YSU’s losses continue to mount with regard to a key labor pact

Youngstown State University President Cynthia Anderson, who has made it clear that she had nothing to do with the Association of Classified Employees contract when she was vice president for student affairs, has inherited a grand legal mess from the previous administration.

The Sept. 28 arbitrator’s ruling that YSU owes back pay to 60 ACE members is the latest defeat for the university.

In May — two months before Anderson was promoted from vice president to president — a federal arbitrator ruled that YSU had violated its contract with ACE when it converted members’ wage rates from an old scale to the Ohio job classification plan. Lee R. Franklin of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service directed the university to recompute the wage rate of each union member who had a pay-grade change as a result of the 2008 conversion and to pay them the difference in wages and all applicable increases retroactive to Aug. 15, 2008, the effective date of the contract.

Last month, Stanley T. Dobry of Warren, Mich., ruled that the university isolated the lower-seniority employees’ pay rates, “hoping that the university would not aggressively pursue vindication of the rights of a small minority.”

The common denominator in all the successful challenges filed by the union against the university is Craig Bickley, the former chief human resources officer and chief negotiator for the ACE contract. Bickley resigned in January 2009 after being placed on administrative leave the previous month following an investigation into concerns raised about the three-year pact.

But the resignation has left unanswered numerous questions about the negotiations.

Indeed, a telling point during the arbitration hearing was that no member of the negotiating team participated to counter the union’s claim that Bickley had unilaterally changed the conversion method after contract was approved by both sides.

The arbitrator, Dobry, not only agreed with ACE, but took a swipe at the former administration.

“The university’s intent is clear that there was no plan to implement the contract that they had just negotiated with the union,” he wrote.

Not persuasive

Dobry did not buy YSU’s contention that ACE’s president at the time, Ivan Maldonado, had provided “uncorroborated and obviously biased testimony of the local union president.” Maldonado was fired after it was revealed that he was one of a handful of employees who received huge pay boosts after the job reclassification provision was agreed to in the contract.

He is appealing the termination.

Although some of the details of the YSU-ACE negotiations have been made public, there is a lot of information that is not yet known.

For example, did the administration of Dr. David Sweet determine if there was a relationship between Bickley and Maldonado that went beyond the negotiations?

Or, did anyone in the executive suite sign off on any of the provisions that were being negotiated that resulted in a windfall for the employees?

With new labor negotiations with the various unions looming, Dr. Anderson and members of the board of trustees need to determine what went wrong with the ACE talks so the same problems don’t arise again — problems that carry a huge price tag.