Our Teamsters Unit 6 Team met with CSU for bargaining on January 26, and the CSU responded to our Union’s proposal to strengthen protections against contracting-out with a total insult: CSU proposed vastly expanding their ability to contract out and undermine the work of our bargaining unit. Their outrageous proposal would redefine normal bargaining unit work to allow them to exclude any work they choose in order to contract it out and dramatically limit our existing protections against unfair contracting-out.
In response to our questions, the CSU team was forced to admit that a driving force behind their proposal was cost savings, which means contracting out work to pay substandard wages and benefits to contracted employees.
They also admitted that their proposed language could be used to backfill vacant Unit 6 positions with contractors instead of actually addressing the critical hiring and retention problems created by CSU’s low pay and lack of annual salary steps.
Our Teamsters Bargaining Team immediately made it clear that this proposal is totally unacceptable! Our team explained that our members frequently have to fix contractors’ shoddy work and clean up the messes they leave on campus. Our Union has won several grievances just in the past few years after the CSU violated our Teamsters contract by contracting out Unit 6 work, with Teamsters receiving thousands of dollars in pay to make them whole for work that should have been done in-house. Our contracting-out protections must be strengthened, not weakened, which is exactly what our Bargaining Team has proposed and our members will fight for.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. I think the CSU Unions realize we have to do something different and I hope this is the year we do it.”
In this session, our Union and CSU exchanged several other proposals. However, CSU failed to respond to reinstatement of step increases, which we proposed in the first bargaining session. Teamsters demanded that CSU provide a response on the steps at our next session.
“Our team, and our Unit 6 members across the state, will stand strong to protect our work from contracting out, we will firmly reject proposals that aim to roll back protections. We will continue to push our proposals to increase protections of our work from contracting out.”