the quality of service and the standing of UC libraries will increasingly suffer if there is not some improvement in the compensation of UC Librarians. It is hard to maintain that there will not be a significant impact when virtually every community college district now pays more to librarians than UC. CSU is now over 22% ahead of UC in librarian compensation and that is a very real market problem to which UC must respond.

We remain confident that if we do not cave in to these initial threats (or perhaps even additional ones they will concoct), the Administration will be forced to take the need for real bargaining over librarian salaries seriously. If we don’t see a turnaround soon, we will begin to unleash our public relations campaign over these issues.

Mike Rotkin

Chief Negotiator for Unit 17 UC-AFT