Negotiations Update
The MIT Campus Police Association welcomes back all returning students and faculty, and extends its greetings to all incoming freshmen. We are committed,as always, to providing a safe environment for all students. Students, faculty, and all other MIT employees should feel free to call upon campus police officers at anytime for assistance.
We regret to inform you that our ongoing struggle for a fair contract with MIT remains unresolved. However, our determination to obtain quality of life improvements and reasonable economic advancements in a new contract remains undaunted. In furtherance of these goals, we will continue to keep the MIT community informed of our situation through periodic publication and distribution of the Labor Relations Update. In this issue of the Update, we review some of the unresolved proposals in out negotiations, and identify MIT's perplexing stance on each.
MIT's stubborn refusal to the simplest of changes in the present contract can only be labeled as antifamily, For example:
1. The Association has asked that for a contract clause which states that its members be notified in a timely manner whether their vacation requests will be honored. The reason for this, of course, is to allow the officers to coordinate vacation plans with family members. MIT refuses to agree to such a clause.
2.. The Association has asked the right to use personal time already accrued by them in one hour increments. This would allow officers to tend to family demands and return promptly to work without loosing a whole day. Other MIT employees have been extend this right, and there is no cost to MIT for this benefit. Nonetheless, MIT refuses to agree with this clause.
3. The Association has asked that its members not be called into work on their scheduled days off unless there is an emergency requiring their presence. MIT refuses to guarantee the officers that they will not have to work on their own days off! As a result, family plans which officers have made often must be canceled at the last minute. In a characteristic flourish of institutional hubris, MIT Police Department Managers have told police officers that they "own them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
The Association has also asked that its members be granted due process rights to representation if any of them are charged with misconduct. These rights are widely recognized throughout America in both the public sector and private sector, but apparently not at MIT.
MIT remains equally inflexible over reasonable economic proposals put forth by the Association.
1. The Association has asked that MIT adopt an educational incentive plan which would reward officers who have or obtain college degrees relevant to police work. The Harvard Campus Police now receive this incentive plan, and Massachusetts Police Accreditation standards expressly endorse education plans of this nature. Remarkably, MIT sees no correlation between the quality of policing and educational achievement in the area of public safety.
2. Members of the Association are trained EMT's. This training insures that officers will be able to provide immediate, and potentially lifesaving, care pending the arrival of medical personnel and/or the transport of medically compromised persons to a medical facility. The Association has asked for a reasonable additional compensation in recognition of possession and use of its members' EMT skills. After eighteen months of bargaining, MIT has proposed to increase the EMT differential by the handsome amount of two cents per hour. That's sixteen cents a day and eighty cents per week. If a campus police officer saved all of MIT's proposed increase each week, he or she would still not have enough cash to purchase a single cheeseless McDonald's burger. It would take two full months of work for that officer to afford a Whopper with fries and a cola.
If you agree that MIT's labor relations are unfair and should be changed, please call or write the following MIT representatives and indicate your support for change.
Charles M. Vest
President
(617) 243-0148
cmvest@mit.eduJohn R. Curry
Executive Vice-President
(617) 253-1882
jcurry@mit.eduRobert J. Lewis
Director of Personnel
Employee Relations
(617) 253-4078
rlewis@mit.eduAnn Glavin
Chief, MIT Police
(617) 253-1212
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