Aborting a planned Parents Weekend rally, negotiators for the union representing 90 library workers announced Friday afternoon that they had reached a tentative five-year contract agreement with the University.
United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island representative Karen McAninch left the Rockefeller Library negotiations just prior to signing the agreement to announce the terms of the proposed contract, which will face a "pretty pro-forma" authorization vote of the union members, probably today, before it is officially signed. The contract will include a 2.25 percent wage increase this year, changes in health insurance co-payments in 2007 - the last year of the contract - and an agreement by the University to leave the library hours as they are now and give six months' warning before reopening contract negotiations on the subject.
Vice President for Administration Walter Hunter praised the tentative agreement in an e-mail to The Herald Sunday.
"This new collective bargaining agreement permits the leadership of the library to make the informed decisions necessary to ensure that our libraries remain a vital scholarly resource, and outlines a package of wages, benefits and working conditions that is fair to the union members and the rest of the University community," he wrote.
The library workers' last contract expired in September 2002; it was extended into early 2003, but since then, library workers have worked without a contract. In two years of negotiations, the union and the University have been unable to reach agreement, primarily due to disagreements about the University's proposed reorganization of the libraries, under which individual workers would each be responsible for a variety of tasks - including shelving, cataloguing and desk staffing. Workers have contended that the reorganization would force them to do more work without a corresponding pay increase and would take away the stability of their schedules.
Librarians and student workers do not belong to the union and are not involved in the contract.
The union and the Student Labor Alliance had planned a Friday afternoon rally on the Main Green, including a display of about 1,000 student-signed cards expressing support for the library workers, during a Parents Weekend coffee.
"If the administration won't listen to students, they'll listen to parents," said Te-Ping Chen '07.
The rally was not part of a threat to strike, said Chris Hu '06, but an attempt to "get negotiations moving again."
"We would hope that parents would ask questions of President (Ruth) Simmons, asking why this has gone on so long," said Debra Nelson-Danielson, a senior library reference specialist and an alternate negotiator who stayed with the team late into the night Thursday, partly because the negotiators were accidentally locked into the Rock.
As about 30 workers and students began making their way from the Rock Friday, Ellen Crim Lech-Moore, a senior acquisitions associate, stopped them to announce that a tentative agreement had been reached. The workers continued to the green to thank student organizers and celebrate.
