A candlelight vigil held last Tuesday outside the Brompton Road home of Adelphi University President Robert Scott was one of the most recent signs that strikers from Local 153 are still not pleased by the offers being made by the university, in a conflict that has been going on since Sept. 8. The union claims that the university has flatly rejected their proposals while the university claims there has been a lack of response to negotiations on the part of the union.

The Adelphi support staff employees, represented by Office and Professional Employees International Union, Local 153, are striking in an attempt to improve their wages and their pension plan and to reduce the high co-pay of their health insurance premiums.

In 1997 the union negotiated a collective bargaining unit and under the negotiations the university reported a multi-million dollar budget deficit and, according to the union, demanded that Local 153 members share some of the burden by accepting a contract that was below the standards established in bargaining with 18 other metropolitan area private universities. According to Local 153 they bargained an agreement that was designed to enable the university to get back on its feet. Along with the budget deficit, Adelphi also suffered an enrollment decline. That decline brought about a reduction in the size of the university workforce. Those remaining picked up the duties of the many who resigned or were laid off between 1996 and 1998.

According to the union, statistics show that the size of the Local 153 bargaining unit has steadily decreased by a greater percentage than the university enrollment itself, further increasing the workload of those remaining employees. The number of employees in Local 153 decreased from 269 in May 1988, when there were 6,100 students enrolled to 159, with a current enrollment of 6,200 students. The union notes that in instances where the university has replaced employees, they have hired them at the contractual minimum rather than at the salary of the former staff members. According to Local 153 the net effect of the turnover was that between 1997 and 2000 the average staff member wage decreased when adjusted for inflation. Local 153 is asking for wage increases of 4-4.5 percent per year, a proposal rejected by Adelphi.

The union also claims that the low salaries paid to employees has affected participation in the university health and pension plans. The health plan requires employee participants to contribute 35 percent of the premium regardless of the employee's income. An increase in premiums has resulted in a decrease in the number of employee participants, resulting in a health plan enrollment decrease of nearly 50 percent in the last three years.

According to Local 153, they made a proposal designed to enable more employees to participate in the university medical plan, providing employees in lower salary categories the option of contributing lesser amounts of the premium and tying in the employee contribution rate to their salary. The number of participants in the university's pension plan, which requires employees to contribute 4.5 percent of their salaries, has also decreased. According to Local 153, the union has proposed eliminating the required employee contribution and establishing a minimum rate of contribution by the university.

Local 153 has proposed that all employees participate in the Local 153 pension plan, which, according to them, would not add any additional cost to the university budget. This plan would provide back service credit to all staff for all the time they have worked at Adelphi and has no waiting period. Contributions would be made by the pension plan, not the university, for each employee for his or her entire tenure at Adelphi. In effect, the Local 153 pension fund proposes to give a $2,000,000 grant to its members at Adelphi.

The union claims that the university has flatly rejected all their proposals. University President Robert Scott claims that the university has tried to negotiate since September but the union has not cooperated.

"I will say I am very disappointed that the strike has gone on as long as it has," said Scott. "I have made several revisions to our initial offer, in writing, and we went over two months without a written response from the union." Scott noted that approximately two weeks ago he met with the international union president to discuss the lack of negotiations. "We can't very well have a negotiation if they're not willing to respond in writing since our experience was that their oral responses were not consistent," said Scott. He noted that the university did finally get a written response from the union the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. He added that this was an incomplete response requiring action by the union's board of directors. Last Tuesday, this response was received by the university and on Friday Scott was meeting with the university attorneys to see what the next step would be.

According to Scott, Adelphi has made an offer to the union that exceeds inflation, but the union has rejected the offer. "I don't understand why they went on strike when they are not willing to give us a written response and, in fact, the response we got just this past week demands even more money then they did in September," said Scott. "That's not the way negotiations are done."

Scott said that the university was saying "no" to the pension plan because of the information about it, being given by the union, and he added that when he met with the international union president they found that the union had made a mistake in the information they had provided. "So that became a breakthrough," said Scott, who noted that the attorneys are now looking at the new information provided.

Scott added that the university also had a difficult time getting the union to meet last summer, before the strike began. "I believe if there had been more consistent negotiations that we would have made a lot more progress but it has been difficult when the union has not been responsive," he stated. Now that the union has been more responsive, he believes this strike could end soon.