The College Hill Independent

Back

Circulation Negotiation
Library management and staffbust heads in a contract dispute
. . . by Anna Lamut
[photo by Dawn Terry]

Everything may seem the same as usual. The café still serves bad coffee, and the Absolute Quiet Room still has people making out in it. But within the depths of the Brown libraries, a storm is brewing.

The Brown University library system is currently undergoing contract negotiations with Service Employees International Union Local 134, a union that represents about half of the library staff. The library staff contract expired on September 30th of last year, but was renewed until February 28th. Since the beginning of March, library union members have been working without a contract, leaving them the right to strike if need be and also leaving the university with the right to engage in a lockout. Although the two sides have resolved issues such as first year raises and health and other benefits, the University’s proposed plan to restructure the library remains a matter of contentious debate.

Proposals for library restructuring began six years ago, for the main purpose of making the library more “user-friendly.” This means making the library resources more accessible to students and faculty, and increasing the amount of research one can do from home on the computer. Focus groups administered surveys to library goers, and took their suggestions into account when putting together the reorganization plan.
Service groups with a smile

The two major sources of dispute between the union and management are involuntary transfers of job descriptions, and allowing employees to secure hours that are not subject to change. Library management is proposing to create new departments as part of the reorganization, which will be relabeled “service groups”: for example, circulation will be known as “gateway,” and shelving will be known as “materials care and delivery.” With the creation of these new “service groups” comes an overhaul of many employees’ job descriptions. However, many employees do not want to commit to vague new descriptions that do not correspond to the higher-level skills and years of experience they have. Workers fear, for example, that an experienced cataloguer might be placed into a position dealing with preservation and delivery of materials, or that a nationally known expert on Government Documents could be put into a budgetary position.

One side effect of this process, according to the union, is that some service groups will no longer have a subject expert. An area that will suffer particularly from this deficiency is the new service group of “scholarly resources,” which will be responsible for collection development and outreach to faculty. This group would be deficient in the area of the Sciences and Social Sciences (including Government Documents), meaning that faculty in these fields would not have the benefit of librarians with appropriate backgrounds completely dedicated to collection development in these areas.

Mark Nickel of the Brown News Service says that most proposed changes will not involve moving employees out of their area of expertise, and Merrily Taylor of library administration asserts that no expertise will be lost, although it may be transferred to areas where it is more needed, such as music and collection development. Nickel explained that most changes in job descriptions would include adding more duties to the current ones performed so as to make each job more flexible and interesting. He added that the University’s decision to hire an outside service to prepare books for shelving would free up library staff who have done this task in the past to do “other things” in the library.

The second major issue in debate, the assignment of hours, stems from the fact that the new contract would require employees to be available to work whenever the library is open. Currently this means 8:30 am to 2:00 am; though many students surveyed suggested 24-hour library service, extended hours are not currently planned. Nonetheless, if the library’s hours do change, union members say the new contract might require that they work any hour of the day or night with minimal foreknowledge. Union members maintain that this would be at best an inconvenience, and would cause innumerable scheduling problems, transportation difficulties, and physical stress.
While the University feels that expanding the hours certain staff are available is necessary in order to improve library services, Mark Nickel has suggested that the University will try to be responsive to the needs of employees when deciding these hours. One proposal involves allowing employees to make a list of hour preferences, and then trying to coordinate these preferences with those of others. Although obviously not everyone will get their first choice, this may be a step on the road to giving employees a more fair degree of choice of the hours they work. In addition, although initially the percent of staff working weekend shifts was to increase from 10% to 17%, this number has gone down as the negotiations progressed.

Dewey all agree?
Although they admit that restructuring is necessary to improve the efficiency of the library system, library staff feels as though restructuring should happen in a way that allows them respect, gives them some freedom to plan their own hours as opposed to having hours imposed upon them, and is consistent with their job specialties. Without these considerations, staff fear they will be treated as essentially interchangeable, both in the hours they work and the specific work they do. In addition, many feel as though the current restructuring plan, though optimistic in its inception, will not lead to the increased efficiency and coordination it is intended to bring about.
So far, the seven-month long negotiations have brought some progress: just last week, the university agreed with the union to try to avoid involuntary transfers. In general, however, negotiators feel dismayed by the university’s lack of responsiveness to their concerns. According to union business agent Karen McAninch and negotiating team member Timothy Engels, “Given the many years that both management and union negotiators have worked with and negotiated with one another, it’s pretty disturbing that management needs so abrupt a change at this point. Management proposals to eliminate negotiations over job descriptions and hours of work are clearly intended to diminish union power.”

While McAninch and Engels point to changes in job descriptions and hours as the main causes for dispute, Mark Nickel suggests that the main reason that the negotiations have been difficult is fear of inevitably uncertain change. The fact that the union just recently declined the University’s suggestion to bring in a federal mediator to help with the dispute, saying that this was premature, is a sign that these negotiations might be going on for days to come.

Anna Lamut B’05 is getting reorganized.

Back to Indy Home