Employee Participation Meetings Open Communication About Work Challenges October 2, 2011

Clockwise from top left: Local 34 Art Gallery members John Balash, Zsofia Jilling, Christinia Czap and Tom Phillips organized the EPM in their department.

Over the summer, more than 200 Local 34 members in 47 different central campus departments—from African-American Studies to Physics to the Shared Services Center–held Employee Participation Meetings with management. “We must speak up,” says Tom Phillips, Local 34 Committee member in the Yale Art Gallery, where almost every C&T signed on to a letter to the Director requesting a series of EPMs.  “We started all our meetings by stating that we (Local 34 members) are working hard to do the best job we can, but when policy, budgets or managers force us to compromise the quality of work we do, then we must speak up.”

Local 34 Central Area Committee members Linda Hase, Mary Jane Stevens, Ann DeLauro, Joanna Gorman, Heather Lewis, and Jackie Bradley.

In response to three years of budget cuts and a series of reorganizations, hundreds of C&Ts took advantage of a useful but underused article in our Local 34 Contract (Article IX 1(b)) which gives the employees the right to call an EPM and then present ideas and discuss solutions on how to improve services. In many academic departments, explains Ann DeLauro, the Registrar in the Italian Department, the EPMs “have opened doors of communication between support staff and faculty and led to discussions about our departments’ autonomy and future ability to run as efficiently as they should without compromising the quality of work.”

For each EPM, the Local 34 employees in the departments created agendas that addressed real issues facing C&Ts: career path, shifting of work to students and other employees, decisions regarding restructuring, new positions, workload, and job descriptions, and understaffing from attrition and layoffs. Moreover, they offered real solutions, as Marcy Kaufman, Registrar of the History Department, heard in the EPMs she attended. “We have been able to engage with our Chairs, coworkers, and members of the administration,” Marcy said, “providing them with much-needed perspective from the point of view of the employees who actually do the work.”

Already these meetings are paying off: several staff who had taken on additional higher level work are getting Y payments and upgrades to E Level, Local 34 Committee members attend a regular Shared Services Steering Committee meeting to discuss ongoing reorganizations in the academic departments, and management in departments from 344 Winchester to Chapel Street are making commitments to improve training and to keep up communication.

If you would like to plan an Employee Participation Meeting in your department, please contact your Local 34 Steward or Organizer.