Speaking Out

Just the Facts, Ma’am

In 2003, the Associated COLT Staff of the Universities of Maine (ACSUM), an NEA affiliate representing the 1,100 clerical, office, laboratory and technical (COLT) employees of the University of Maine System, was faced with a situation familiar to most unions in recent times: a draconian increase in health insurance costs that outstripped the raises being offered in negotiations with the university sysem.

ACSUM leadership approached the problem by creating a credible snapshot of the bargaining unit’s economic situation. The entire unit was surveyed on financial specifics and a white paper titled Personal Economies: Living on the Edge with Nothing Left To Give was developed around the results of the survey.

The picture the survey painted was dramatic. A significant number of ACSUM-represented employees, about 20 percent, were having a hard time getting by without help—either from families or public assistance. The COLT unit is 85 percent female. The unit’s income, roughly $23,000 on the average, is barely enough for even a small single-parent family.

It seemed obvious that the state was ill-served by compensation practices that contributed to the growth of a class of working poor. The relative lack of compensatory reward for the largely female clerical staff with increasing technical skills is problematic.

Although the university came to the table with its usual stonewalling, take-it-or-leave-it approach, as negotiations stalled and spilled over into mediation, ACSUM stood firm against take-back threats while concentrating on a wide and strategic distribution of the white paper to legislators and stakeholders.

In the end, pressure generated with the help of the white paper helped ACSUM win reinstatement of a step system that had been missing from the contract for a decade—a historic victory because the absence of a step system had over the previous decade contributed significantly to the unit’s wage woes.

This settlement is not the end of ACSUM agitation around its survey research. The union now has a benchmark that can be compared with similar future surveys. Issues raised by the white paper continue, and the added research it suggests, such as gender equity and living wage issues, will continue the momentum.

Jane Crouch is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Middlebury College, with a background in Russian language and literature. She is now a part-time secretary for the University of Maine Bureau of Labor Education.