Kronos Update: June 17th Meeting with University Admin and Petition Update

Dear USA members,

On Wednesday June 17th, the University Staff Association met again with UMass Admin (Barbara Chaput, Jeremy Forgue, and Ryan Kennedy) to discuss the implementation of Kronos and ask questions. Our questions were met with a shocking amount of “I don’t know” and no clarity around why it’s necessary. They were unable to describe how utilizing Kronos will be a benefit for members and openly acknowledged that it will cause headaches for users, supervisors, and their own team working through issues as they arise. No positives, all negatives? Sounds like the perfect way to flush taxpayer dollars down the drain.

It is also increasingly clear that Kronos will be frustrating for good supervisors who are flexible and helpful and will be another tool used by bad supervisors to target members they don’t like.

Speaking of flexibility, how many times have you been in the middle of something and stayed at work for a few minutes? Or come in 10 minutes late and stayed 10 minutes on the end of the day to make it up? All these scenarios become more complicated with Kronos. Not only that, but if you end up staying past your scheduled time to finish a task or speak with a student and you don’t have approved overtime, the admin across the table could not and would not say our members wouldn’t be punished for their diligence.

When user privacy was raised, there were plenty of platitudes and vague assurances. However, Jeremy also pointed out that there are plenty of other platforms where user data could be stolen. Their reasoning was: if it could happen anywhere the University is storing our data, then why does it matter if there is another avenue for it to be stolen? The administration speaks of Kronos as though its implementation on 170 USA members in Administration & Finance is a foregone conclusion, but they don’t have any real guarantee that users will be safe from increased surveillance and data breaches.

Management has made it clear that they don’t care what USA leadership has to say. You and you coworkers are crucial to winning this fight.

The petition will be delivered to University Administration repeatedly until the message gets across:

We will enforce the protections we’ve won in our contract.

We will fight against inequity in our workplaces.

We will strive for the flexibility and understanding in our offices.

We will protect our personal data from multi-national companies.

If you’ve been out of the loop, here’s some big takeaways about this situation:

• According to Article 8, Section 8 (page 18) of your contract, “unit members, except those in Auxiliary Services, shall not be required to swipe under the Kronos system unless all employees in a Department are required to do so.”
• Management asserts that “all employees” only refers to USA members in this part of the contract, but the Executive Board argues that “all employees” includes all unions in the department and management’s assertion breaks the USA contract.
• Kronos does not serve a purpose that would help staff with their work or improve their working conditions. It would only lead to more staff surveillance and introduce location-tracking, especially for members who work remotely.
• USA members who already use Kronos to track student workers are familiar with how inefficient and time-consuming the software is. Implementing it for USA will disrupt our work and consume a lot of our time and our supervisors’ time fighting to fix errors to ensure we are paid properly.
• Kronos is owned by UKG, a privately held workforce management software company who recently laid off 950 employees citing AI as the primary reason (Source: Boston Business Journal).
• The largest minority shareholder of UKG is Blackstone, a war profiteering investment firm with significant investments in Israeli software and tech companies. The Research Committee will continue to dig up more information about Kronos and UMass’ ties to it. UMass Lowell recently declared Blackstone a “preferred partner” alongside Raytheon.