Over the past year, non-bargaining classified staff at Ohio University (OU) have been waging a campaign to unionize with the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Roughly one half of OU’s classified staff are already unionized as AFSCME local 1699, and the remaining non-bargaining classified staff are hoping to add a new local to the list.
In this series, Athens Left Field interviews former Classified Senate Chair Jacob Jakuszeit: an Athens County resident, former Ohio University student, worker at Alden Library, Classified Senator since 2017, and member of The Classified Employee Organizing Committee. Jacob speaks on a range of topics around the classified unionization effort, the budget crisis, and the treatment of University employees. This article is part one of a three-part series.
Since publication, non-bargaining classified staff successfully won a union with 82.8% of the vote (265 votes in favor and 55 opposed).
Click here to read Part Two, and click here to read Part Three.
Jacob urging his fellow workers to vote yes to unionize.
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ALF: On a basic level, why should non-bargaining classified employees vote to unionize? What makes that the favorable course of action?
J: Our best organizer since the start of last fall semester has been the administration. Everything that’s happened since then has reinforced that the university doesn’t care about us. Everything they’ve announced has been detrimental to employees, and in essence detrimental to students in many ways.
They’ve done away with many of the job protections and a lot of the rewards for being a long-term employee. They clearly don’t value loyalty, they don’t value longevity. I’ve worked at OU for a few years now, and we hired someone in March just before the pandemic, and they make the same as I do because I’m at the bottom of my pay grade.
So if we want to have any sense of job security and any sense of reward for longevity, we need a contract. A contract is something the University can’t pull away until we’re at the bargaining table again, and then we have some leverage. But right now we have no leverage. The only group that has any power is Faculty Senate, because their Faculty Handbook provides some level of protection, but even they don’t feel like they’re part of the decision making process, because in reality they aren’t.
In our organizing we’ve said we want a real seat at the table. A common refrain has been, “well we have a seat at the table: we’ve got Classified Senate! Aren’t you Senate Chair?” Yeah, but I have, like, the seat at the Thanksgiving kids’ table where they don’t trust me with the good china. It’s a dog and pony show. They just have us so they can say “in the spirit of shared governance, we discussed this with our constituent groups…” but it means nothing.
Most of what we do is sitting on committees where we’re basically told stuff after decisions are made — that’s the notion of “shared governance” here. That’s been part of the campaign: educating employees who don’t get involved in the gory details of the university’s operation so they see that we really have no power.
It’s become explicitly clear since the end of April that they have the ability to just wipe away all of our job protections. They can now reduce pay as needed for “operational necessity”, and they can reduce people now who are full-time to ¾ time — somehow without it being considered a reduction in force1. So we have people who’ve had their jobs cut by 25%. Meanwhile, at the top, the most generous of voluntary pay cuts have been 15%, and those are people who are making over $400k.
One of the consistent lines that we’ve had throughout this effort is: if our President and sports coaches have contracts, why can’t we? Their contracts say they can’t be furloughed, they can’t have their pay cut unless it’s voluntary. It’s all in there. Anyone who was on the fence about it, they see these people are only looking out for themselves in these positions of leadership. If we want to maintain any kind of standard of living for us, our kids, our region, we need a contract. That’s also been a class argument we’ve made: it’s not just about me getting mine, not just about me getting a raise or better benefits — it’s about leaving something better for my friends and neighbors.
If we want to maintain any kind of standard of living for us, our kids, our region, we need a contract. That’s also been a class argument we’ve made: it’s not just about me getting mine, not just about me getting a raise or better benefits — it’s about leaving something better for my friends and neighbors.
ALF: OU has had both unionized and non-unionized jobs for a while; what sparked this current drive to unionize non-bargaining classified staff?
J: There was an ongoing interest with some of the workers in transportation and parking [who are currently non-unionized] joining 1699. Some of them are part-time, so they’re not benefits eligible, so they were talking to AFSCME – working with folks there to get into the existing local2 during the next contract negotiation. Those conversations spurred more conversations about us organizing, which there have been attempts in the past, the most recent 20 years ago. It failed by, I think, 41 votes.
It started off with just those conversations and spread from there. Some of the people who have been involved are long time employees who have been part of previous unionization efforts and saw that the new administration was continuing down the same path as McDavis3, maybe with a little bit more of an aloofness so it didn’t seem quite so threatening at first.
ALF: So the previous drives helped lay the groundwork for this one?
J: Yeah, I would say that to a certain extent. When the votes were in person and on campus there was an intimidation factor with turnout and with how you would vote — you had to go to a building during a set time. That’s changed, so even if we were working on campus right now, the election would still be done with a mail-in ballot. You sign the outside of the envelope but there’s an interior envelope that you put your ballot in. It doesn’t have any identifying information.
ALF: Are there any historical reasons regarding which positions have been bargaining vs non-bargaining up until now?
J: I don’t know how long local 1699 has been around but I know it’s decades. I think the differentiation was just “blue collar” vs “clerical office jobs”. Obviously we’ve seen more crossover as time’s gone by as far as what those jobs look like. There’s been some moving and switching over the years, but by and large that’s been the defining difference between bargaining and non-bargaining.
I’d also say that part of the historical context is people who worked here in the 80s and 90s — who are still here — saw regular raises that are 3-4%. They paid no deductibles and they paid no insurance premiums. When the last attempt to unionize happened the university pushed back. The anti-union rhetoric they used was “well if you join a union, things will change and you’re gonna have to pay for parking, because we’ll have expenses having to deal with your union.” You know, really generic, classic tactics.
There were even people who didn’t support the unionization attempt last time who saw all the arguments the University made were straw men. They were planning on taking benefits like parking away anyway; we all pay for parking now. So people saw what happened and have seen where we have gotten this year: no raise, sometimes 1%, 1.5%. So not only does it not keep pace with inflation, but also, in the past 3 years, they told us “hey, insurance premiums are going up over the next 3 years by this percentage amount”. This year they didn’t announce any percentage amounts, because the percentage amounts were massive. They instead talked about the dollar amounts, and I as Classified Senate Chair had to reach out to benefits people to talk to us about that, because they wanted to bring no attention to the fact that our premiums went up and they were planning no raise pool4.
ALF: Have you had any pushback or resistance to the unionization campaign from OU?
J: There’s been no active opposition. They didn’t bring any union busters, didn’t call meetings and have presentations on why unions are bad. That’s a different response than we saw under the previous administration.5
Early on we kept things as quiet as possible for as long as possible, to try not to draw attention until we’d reached critical mass. Even when it did become more public, OU didn’t really push back. They did acknowledge it and of course we started off early on in the public phase getting letters of support from elected officials — like Sherrod Brown (D), mayors from the cities where we have campuses, and even state rep Jay Edwards (R) who is pro union… or at least not-anti-union. So we had a lot of people that supported us and I think that also helped keep the pushback light.
We did see in some offices, like housing, they leaned on that emotional “we’re a family” thing. A lot of people there who were long-term employees say things like, “well I’m close with my boss and we have a good relationship. Why would I want to spoil that?” Some of those people, when we filed for voluntary recognition, even filed complaints with the state. Now, they’re supporters, and they’ve voted yes because they’ve seen over the last several months how little the university cares.
One area where the university really dragged their feet though: we asked for voluntary recognition in December, and they kind of obfuscated — “well, you want us to respond by January 2nd, and that’s only 3 weeks away and we don’t know if we can do that.” So all through January into February they dragged their feet on whether or not they were going to grant voluntary recognition, which would have moved us directly into the bargaining phase. They set meetings and then canceled them last minute, things like that. It became clear that it was a delaying tactic. In some ways it worked out in our favor. I mean, I wish we’d been in bargaining before the pandemic started, but people now see that the university dragged their feet, and that shows what their values really are, as far as the Cutler Hall6 people.
ALF: Has the union drive process gone the way you expected?
J: I naively thought in the Spring of last year that we could vote during Fall semester. I thought that we’d do most of the organizing over summer, and we did do a lot of organizing. We built a skeleton on which to coordinate things across different campuses, and built relationships that didn’t exist before, leveraging our social and work connections. I was hopeful that we would have everything done: that we’d have all the cards signed, we’d file for an election, and we’d be voting on it before Christmas time.
It took a lot longer than that, because my perception of where coworkers would be was off. In my social and political circles, there is a different level of class awareness, familiarity with oppressive systems. So many people personify OU and really attach a lot of emotion to systems that don’t treat them with the same level of care, respect, or emotion.
ALF: So how confident are you at this point that the vote will pass?
J: We are on our third day of the official 14-day voting period: July 14 – 28. We have more than 200 people confirmed that they have received their ballot, voted yes, and put it back in the mail. We need 230 to win. The bargaining unit, which is based off of a list that OU provided on Feb 6, is 459 people I think. We’ve lost people since then due to job abolishments and retirements, however the SERB (State Employment Relations Board) asked OU for an updated eligibility list due to the delay — we were supposed to vote starting March 31. OU didn’t provide them a list. If OU tries to contest any of the ballots, we’re going to push back on that.
So I’m very confident that we’ll win. What I’m not sure of is the final vote count. Obviously the stronger the percentage in our favor, the better position we are in starting to bargain because that shows strength and unity. If we got 230 that would be fine, but it doesn’t send a strong enough message that we’re all together. And you know, (almost) no one wants to strike. But as an ultimate tool to lord over their heads, strikes or work slowdowns don’t seem to be as good of a threat if we don’t have strong numbers.
That’s what I’m nervous about right now. We’re being judicious to make sure that we don’t get overconfident. We want to hit that 230 mark so that we have a little security blanket, but we’re going to keep pushing through the end of the period to make sure that we get all the “yeses” and as many “maybes” as possible. We’ve even been able to convert some people who were active opposition — they’ve changed their mind based on the actions of the administration.
>>Click here to read Part Two
>>Click here to read Part Three
Andi Cass
Andi Cass is a contributor based in Athens County for Athens Left Field.
Rosa Cowen
Rosa Cowen is an Athens Left Field contributor based in Athens County and a worker at Ohio University.
- https://www.ohio.edu/policy/40-046
- Shorthand for a local unionized bargaining unit, in this context referring to AFSCME Local 1699.
- Roderick McDavis was the previous OU president before Duane Nellis, from 2004 to 2017.
- A pool of money from which raises are allocated. For example, the university may plan a pool that would allow ⅔ of employees to get 1% raises and ⅓ 1.5% raises for the year with departments deciding who gets how much. Having “no” raise pool effectively means no raises across the board, no matter how poorly or well someone’s performed.
- To read an example of how OU used union-busting under McDavis, see Morris, Conor. 04 November 2015. “Union election coming for OU call center workers amid allegations of ‘union busting.’” Athens News
- Cutler Hall is the university building which houses the President’s office, the Provost’s office, as well as the offices of other senior-level administrators.