Public school custodians in North Kingstown didn’t mourn when the school committee outsourced their jobs last year. They organized.

The 27 school janitors voted today to negotiate their pay and benefits collectively as a bargaining unit with the NEARI.

“Privatizing doesn’t mean an end to union rights,” said Pat Crowley, of the NEARI. “Any municipality that thinks privatization is a way to get away from unions is wrong.”

He said the re-unionized custodians will elect a negotiating committee in time to work out a new contract before school starts again in September.

“This is the first time a private, for profit employer has had unionized workers in a school,” Crowley added. “That means they now have a right to strike. Not that we are looking forward to that but it’s a right they didn’t have as public sector employees. It’s definitely a possibility.”

The NK School Committee outsourced the custodian’s jobs to the private sector in August in hopes of saving money. The custodians worked this school year without a contract.

“They want some justice for the injustice that was done to them last year,” Crowley said, though he added t is too early to know if they will want to recoup all the wages and benefits they lost when the school committee outsourced their jobs.

North Kingstown Education Support Professionals (NKESP) – who have been battered over the last few months by the town’s school committee and Superintendent Phil Auger – took overwhelming votes of “no confidence” in the leadership both have provided for the school district. Our local union of teacher assistants, clerks, food service workers, mini-bus drivers, bus paraprofessionals, maintenance workers, and custodians has worked more than 18 months without a contract, despite working toward an agreement by following the process of mediation and arbitration.

The NKESP membership voted unanimously on two letters sent to School Committee Chair Kimberly Page and Superintendent Auger. About Auger, NKESP pointed to his cavalier attitude toward employees; his inability to focus on employee related issues; his leadership style of intimidation, bullying and lack of collaboration; and his lack of respect for support employees, their union, and its leadership, among other charges.

The first letter stated, “Dr.  Auger leads by firing employees who get in his way, ignoring concessions from the union to save these employee’s jobs, cutting deep into the contract conditions of the existing ESP workers, using contract language only when it suits him and causing over 13 grievances, a record number for the most ever filed under any prior superintendent.”

All 26 custodians were fired in June, in a privatization move by the school committee and superintendent, who then imposed deep cuts in the pay and benefits of remaining employees.

The letter went on to say, “NKSD is no longer the wonderful place it used to be…”

The second letter regarding the school committee cites members’ behavior at meetings, such as refusing to listen to the union or the public; texting; talking among themselves; interrupting each other; flirting with each other; shutting off microphones on other members and the public; reading newspapers during meetings; making false accusations; bullying; and using abusive and inappropriate language.

This letter stated, “The school committee has no concern for the hardships it has caused its employees and the families of the employees. The school committee has made itself look ridiculous and has eroded public confidence in the school department.”

NKESP is calling for the school committee to bargain in good faith toward a fair settlement. The arbitrator’s decision four months ago – which the committee rejected – would have settled the contract with enough money to balance the budget and keep the custodians’ jobs.

Karen C. Jenkins is Communications Director for the National Education Association RI

About 300 people packed the North Kingstown High School auditorium for the school committee meeting, many of whom planned to address committee members about their decision to outsource custodians’ jobs to an out-of-state company.

And if you think they were upset at the beginning of the meeting when Dick Welch made a motion to move public comment to the end of the agenda, you should have heard them when the committee closed the meeting without letting the people have their say.

“Shame on you, shame on you,” chanted the crowd, filled with both local residents and union members from around the state.

School committee member Don Boscardin said they adjourned because the crowd was getting too rowdy. Welch declined to comment to RI Future.

Throughout the meeting, members bickered with each other over issues as small as how much toilet paper should be purchased for the next fiscal year.

Committee members Bill Mudge and Melvoid Benson played to the crowd by stalling the meeting with a myriad of mundane questions. School staff and Committee President Kim Page responded by talking down to them and sometimes cutting them short.

Mudge said in an email earlier in the day that the other committee members have frozen he and Benson out of the negotiating process. During the meeting, he threatened to reveal discussions from executive session.

“For the record, I was never advised by phone, e-mail or while I speaking with Mrs. Berglund and/or Mrs. Benson that a negotiations meeting had been convened and was underway in the superintendent’s office between ESP Union officials, Dr. Auger and School Committee Members Mrs. Page, Mr. Ceresi, Mr. Boscardin, and Mrs. Avanzato,” he wrote.

Earlier in the day, the union agreed to return to work on Wednesday, according to Judge Brian Stern, who was hearing a request for an injunction to end the work stoppage. In exchange, the school department agreed to continue working towards a resolution with the union.

The school committee still has some 30 days to nullify its contract with the out-of-state company hired to clean the public schools, though union officials expressed doubt that an agreement could be reached outside of a court decision. There are still some grievances and unfair labor practice complaints that could reverse the decision.

About 70 school employees marched and formed a picket line in front of North Kingstown High School this morning, and plan to rally again tonight at a school committee meeting.

Several union members said negotiations ended with Superintendent Phil Auger ended at about 10:30 last night, even though they were willing to keep working towards a deal. School was not cancelled until 6:30 this morning. One parent at the high school this morning, a non-union member, said his family got the call just 15 minutes before the school bus was supposed to arrive.

Earlier this summer the school committee rejected the decision of an arbitrator that would have saved the district more than $1.3 million over the next two years and instead fired the school custodians and outsourced their jobs to an out-of-state company. Some custodians were hired back but at an approximately 30 percent cut in salary.

Teachers were not on the picket line this morning, but voted unanimously yesterday afternoon not to cross it either. While teachers voted to do so for at least two days, several union members at the high school this morning said they expect a court injunction will remand employees back to work as early as today.

Union officials said they will not ask members to defy a court order. Instead, they hope today’s action will ignite the interest of the people, who may be more persuasive in changing school committee members’ minds that union intermediaries have been.

Bill Mudge, a member of the school committee, has filed an Open Meetings Act complaint with the Attorney General’s office and has implored his colleagues to come back to the negotiating table.

Here’s a video of Nancy Ferencko, president of the education support professionals union in the North Kingstown school system addressing those on the picket line this morning:

North Kingstown School Committee member Bill Mudge said the school committee and superintendent have not negotiated in good faith with the custodians and its union and said at “Tuesday night’s meeting I will request a vote of the entire S/C to hold a special/open meeting to consider the unions June 26, 2012 proposal” in an email he sent out to state and town officials Monday evening.

“Unfortunately, I believe that there has been complete breakdown in the negotiation process, absence of School Committee leadership and that school committee erred, when it failed to consider the union’s proposal presented to Attorney Carroll on June 26,” he wrote in the email.

All school personnel have decided either to strike or not cross a picket line today, which was supposed to be the first day of school. They are protesting the huge wage cuts custodians took when their jobs were outsourced to a private company.

The school committee meets tonight.

Mudge has been critical of the way the school committee has handled the situation with the 26 custodians, whose jobs were outsourced to the private company GCA and took an average pay cut of about $13,000.

“What happened was most unethical,” he said in a phone interview earlier in the day. “I don’t know what the ultimate result would have been but we didn’t bargain in good faith and I am ashamed to be on the school committee.”

Mudge said the school committee received a decision from an arbitrator on June 26 that would save the district more than $1.3 million over two years. Later on the same day, the school committee agreed in executive session to proceed with privatizing school custodial services.

“We had all received a copy of arbitrators award and we had a meeting that night,” he said. “Nobody really looked at it and the superintendent said he disagreed with it.”

Mudge walked out of that meeting, he said, because he didn’t think the school committee followed open meetings rules when it went into executive session. He later filed a complaint with the Attorney General.

“My issue is not necessarily the result, it’s the process,” he said.

The school committee ultimately signed a contract with the out-of-state company rather than agree to the terms laid out by the arbitrator.

School Committee Chair Kim Page indicated in a reply email to Mudge that she does not think he has the votes to pass his motion at Tuesday’s meeting.

“Poll the committee all you want Bill,” she wrote in reply to his email. “If you get even 3 votes to attend your meeting, I would be shocked.”

Here’s Mudge’s entire email:

I am writing you because I am concerned about the subject notice posted on the NKSD website which states “While School Committee labor negotiations continue with the NK Educational Support Professionals, there remains a possibility that this union may strike on Tuesday and force the closure of school.  Right now both sides continue to meet, and we are doing all we can to avert a work stoppage, but I am writing to you to give you some advance notice to make contingency plans for your children’s care should the NKESP go forward with a strike.”

First, as a member of the school committee, I (and I believe Mrs. Benson) am unaware of any continuing labor negotiations currently ongoing with the NK Educational Support Professionals.  Regardless, to the best of my knowledge, on June 26, 2012 NKESP union officials did provide additional contract concessions to Mary Ann Carroll, attorney for the North Kingstown School Committee’s (NKSC), with the understanding that Attorney Carroll would present the new proposal to the NKSC that evening.  It is also my understanding, Attorney Carroll attempted to present the unions proposal to the school committee, however it was rejected out of hand by committee members Welch, Page, Avanzato and Boscardin.

Second, I am also unaware of any ongoing negotiations with ESP union officials since March 13, 2012, when at that time a motion was made by Lynda Avanzato and seconded by John Boscardin to dissolve the Negotiations Sub-Committee and subsequently passed by a 4 to 1 vote.  Mrs. Avanzato’s and Mr. Welch’s rationale to dissolve the committee was predicated on their assertion that when the committee moves into arbitration, it’s the entire committee that becomes involved.  Thus, any interface or discussion with union officials by a School Committee Member or members and Superintendent Auger were not authorized and therefore not representative of the School Committee.  Additionally, Attorney Carroll has not been authorized to represent the school committee in any matters concerning union negotiations.

Third, since the June 26, 2012 school committee meeting I have attempted on several occasions, to poll all NKSC members to hold a special or emergency school committee meeting to address the unions latest proposal; however, Chairperson Page has continually rejected each of my requests, in violation of our own school committee policy.  Because of Chairperson Page’s in transient’s and unwillingness to bargain in good faith, on August 12, 2012, I filed several Open Meetings Act complaints with the Atty. Gen.’s office regarding the procedural conduct of the June 26 meeting and because the school committee voted, in essence, to rejected the unions new proposal in violation of the OMA.

Fourth, I would like to point out that on the evening of June 25, 2012, during executive session, and after only a 20 minute discussion of an arbitrator’s 25 page decision and award which had just been received and included $621,000 and $687,000 of budget savings in FY13 and FY14 respectively, the school committee voted to fire the janitorial staff.  Furthermore the decision was predicated and accepted “without question” on Superintendent Auger’s assertion that the amount of savings cited by the arbitrator was incorrect and would not be realized, despite the fact that the arbitrator’s written statement that “most of the values were provided by the school committee as part of its evidence in this case.”  I feel the S/C owed its valued long time employees the professional courtesy to at least validate the accuracy and/or disparity between the arbitrators and Dr. Auger’s calculated savings.

As outlined above, I have done everything possible since February, when I was first appointed to the now defunct negotiations committee, to ensure that School Committee and the ESP union were bargaining in good faith.  Unfortunately, I believe that there has been complete breakdown in the negotiation process, absence of School Committee leadership and that school committee erred, when it failed to consider the union’s proposal presented to Attorney Carroll on June 26, 2012.  As such, and in regard to the rumored statement there “will be a work stoppage” resulting in school closure,  I respectfully request that all union employees continue to work their normal work day schedules until the S/C meets this Tuesday.  In turn, I give you my word of honor that  at the Tuesday night’s meeting I will request a vote of the entire S/C to hold a special/open meeting to consider the unions June 26, 2012 proposal.  I believe this is a win, win proposal for both parties and the parents and children of our community, even if only for a day.

 

North Kingstown public school teachers voted unanimously this afternoon to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers who plan a strike Tuesday for the first day of school to fight for fair wages for school custodians.

Mary Barden, a middle school social studies teacher who is president of the local teachers’ union said the members agreed to do so both for safety concerns – because it can be dangerous to cross a picket line, she said – and “equally as important we want to stand in solidarity with the people we work with every day. We want them to know we support and honor what they are doing.”

Barden said union members passed three resolutions at the afternoon meeting.

The first was that if school is cancelled they will not report. If school is not cancelled teachers will report to school “but we will not cross a picket line.” The third motion was to follow the same process if the custodians and the school department have still not worked out their differences.

Here’s his statement:

The superintendent and school committee need to only look in the mirror for someone to blame if school doesn’t start on time. They need to rein in their actions, put a stop to their unfair labor practices, and deal with their responsibilities to SEIU. They are out of control and need to put the welfare of the district before their personal political agendas.

Ironically, the contract with GCA doesn’t save the district any appreciable amount of money more than the arbitration award did, and yet they chose to upheave the personal lives of their loyal employees and disrupt the entire town by their irrational behavior.

And here’s the full press release from the NEA-RI

What has been festering all summer between North Kingstown custodians and the school district is threatening to boil over at this Tuesday’s school committee meeting. The committee’s rejection of an arbitration award and subsequent firing of 26 workers in favor of privatizing has incited more than one local labor union.

The NK Education Support Professionals (NK ESP) and its parent union the National Education Association Rhode Island (NEARI) sought court intervention to stop the move as soon as the firings occurred last June. This suit is currently under appeal. Meanwhile, information gathered about the private contractor – GCA Services – indicates a spotty past in other districts around the country. (See www.roundhouseleft.com for details.) Despite mounting evidence against the company’s practices, the Committee continued to move forward with its plan.

At last Tuesday’s (August 21) School Committee session, residents and union members stood up and spoke out against privatizing. The following day, North Kingstown Superintendent Phil Auger took the local NK ESP president behind closed doors and upbraided her for those comments, prompting the union to file an unfair labor practice charge against him.

Learning of the charge, Vice Committee Chair Dick Welch told the union leadership the next day that he would not support any agreement reached unless “the union withdrew the unfair labor practice charge.” Welch’s conduct is itself an unfair labor practice. The union filed that additional charge Friday, August 23.

In response, Superintendent Auger has emailed parents warning of a possible job action Tuesday that could interfere with the on-time opening of schools.

Another statewide union has reason to protest. GCA Services has a regional agreement with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has complained that GCA ignored its contractual obligations in the North Kingstown situation. Auger and the school committee have not addressed the potential action that SEIU may consider taking on its own against this company. Either way, should the parties appeal to the courts, jurisdiction now resides in private sector law since it involves a private company, and would likely not end up in the Rhode Island judicial system.

NEARI President Larry Purtill said, “The superintendent and school committee need to only look in the mirror for someone to blame if school doesn’t start on time. They need to rein in their actions, put a stop to their unfair labor practices, and deal with their responsibilities to SEIU. They are out of control and need to put the welfare of the district before their personal political agendas.

“Ironically, the contract with GCA doesn’t save the district any appreciable amount of money more than the arbitration award did, and yet they chose to upheave the personal lives of their loyal employees and disrupt the entire town by their irrational behavior.”

Summer break might be extended in North Kingstown as school staff is considering striking to fight for school custodians whose jobs were outsourced to a private corporation earlier this summer.

“At this time it is unclear if school will open on time,” said Pat Crowley, an official with the National Education Association of Rhode Island, the union that represents all school employees except the custodians since they were outsourced.

Update: NEA-RI President Larry Purtill comments on possibility of labor strike.

An email sent from Superintendent Phil Auger confirmed the potential strike.

“Right now both sides continue to meet, and we are doing all we can to avert a work stoppage, but I am writing to you to give you some advance notice to make contingency plans for your children’s care should the NKESP go forward with a strike,” he said in an email to parents.

According to Crowley, the 150 education support professionals (in other words, the non-teachers at NK schools) plan to strike if an agreement can’t be reached before Tuesday morning. Mary Barden, president of the NK teachers’ union, said she does not expect that teachers would cross the picket line. They plan to vote on the matter tomorrow afternoon.

Earlier this summer, all 26 school custodians’ salaries were cut by an average of $13,000 when the North Kingstown School Department outsourced their jobs to GCA, a private corporation that provides janitorial services mostly to the private sector.

While a contract has been signed with GCA, Crowley said the school committee still has about 30 days left to legally nullify the deal without recourse.

In June, the School Committee voted to privatize the custodians jobs after the education support professionals agreed to make $400,000 in cuts. NEA-RI has filed a grievance because of this, saying their members met the demands expressly requested by the committee’s attorney.

Since signing the contract with GCA, the SEIU also filed a complaint over the contract because of an agreement with GCA that states if the company does business in New England it has to pay employees commiserate with SEIU prevailing wages. This would nullify any savings the School Committee would realize by outsourcing the custodians’ jobs.

Crowley said the union members will go back to work when the School Committee agrees to abide by the deal the two sides agreed to in principle in June, which would save the school district $400,000.

The SEIU filed a grievance against the private sector custodial business hoping to ink a deal with the North Kingstown School Committee. The union says the company violated their New England-wide contract when it failed to apprise them of the deal it entered with the school district.

According to the grievance, GSA, the outsource company, had a previous contract with the SEIU that stipulated the company is “required to notify SEIU Local 615 ‘as soon as (your company) receives notice that it has been awarded a new job location.'”

“Failure to do this can result in a misapplication of contract standards which may subject your company to monetary damages and penalties,” read the grievance.

While a deal has yet to be signed between North Kingstown and GSA, the company is already doing business in the local schools.

Rachel Miller, of the SEIU 615, said the contract requires GSA to negotiate a contract with the custodians who will have the option of organizing under the SEIU. The NK school custodians are currently represented by the NEA.

“The starting point for negotiations would be no cuts,” she said. “It is also my understanding that they misled- at least by omission- the North Kingstown school committee, never mentioning that they are parties to the agreement with Local 615.”

A provision in the contract, she said, stipulates  that working conditions and wages cannot be reduced.

In other words, the company might not be able to negotiate any better deal with the custodians than did the School Committee. In fact, the new union might have more negotiating power because it would have greater leeway to strike given that it might not be bound by the same state labor laws the current union is.

Meanwhile, Rhode Island custodians are holding a 24-hour strike at TF Green Airport in solidarity with Houston area janitors who are holding out in hopes of winning a modest pay increase.

“Just like here in Rhode Island, Houston janitors clean the offices of some of the richest corporations in the world yet they struggle to make ends meet,” according to a press release about the strike. “Despite record profits and inflated CEO pay, janitors who clean Houston’s office buildings are paid just $9,000 a year. When janitors refused to accept this offer, they were met with harassment and intimidation by their employers.”

North Kingstown school custodians are standing in solidarity with the strikers at the airport and will a representative will be speaking with the media there at 11 am.

To those who support such public sector outsourcing, it is a very black and white issue. Governments, they say, are in the business of providing services not jobs and if and when money can be saved for the taxpayer, it should be.

But detractors often see a more nuanced situation, or more complex economic ramifications.

First, the savings aren’t worth the costs. In East Greenwich, for example, firing the custodians would have saved the average property taxpayer about $13 a year. Because NK has not yet agreed to terms with the private company, any savings are still unknown. But compare that to the $11,000 a year pay cut Tom Keenan will take if the School Committee outsources his job. While the deal isn’t done in NK, he is already employed by the private company at a $5 an hour pay cut.

It begs the question: how many taxpayer dollars equal one person’s financial security? The answer, at the very least, is that, morally, we should all be willing to cough up the price of a pizza a year to keep our neighbor solvent. But forget about doing what’s right for a moment, even from an economic perspective the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

Secondly, the savings aren’t even real. I don’t know much about GSA, the Tennessee-based company North Kingstown is considering doing business with, but I promise you they are not in business to save taxpayers money. Any school committee that thinks it is going to be easier to negotiate a contract with a faceless big national corporation than with organized janitors is fooling itself. The only difference is the taxpayer dollars will be going to rich people in Tennessee rather than working class people in North Kingstown, where more than half of the school custodians live in town. Any savings that are realized will come directly from the pockets of the 26 custodians.

Those are the economic arguments against outsourcing the daily cleaning and conditioning of our schools. The social arguments against this type of outsourcing are a little harder to quantify. One involves the safety of the students, and there are multiple media accounts of GSA employing sex offenders. (See here, here and here.) This alone should be of great concern to North Kingstown residents.

Then, there are the intangibles. Custodians happy with their jobs will be more likely to look through a dumpster for your kids expensive retainer, and will probably do a better job of cleaning the toilet your kid sits on.

Custodians can also be the most important role model one can have in school. Or at least one was for me.

When I was in elementary school I had a little more energy than some of the other students and every once in a while it landed me in a bit of trouble. One time I brought an Eddie Murphy cassette tape to school and when I brazenly played it at recess (quite possibly my first test of the First Amendment). The school’s legendary principal Jim Foster introduced me to school custodian Bobby Taylor. Well, actually he remanded me to help him clean the school.

It turned into a summer job and Taylor paid me $5 an hour to help him spruce up the school. We became fast friends, and he was one of the first adults I knew personally who worked with his hands for a living – something that can be really inspirational for a hyperactive kid. Taylor, us students assumed, was developmentally disabled; we based this on his severe stutter and the fact that he rode a bike instead of driving a car to work. He may well be somewhat slow in clinical terms, but the Bobby Taylor I knew was every bit as smart as any other adult I happened to know as an 11-year-old in East Greenwich.

I still see Bobby Taylor riding his bike around town, and every time I do I recall that one of the first truly great teachers I ever had wasn’t a teacher at all. He was a school custodian.