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Strike authorization vote planned by YSU faculty union
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
The union representing Youngstown State University faculty will schedule a strike authorization vote for later this month.
The union’s negotiation team met Thursday and decided to conduct the vote, likely either Oct. 22 or Oct. 29.
It’s a marked turn from mid-August when the negotiating teams for the union and the university issued a joint news release announcing that a tentative agreement had been reached.
That agreement, though, didn’t address health insurance, and that’s the bone of contention now.
Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez, chief negotiator for the Youngstown State University- Ohio Education Association, expects the issue to go to fact-finding.
“We’re taking a two-pronged approach,” he said, referring to moving forward with the vote while negotiations continue regarding health insurance.
The union negotiator said the union team is trying to schedule negotiating sessions with the administrative team for next week, although he’s not hopeful that an agreement on the issue will be reached.
Ron Cole, a university spokesman, pointed out that the two sides reached a tentative agreement on all of the other issues in the contract except health care. A subcommittee was formed with representatives of all the university unions to work on the health-care issue, “which, admittedly, is a big issue,” he said. “That subcommittee has been meeting over the last several weeks.”
According to a negotiations update from Palmer-Fernandez that was distributed to the faculty and obtained by The Vindicator, the union presented a counterproposal on health insurance that the university rejected this week, presenting its counter “that significantly departs from our counterproposal.”
If agreement can’t be reached, an impasse will be “declared and we will then enter fact-finding for this one remaining article,” the update says. “Scheduling fact-finding and then waiting for the fact finder’s report will take several weeks. But if a compromise is achieved, we shall then have a master tentative agreement ready for ratification, first by the [trustees], likely in its November meeting, and then by us.”
Palmer-Fernandez said the health-care package presented by the administrative negotiating team would “drive some of our lowest-paid faculty into poverty.”
“They are vindictive and punitive with the faculty,” he said.
Cole said he doesn’t know the specifics of the proposals being discussed.
“The goal here is to come up with an agreement that is fair and within the boundaries of what the university can afford to do,” he said.
The proposal, Palmer-Fernandez said, would require a faculty member making about $42,000 annually to pay an additional $1,000 per year toward health insurance. Under the just-expired pact, faculty members pay 15 percent of the health-care premium.
The union’s negotiating team wanted to meet this week, but the administration’s chief negotiator was out of town, Palmer-Fernandez said. The union proposed two days next week to meet, and the university’s team hasn’t responded, he said.
“This is not a board and not an administrative negotiating team that wants to close a deal,” Palmer-Fernandez said. “They keep putting us off.”
He said this is the first time in the 40-year history of the YSU faculty union that the union has gone for two months without a contract. The previous pact expired Aug. 17.
“And it’s right at the feet of this board,” Palmer-Fernandez said. “We asked to meet [Thursday]. We wanted to meet two days next week, and they don’t even give us the courtesy of a response, so we’ll have a strike vote.”
Cole said a negotiation session is set for Wednesday afternoon.
“There have been and will be next week opportunities to continue to hammer this out,” he said. “These are difficult issues, but we hope we can come together and come to an agreement and resolve the remaining issues.”
After a strike vote, the union must notify the State Employment Relations Board. After that step, the union may strike at any time after a 10-day period.
The contract between YSU and the Association of Classified Employees expired in mid-August and initially was extended through September. Cole said the contract was extended again, and negotiations with that union, which represents classified employees including secretaries, parking attendants, maintenance workers and other employees, are ongoing.