Some Unexpected Good News for Limited Term Employees on our Campus

In light of all the controversy about Governor Walker’s budget repair bill, and the upcoming cuts to our salary and benefits, I was elated to see the following in my email today, a memo from our HR Director, on behalf of our Chancellor, initiating a committee and other initiatives to represent “limited term” employees. This is a milestone!

In November 2009 I published an article about the inequities surrounding limited term employment on our campus. Soon after, I was asked to join the Commission on the Status of Women. I brought this LTE issue to the Commission and we spent all of the 2010 academic year preparing and drafting a proposal that we recently sent to the Chancellor with specific recommendations, including the need to employ limited term employees at a living wage.

It was a slow and tedious process—and just recently I had begun to believe the proposal would sit somewhere on someone’s desk and fade into oblivion. I was even more disturbed when Governor Walker’s budget repair bill was released, which will cut health insurance and retirement system benefits for all limited term employees.

Then, in an email to campus yesterday, the Chancellor said the following:

There are many misperceptions about state employee and specifically university employee salaries and benefits as being significantly above those in the private sector. We all need to be aware of the facts and make sure that we communicate them to our legislators and fellow citizens. Here, for example, are the median annual base salaries of our employee categories:

Classified employees (419 employees) $31,540

Unclassified (810) $53,217

LTE (88 who are in the WRS) $25,140.

Since the governor’s announcement on Friday, I have been truly impressed by our campus community’s response. I share the genuine concern for those most affected by regressive elements of this proposal, namely LTE and low-salary employees. We have been working with the Women’s Commission to see how we might address the difficult status of LTE employees, and this bill will make that task even more urgent.

I was impressed by the sensitivity and awareness of how devastating this budget repair bill is for limited term employees. In my eight years here, I've never heard anyone at the administrative level even approach the topic of "limited term" employees or their rights. I couldn’t help but feel that in part, our work on the Women’s Commission had played a vital role in spreading awareness of this important issue.

Then, today, I saw the following from HR. To have this equity initiative, backed by HR and the Chancellor, complete with a committee to represent LTE issues, and tasked with the objective of securing a living wage, is monumental! LTEs have never had any representation on this campus, and I would go as far as to say it has been somewhat taboo to even talk about it.

February 10, 2011

To: All Classified and Limited Term Employees

From: Donna Weber

Director, Human Resources

RE: Promotion of Equality

Chancellor Levin-Stankevich has asked me to lead our classified staff, limited term employees and academic staff in identifying perceptions of, and actual inequities across campus employee groups. I am honored and pleased to lead this “Gold Arrow Project Charter,” which is the first of its kind on this campus, and a direct result of the Strategic Planning efforts.

Although we have limited authority to adjust salaries, we pledge to do whatever we can to ensure a feeling of inclusivity and equality for all employees.

I am working very closely with the Chancellor, Teresa O’Halloran and Jack Connell, and they are committed to this important effort. This project is supported by the Women’s Commission. I am also working collaboratively with the Student Affairs Leadership Fellow (Christopher Buckley) to enhance our new employee orientations.

One of the first things I want to do is establish a Staff Council that would be willing to work with me by supporting the effort and providing a voice for all classified staff and limited term employees to provide important and valuable input to the UW Eau Claire administration. This council could bring forth recommendations, ideas for professional development, etc.

The current classified committees (scholarship committees, professional development committee, etc) would be folded into this larger committee.

Following are some ideas that I (and others) have for the committee’s charge:

• Explore options for professional development

• Plan and prepare for a professional development day/s for ALL Employees to be held in August (between summer session and the onset of the academic year)

• Find new ways to reward employees for excellence in service

• Provide a collective voice for the administration

• Enhance new employee orientations

• Encourage the administration to have classified representation on more administrative search committees

• Provide LTEs a living wage

If the budget repair bill succeeds at stripping limited term employees or their health insurance and retirement benefits, I’m not sure how much this campus initiative will realistically help them…but it gives me hope that with persistence and passion you can bring an issue to the table and make something happen. Hopefully we can continue the work, even if we must wait until we have the leadership of a new governor.

Stress is Bad at the Bottom of the Hierarchy...Luckily Your Attitude Counts for Something

I just read this amazing article in Wired about the connection between stress, your physical health, and your emotional state. This article describes how anthropologist Robert Sapolsky proved that baboons at the bottom of the social hierarchy were more stressed out and had more health problems than baboons at the top of the hierarchy. This article cites studies of stress in baboons, Oscar nominees/winners, and British civil servants, showing that there is a direct connection between stress and your health:

Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more.

The shocking part of the article for me was the finding that it’s not necessarily a stressful, demanding job that is so “deadly,” but rather the feeling like you have no control or that your work is meaningless…sound familiar to anyone?!

While doctors speculated for years that increasing rates of cardiovascular disease in women might be linked to the increasing number of females employed outside the home, that correlation turned out to be nonexistent. Working women didn’t have more heart attacks. There were, however, two glaring statistical exceptions to the rule: Women developed significantly more heart disease if they performed menial clerical work or when they had an unsupportive boss. The work, in other words, wasn’t the problem. It was the subordination.

This passage also points to the fact that some groups are more vulnerable than others. In this case, women. That got me thinking about our campus hierarchy and our limited term employees, roughly 75 percent of which are women. It is even more troubling to think that many of these women, probably the most vulnerable in our campus community to stress-related health problems, have no health insurance, paid time off, and don’t make a living wage.

I was floored by the description of the following study by Michael Marmot about British Civil Servants. For the past 25 years the study has tracked 28,000 British men and women working in Civil Servant positions who all have access to the same health care system, who “don’t have to worry about getting laid off,” and “spend most of their workdays shuffling papers.” Here is a description of the findings:

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

This study is haunting to me because our campus has the same type of hierarchical Civil Servant system. If the people at the bottom of the hierarchy have “double the mortality rate” in a situation where they have the same benefits as people at the top of the hierarchy, what about the people at the bottom of the hierarchy who DON’T have benefits? What would a study of stress reveal about this population?

In light of these thoughts, the following quote really stuck with me, and I’ll be thinking about how I can be more aware of my own emotional state and my attitude and how these affect my health.

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

Disappointed

The LTE reform meeting was not what I’d hoped for. I was disappointed. I know that it’s an accomplishment that people were willing to sit around a table and talk about the issue, which has probably never been done on this campus before. I should focus on that. On the other hand, I thought it was focused on protecting the rights of union workers and not focused on how we could all give up a little bit to encourage equity for limited term employees. Even the living wage issue was not well received because we couldn’t have LTEs making more than what union-represented permanent workers make…

Overall the way it came across to me was they are interested in protecting LTEs as long as it means securing additional permanent union-represented positions, but not specifically interested in LTE rights in any sense (the statement “it’s about the position, not the person” was repeated numerous times).

In addition there was a lot of time spent talking about a manual they made which basically consists of screen captures educating LTEs about how to apply for jobs on the Wisc site…and discussion of interviewing skills and other things. I understand these things are helpful but I don’t think that gets at the real issues…50% of our LTEs have college degrees. Many have applied for numerous jobs. I think we all know this isn’t about teaching people how to buff up their resumes or interview better. But, I also lack a complete understanding of all the politics and complexities involved….and at this point I’m starting to feel like I’m not sure I want to understand any more if I am going to hold on to any sort of a positive attitude. Anyway, that’s my take on it….

Speaking Out for Those Who Can't

Since my article about limited term employees (LTEs) was published in the November 2009 issue of Women in Higher Education, I've received about thirty emails, all of which were extremely supportive of the article. (I previously posted the article: http://people.uwec.edu/lehmanjc/Advocate_WIHE11-09.pdf ). I've also had about one person a day come up to me since the end of November, thanking me for writing the article. Below is a collection of some of comments I received. Although the process of writing this article was difficult and frustrating, this feedback has given me a tremendous sense of accomplishment that I had the courage to speak up for those who can't.

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I feel the article covers the problem with LTE status very well. I was reminded this week how little consideration LTE’s get when I saw that classified staff, faculty and administration were all awarded pay for the snow day on the 9th but lowly LTE’s, many who like me as a single mom really needed the pay, were told no pay for you.
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I’m not sure I like the process of an LTE position becoming a permanent position as it would probably mean I would lose my job. I think if they wanted to be fair to the LTE’s who have held those positions, they should offer them first to the LTE and then open it up to the other options. I’m not sure I can favor a system that makes my position permanent but offers it to a host of other people before me. It seems like I would exchange one type of discrimination for another.
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I just finished reading your article on LTE positions…Many years ago I was an LTE working for the State xx Division…. When one of the positions became permanent – I applied and was beaten out by a younger person, whom I had actually trained for the job. I had more experience and had been there longer but because I was an LTE I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I’m not complaining about the position I have now – I’m happy just to get the few hours to help out my retirement. I just wanted to relate my story – and congratulate you on recognizing there is problem.
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Being an LTE this time of year isn’t easy – I’m always working, and pray I don’t get sick, so far I’ve have 5 years of luck that way. I’m so glad you have such wonderful co-workers to have done what they did for you to allow you to be with your mom – warms my heart – there are good people out there. Count yourself as one of those good people!
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Thank you for an excellent article you sent about LTE’s! It was very well written and accurate! I remember responding to a survey, but over time, forgot about it, because I thought nobody wanted to hear from us, let alone attempted to change the system! I was very much interested because I have been here over 18 years in 16 different positions, and for the last 15 years with two positions to be full-time. All along I have been taking the civil service tests, and all the hiring for the vacant positions were transfers…It really is neat that you are still fighting for LTE’s, and if there would be any changes in the system, I would probably lose all those years and have to start as a new state employee, which would also be beneficial for us to be grandfathered in, and have all those years of service have some meaning. It was fortunate that you could work for an understanding supervisor.
Thanks again for speaking on our behalf and I wish you all the best!
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Congratulations on your article about the inequities of LTE positions and women. It was very interesting to read, and I definitely learned a lot and "widened my spectrum" of understanding of that crazy thing called the professional world. All of the statistics were were especially interesting. Thank you very much!