Dear USA members,
On Wednesday, June 30, USA members and PSU and MSP allies greeted the University’s representatives with chants of “respect your workers, respect our contract” as they arrived to hear our grievance about them breaking it by forcing Kronos on USA. Ryan Kennedy, Barbara Chaput, Jeremy Forgue, and Steve Reynolds (Executive Director of A&F) met with the USA Grievance Committee and stewards to hear our arguments and evidence.
However, the show of unity and strength in the Hampshire House hallway before the meeting began was more important than any conversation USA reps could have had with management. Your petition, now 470+ signatures strong, was delivered to each University representative.
As we near 500 signatures, we will continue delivering your petition to the decision makers that are choosing to prioritize UMass’ big donors like Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) over supporting their staff and making UMass a great place to work.
Sign our petition and collect signatures by talking to each other in your departments, buildings, and across campus.
We presented our arguments and evidence clearly, and now management has 10 days to respond. Despite our clear arguments and factual evidence, we anticipate management will deny the grievance, which means we will move it up to the next level of decision makers at Step 3. Please keep an eye out for upcoming actions and petition deliveries!
Solidarity Petition!
Your PSU, MSP, and non-unit coworkers have good reasons to push back on this, too!
• Letting management break one contract weakens every union on campus.
• If they supervise USA workers, Kronos will create more work and headaches for them to manage their time.
• Inequitable workplaces damage morale and harm everyone.
Share the solidarity petition with your departments! You can share this link:
https://forms.microsoft.com/r/tzP1mGupkk
Here are the main takeaways from the hearing:
- Management admitted that there are currently USA members outside of Auxiliary Services that are already using Kronos, in violation of the contract.
- If you are a USA member NOT within Auxiliary Services and you use any timekeeping system, please get in touch with usa@umass.edu!
- Management continues to assert that they are not breaking our Memorandum of Understanding that outlined a specific 90-day period after contract ratification for impact bargaining related to Article 8 Section 8.
- Their argument for why they believe they can still impact bargain this contract language 84 days after the mutually agreed deadline is that similar agreements in the past have also been extended.
- Those past extensions were granted by mutual agreement. They were not extended simply because one party did not take the deadline seriously.
- Management claimed falsely that they have no implementation date for Kronos, when in fact they have told us at a previous meeting that they want A&F staff punching by the beginning of the fall semester.
If you’ve been out of the loop, read this update email for additional context and info.
