Unions Take on Administration in Labor Disputes
By J.p. Lawrence
Bard College and its housekeepers will be taking their current contract disputes to arbitration, a technique for settling disputes out of court, this winter. At issue is the firing of six housekeepers last June.
Bard College and its housekeepers will be taking their current contract disputes to arbitration, a technique for settling disputes out of court, this winter. At issue is the firing of six housekeepers last June.
On the other side, Jim Brudvig, Vice President for Administration, calls the union’s case a “red herring.”
“[The SLD’s campaign] has nothing to do with the housekeepers’ actual performance,” Brudvig said. “That’s what we wanted to judge, not to qualify people under some imagined technicality. There's nothing that says one minute after 90 days, you have to make a decision.”
Senior Zeke Perkins of the SLD says he disputes the worker evaluations used by the college, which he calls “inadequate and suspect.”
The SLD has created a petition to reinstate the six fired workers and delivered the petition, which Perkins estimates had more than 750 signatures, to Brudvig’s office Monday.
“We had to take a moral stand on this issue as a student organization wanting to uphold the rights of workers on this campus,” Perkins said.
Ultimately, Brudvig says, the case will be decided by the arbitrator. The one-day arbitration date will occur either in January or February, depending on the schedules of the union, the college and the arbiter.
“We were following the procedure that we had, and that's the case we'll make to the arbitrator,” Brudvig says.