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Time We Got Paid What We're Worth

With NEA help, New York community college ESP win pay upgrades.

In another workplace, New York State NEA member Phoebe Forbes might be called a business manager. Among her other duties in the business office of Jamestown Community College, Forbes certifies more than $2.5 million in student awards for the state tuition assistance program, maintains financial records, and helps collect past due accounts.

Yet Forbes is officially a "senior account clerk typist," a humble civil service job title with an ancient job description quilled before the dawn of office technology. And across the campus, other "typists" are, in reality, high-tech department secretaries, many coordinating the affairs of 30 to 40 faculty members at a time.

Until recently, the pay of JCC's predominantly female support staff pretty much reflected those modest titles-not the skill, effort, and responsibility required to run a large community college with two campuses, two satellite centers, a distance-learning operation, and a child care center.

But that's starting to change, thanks to a pay equity/job classification study conducted by NEA and November pay upgrades for 64 employees-from $200 to $1,600 annually-negotiated by the Jamestown Community College Service Association.

The effort that produced this historic agreement was kicked off in 1993 by Phoebe Forbes after she learned about NEA's pay equity program. Forbes, now vice president of the 122-member JCCSA, then began working with NEA and NEA-New York staff to eliminate gender and racial bias from college pay scales.

The need for that work wasn't a hard concept to grasp.

"When did we start paying cleaning staff the same as or more than secretaries?" asks UniServ Rep Bill Fraser. "In the past, there was a definite prejudice towards paying men more."

NEA job classification specialists started college support staff down the road to pay equity by taking a long, hard look at each position. Almost 80 percent of the JCC staffers completed a 51-question NEA job analysis questionnaire, which was optically scanned and tabulated in Washington, D.C.

NEA's preliminary "scoring" of JCC jobs on the basis of nine factors-including knowledge and skills, responsibility, complexity, and supervisory responsibility-didn't, like many management-instigated studies, shut out real employee input. Each college support staffer had at least three chances to appeal and adjust his or her job scores, right up to a one-hour individual meeting with an independent classification consultant.

"This was a study by the people," stresses JCC computer technician Jeff Camp, who contrasts the NEA analysis with an earlier classification project commissioned by administrators. "Supervisors got to 'edit' me in that study," he recalls. "Part of my job was red-penciled right out."

Eventually, college administrators came to appreciate the rigor of NEA's methods, which Bill Fraser calls "professional as hell, with Manhattan phone book-sized documentation."

In negotiations last winter, the parties jointly put up $40,000 in funding for pay upgrades, separate from money for a general pay increase-to which the administration added another $16,000 to smooth out administrative ripples.

The final result: 16 titles, including most child care slots, were upgraded, five remained approximately the same, and seven titles moved downward.

But not one current employee lost a penny.

"We always go into a pay equity/job classification study with the position that nobody loses money in this process," says Linda James, the NEA staffer who led the study at JCC.

Phoebe Forbes, the woman who started it all back in 1993, is pleased by the progress.

"I feel validated that we're finally getting equity here," she says. "It was a long struggle, but the benefits are worth the effort."

"The next challenge," adds Jeff Camp, who chairs the JCCSA Pay Equity Committee, "is to keep our compensation system equitable in future bargaining."

The Jamestown Community College upgrades aren't the only good news on the pay equity/job classification front. Among other Association pay equity victories across the nation:

• The first big triumph came back in 1987 when an NEA pay equity study and Association bargaining produced $2.3 million in legislated upgrades for more than 1,000 clerical employees at the University of Maine.

• In Oregon's Salem-Keizer school district, ESP last year negotiated upgrades for 19 job titles. The biggest benefactors: all of the district's 160 bus drivers and many custodians as well.

  "We had excellent cooperation with the district," notes UniServ consultant Mike Carter. "More than 1,100 of our 1,600 ESP members completed the NEA job analysis questionnaire. We were able to use members on release time to both help co-workers fill out the questionnaire and conduct meetings where employees could question the initial survey results."

  Better yet, the administration and the Salem-Keizer Association of Classified Employees negotiated a joint committee to conduct all future job classifications and reclassifications.

  "We hope that our members will develop real confidence in this joint panel," says Carter.

• NEA and its Alaska affiliate are now training an ESP cadre to conduct classification surveys and meetings across the state.

For more info on NEA's pay equity/job classification program, contact NEA staffer Linda James at Ljames@nea.org.

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Pay Upgrades Don't Just Happen

An NEA pay equity/job classification project won't succeed in your district or college without buy-in from administrators, a strong NEA local affiliate, and a pot of money set aside to implement pay upgrades -- separate from a general pay increase.

"There must be an agreement that nobody loses money in this process," stresses NEA staffer Linda James.

"Pick a pay equity/job classification project as a long-term plan," advises New York UniServ Rep Bill Fraser. "It's hard to come up with adequate money for an immediate fix, and you always need to take into consideration the concerns of administrators."

Local leaders, notes Oregon UniServ Consultant Mike Carter, should prepare for a bit of "internal strife" that results when some members discover they won't get upgrades out of a pay study.

"It may take a little longer to do this right," adds NEA-New York affiliate relations director Lenny Lavalette, "but the results are worth the work."

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A Bit of ESP History in Nebraska

• NEA's first ESP affiliate in Nebraska, the 15-member Waverly Transportation Association, has negotiated its first contract. The agreement places transportation employees, who had been "frozen on step" for three years, on the proper step of the district rate schedule according to years of service.

• Federal Education Association activist Mike Barrett, a teacher at A.T. Mahan High School in Keflavilik, Iceland, has helped win a 15 percent increase in his military post's allowance for civilian employees. Barrett got 32 teacher colleagues to complete a spending habits survey and collaborated with Air Force Major Chris Lozo, who created software to tabulate findings and prepare a presentation for the brass. The result: a post allowance increase for all on- and off-base civilians and a pledge from the local military command to include civilians in all future COLA surveys.

• NEA faculty and support staff affiliates at Iowa's Southeastern Community College have convinced the board of trustees -- for now -- not to privatize maintenance and groundskeeping functions and slash 16 jobs. Students staged a walkout over the issue, staffers staged a rally and informational picket, and 300 employees, students, and community residents packed a board meeting. Trustees put the privatization plan on hold and formed a stakeholders' panel to examine ways to cut costs without cutting people.