YSU faculty contract approved, but blasted by Trustee Harry Meshel

YOUNGSTOWN

Youngstown State University trustees approved a new three-year contract with the university’s faculty union that provides bonuses and salary increases but eliminates or reduces other faculty compensation.

The board approved the pact, which was OK’d last week by the union, by a 7-2 vote, with trustees Harry Meshel and David Deibel opposed.

“There’s no question we have outstanding faculty at this university,” Meshel said at a special trustees meeting Tuesday. “They’ve proven themselves over and over. I do have to question the intellectual level of the union leadership they have.”

Meshel referred to the union’s negotiating team agreeing to terms of the first tentative agreement reached in November and then urging membership to reject it, calling it unethical and childish. The union rejected the earlier tentative agreement.

Someone who would do that “shouldn’t be on the negotiating team and should not be running the ethics department either.”

Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez, the faculty union’s chief negotiator, is the director of the James Ethics Center at YSU.

Meshel’s “remarks, made in ignorance of the facts, should not be dignified by any further comment,” Palmer-Fernandez said.

Annette Burden, president of the YSU-Ohio Education Association, the union representing faculty, believes Meshel is misinformed.

“It is unfortunate that the remarks made by Mr. Meshel were a result of gross misinformation,” she said in an email. “Remarks such as these tend to be harmful to the fostering of a more healthy relationship between the faculty who have given so much in support of the university and the board of trustees who are appointed to look after its financial interests. I hope that we can move beyond this pettiness and work constructively to collectively support our mission as an urban research university.”

Meshel also was critical that with roughly 370 faculty, only 207 voted on the contract. The contract was approved by 17 votes. Meshel credited the administration’s negotiating team for its work.

“Anyone can argue with me,” he said.

“I created collective bargaining for public employees [in Ohio]. I’ve supported unions my whole life because they support working people. I’d like to see this leadership support working people.”

Meshel was a long-time state senator.

Read more about the pact in Wednesday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.