LSS Bargaining Resumes Today

CSUEU and CSU meet today to continue bargaining on the implementation of the Library Services Specialist (LSS) series.

In previous bargaining sessions, the CSU has consistently proposed putting these employees in a more technical, more demanding classification series without a higher pay scale. In other words: the CSU wants us to abandon the idea that pay should be related to a job's skills and responsibilities. This would betray not only the Library Assistants, but all employees we represent now or may represent in the future.

Higher pay for higher skills and more demanding work is fundamental to our pay scales — it's the reason, for example, that the salary schedule for the Expert-level Analyst/Programmer is higher than that of a Foundation-level Analyst/Programmer, and that both are higher than the salary schedule for, say, Accounting Clerks.

Abandoning this principle — that there's a connection between a job's duties and skills and the appropriate pay for that job — would make it difficult to argue in future that anyone should get higher pay because of the nature of their work. Separating duties and skills from compensation would also eliminate the usual reasons for bonuses and stipends, or an In-Range Progression (IRP) for higher skills or responsibilities. So far the CSU has not offered any reason that the LSS series should be a special case (not wanting to pay for the work employees do is not a justification — if it were, we'd all be working for minimum wage).

Strangely enough, the CSU managers pushing this have not volunteered to have their own pay scale reduced to that of a less demanding classification.