Bargaining in the News

Last week, David Steves wrote a clear, fair article in the Eugene Register-Guard about the negotiations between OUS and university workers. It's principally about SEIU's dealings--mainly because the University of Oregon is the paper's focus, and OU professors aren't unionized--but Steves points out the head-scratching difficulty in getting contracts signed:

Until now, a labor agreement by the state’s biggest public employees union and state government smoothed the way for a quick settlement between Oregon’s public universities and its unionized classified workers — mainly those who hold clerical, custodial and maintenance jobs.

Despite the ratification last week of such a contract between the state of Oregon and the Service Employees International Union Local 503, the Oregon University System has so far been unwilling to use the statewide labor contract as a model for an agreement with its 4,000 union-represented classified workers.

As we gear up to put pressure on OUS/PSU for our own contract, this point is central: we want parity with other state workers. If one deal is good enough for Oregon state workers (SEIU-DAS), why should other workers get a worse deal? More to the point, why should university workers, whose paychecks are only partly paid by taxpayers, take a larger hit?