Recently, we spoke with Jacob Jakuszeit, former Classified Senate Chair, about the campaign to unionize non-bargaining classified staff at Ohio University (OU). In part two of this three part series , Jacob talks about classified workers’ grievances, their hopes for the union, and the university leadership’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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 one of the interview, and click here to read part three.
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ALF: What are the primary grievances that classified workers have cited? Are there any common themes?
J: Yeah. Wages of course are part of it. There’s a lack of say over job duties; we’ve seen where people have retired and there’ve been cuts by attrition, and people are absorbing other job duties without any rise in compensation or in title, and that’s not reflected in their job description.
There have been concerns about the new “Performance Management Program.” It’s a process that’s geared more towards administrators, who have long-term projects and goals. Many classified employees have transactional and task-oriented type duties, where it’s harder to show that you’re doing a great job because things are harder to quantify. What, I’m going to pick up the phone after fewer rings? There’s mixed opinion — some people want merit-based raises, and some really don’t like that idea. Regardless, not having any say has been a concern.
Uncertainty around benefits — we have no control over how much we’re paying, and there’s no certainty from year to year. Some of these costs [e.g. healthcare] unfortunately, as a society, we’ve decided to put on employers (and therefore employees), but at least with a contract you have a three-year picture of what is going on. Whereas now, we found out what the rates were going to be I think in March [for upcoming fiscal year starting July 1].
Not having that information, and not having any input have been major concerns. And from the bottom to the top pay tiers, the difference in employee contribution [toward healthcare] is something like $20. That’s a very small difference between people who make $10 or $12 an hour and people who make… I don’t even know how much an hour.1
Another big issue that’s resonated with people is the notion of respect. The top level administration can say word salad PR things all day long, but their actions have shown that they don’t respect workers at the University. So my notion isn’t “I want them to respect me,” it’s “I want them to respect the contract.” But a lot of people talk about not being respected, not being valued, not feeling seen.
ALF: Was there any question about which union you would be organizing with, or was AFSCME essentially a given?
J: I’m not aware of any wider public discussion about a different union. I think it was a natural thing with [AFSCME local] 1699 already being on campus. I think it was helpful to have that existing relationship: having an AFSCME office in The Plains, and AFSCME being willing to send two full-time organizers – one of whom is an OU grad – to be here. I like the idea of us being with AFSCME because it’s an existing thing. Folks know AFSCME.
However, just like any labor organization that’s been around for a long time, there’s disappointment that contracts aren’t as strong as they were in the past. That’s true of a lot of unions — it’s true of UAW, true of any of these longtime powerhouses of labor. People have spouses or relatives or friends or neighbors that have been in the union in the past, and weren’t 100% pleased with how things went. That’s part of the reason we’re forming our own local rather than joining the existing local. We’re forming our own organization with our own contract.
I think overall, having an OU alum on the organizing team who is familiar with campus from day one, who could teach the other organizer their way around, was very helpful. The AFSCME international president is also an OU alum, and has made sure resources have been allocated. AFSCME has provided all the resources we need while also commuting as much as we need to the regional campuses. They’ve also been very good at making sure that they’re not “the union;” we are forming our union.
AFSCME tends to run card drives as opposed to unionization campaigns.2 That’s how things started: we were just on a card drive. That’s why it felt like “oh, we’ll get there quick”. But you run out of the people who are just willing to sign a card pretty quickly, and you see that you really need to build up organization and a core group of people who are really going to keep this going. We’re in that huge transition period now, where we are deciding our future.
ALF: Related to the grievances question: what are the major things you’d like to see negotiated in a union contract, if this election goes well?
J: Personally, I’d want to see the minimum wage for hourly employees at OU be at least $15 per hour; I don’t think that’s unrealistic. I would want to see a pay structure similar to the existing 1699 contract: for the first 5 or 6 years of your employment you have a set raise each year, in addition to any percentage that’s across-the-board for all employees, so then there’s an incentive for long-term work at the University. There’s reward for you learning more over time, as opposed to just “oh, you’re still here? I guess we’ll give you a percent raise (and have you pay more for insurance).”
I’d want to see a less complicated and narrower wage structure. We have pay bands that are incredibly wide, where some people can’t ever make any more, and then we have people like me who sit at the bottom of our pay grade and only get a raise if they bump up that bottom. There seems to be a real lack of continuity and equity.
I’d want to see positions defined in clearer terms so that people on our regional campuses aren’t doing the jobs of multiple people without being compensated for that. I’d want to see more parity between some of the administrative employees who supervise work and the people who are doing the lion’s share of the frontline service work with our students, our faculty, and our staff. Basically I want to see that people who are actually doing work are valued for the level of work they’re doing.
I’d also like some peace of mind as far as insurance rates, because we do see that there’s a disparity with the (now-expired) union contract for 1699. Not so much for individual benefits, but for family — bargaining staff are paying far less than what admin and non-unionized classified staff are paying.
Most of all, what I want to see is a contract that values the employees.
ALF: What do you think the biggest barriers are to more collective organizing at OU?
J: I think that there’s been a resurgence in interest in organized labor and organizing your workplace, outside of manufacturing. That’s where there was an initial hurdle for many classified staff members – “I thought unions were for blue collar workers, factory workers, or tradesmen” – so that’s been a big challenge. I think that for many classified workers, there’s a sense of almost shame, or they don’t want to acknowledge that they’re hourly employees. But over the course of this we have been emphasizing this with pride — like, “I’m an hourly employee, I get shit done.”
Many classified folks work their asses off and stay late on many days, and don’t put it on their timesheet because they feel like they didn’t get enough done during the day. Well, those students that you spent hours talking to are part of your job. It’s not “break time” — you wouldn’t be doing that at home. So I think that’s been a stumbling block that we quickly overcame with a lot of people.
Beyond classified workers, I would say faculty are the most ripe for unionization, but also just in the past month someone from Administrative Senate said: “these things are coming for administrative staff. They’re doing them to us.” Whatever they do to one segment of workers at OU, they’re going to do to others. I’d love to see administrative staff unionize as well, but I think faculty maybe could be the most unified group just because their job type is so similar. You have a lot of different political influences there across such a large organization though, and I think that’s held things up in the past. We are very segmented over the organization and there are different cultures — the Office of Information Technology has its thing, Housing and Residence Life has its thing.
ALF: So we’ve been in this pandemic for about four months now, and we’ve had all these various budget cuts across the university. Do you have any thoughts about how the university could have more appropriately addressed that situation?
J: So they’ve said that “these are unprecedented times” but they were saying that before the “unprecedented times.” They were acknowledging the challenging budget last fall. Everyone who worked at the university as we chased the dragon of higher and higher enrollment numbers, we knew budget problems were coming.
It said so in the papers: that OU, Miami, and OSU were the only three institutions [in Ohio] throughout the middle of the ‘10s that had growing enrollment numbers. We had record-breaking graduation numbers — huge graduation classes that we have never had before.
That’s clearly not sustainable. Inflation continues to go up, and expenses for everything continue to go up. You could have looked on Google to see how many people were being born 18 years ago to plan for dwindling enrollment. This isn’t something that requires a lot of foresight. So they chased short term enrollment bounces to fix their woes, going on a construction building spree.
What I want to see is the top leadership — the people involved in those decisions, and the trustees that approved them — jettisoned. Basically, when I look at those people I see incompetence. If they walked us off of this cliff, they should not still have their positions and get to make the decisions about how we now cut parts off.
It’s a revolving door between these people — a cute little club where they all get to go and screw up universities and then go somewhere else and do it all over again. They’re not effective managers. You have the Board of Trustees say “we have to pay top dollar to bring these people here.” I don’t think so. There’s plenty of people who are from the area who would gladly take a lot less money to do a much better job, who have an interest and a long-term investment as members of the community — not as someone standing to gain financially. They have a vested interest in the success of this institution and this region. That’s been part of my talking points about this campaign: we need to stop rewarding people who come and go in 5 or 10 years and just mess things up.
The AAUP,3 for example, proposed a collaborative budget option. It’s very clear that there should have been more steps and the furloughs at the top end should have been severe. There’s no good leader who should ever ask their employees to do something that they’re not willing to do. If Nellis is not willing to take a 25 percent cut, no one else should be cut 25 percent4 — the buck stops with the leadership. There should be no layoffs of working class people who live paycheck-to-paycheck before there are top-level administrators who are laid off, or volunteer to take $1 salaries and work to recover from this situation. We’re in “unprecedented times” as they keep saying: do something that’s unprecedented, do something bold.
ALF: Do you think there’s any possibility that the laid off workers could get their jobs back?
J: It’s law that when an election is filed, or a request for voluntary recognition is filed, that employers and [unionizing] employees are supposed to maintain a “status quo.”5 And the State Employment Relations Board — the agent in charge of our organizing and our election process — instructed OU that it was expected to maintain status quo: to not make changes, not do layoffs, not change job descriptions, not change policies or processes. And they’ve done all of those things.
We want all of those job protections in our contract, but also we want the people who should have never been eliminated made whole — at least until we have the option to vote and begin negotiation on a contract. It’s just not good faith for the university to have acted the way they did.
>>Click here to read Part One
>>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.
- Based on salary data published by The Post and assuming a 40 hour work week, Ohio University President Duane Nellis’s salary would translate to about $234/hour. Provost Chaden Djalali would be about $181/hour.
- To read a discussion about this approach to union organizing, click here.
- The American Association of University Professors. In this case, the Ohio University Chapter.
- See Jacob’s previous comments about reducing staff from full time to ¾ of full time, a 25% cut in a person’s pay.
- See NLRB for “status quo” context: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/bargaining-in-good-faith-with-employees-union-representative