Last night at the board meeting, several important things happened. Here's a quick summary.
First, Tim Kambitsch released preliminary results from the latest round of polling. As you may recall, polling in December indicated that the "strong" support for the levy was at 52%. In the round of polling in May, strong support had declined by 8 points, down to about 44%. The firm contracted to help with the levy campaign indicates that, in their experience, the strong support number is one of the best indicators of the approximate vote total, so this is not good news.
Second, the board voted to freeze salaries for management and confidential workers, to eliminate steps for managers, and to reduce Tim's salary by 5% for one year. (See attached press release.) Tim indicated that this action would save $80k of the $225k the library is hoping to save from its personnel budget. One can infer from this statement that the remaining $145k are savings the library is hoping to achieve in the upcoming negotiations with the staff association. $145k is an amount that, coincidentally enough, is very close to the 3% pay raise that is slated for the bargaining unit in July. So it seems pretty clear that the library will request that the bargaining unit accept similar conditions to those imposed on managers and confidential staff.
We would like to negotiate with the library to arrive at acceptable terms and conditions of any such change. This negotiation, will possibly run longer than the time we have to react before the raise is supposed to take place. As such, we will soon be asking for DMLSA members to authorize a delay of implementation of the pay raise, pending results of the negotiation. If the negotiation does not result in a change to the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), the raise would be paid retroactively. If the negotiation does result in a change to the CBA, the terms of the negotiated agreement would supersede the CBA, once ratified.
The first vote (to authorize the delay in implementation of the current raise) will likely take place next week, and be conducted on-line. The ratification vote on the negotiated agreement will be held at the General Membership Meeting on July 19th.
By calling for the first vote, we're asking you to give us time to negotiate with the library. We want to achieve the best possible result for Union members in exchange for any concessions, but this will require time to sit across the table from management and talk. If the vote does not authorize the extra time, we will face a time crunch that will place a tight constraint on the negotiations.
Please pay careful attention to future DMLSA correspondence; we will be sending critical news updates over the next few weeks.
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