The Emerson College Staff Union has reached an interim agreement with the college toward contract negotiations for five Emerson Los Angeles staff members, as announced on Instagram on Friday.
The tentative agreement guaranteed that the five unionized staff members would receive a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), something all other staff, unionized and not, received months earlier. The union has accused the school of stalling the contract negotiation process, whereas the college argues that a separate contract has to be agreed upon for ELA staff members, citing differences in state laws.
The agreement came prior to a planned leafleting union action at the Boston campus’s Picture Yourself at Emerson Day on Saturday. Daniel Sotelo-Reiner, a recently unionized senior events and IT support administrator at ELA, said that the leafleting goal was never to dissuade prospective students from choosing Emerson, but to inform the community.
“[It was] to let the larger community know what’s been going on, why this process has been dragging out much longer than it needs to be, and that that’s costing Emerson money,” he said. “It’s costing resources. It’s costing time, when we’ve proposed what we feel is an expedited solution, get this behind us as quickly as possible.”
Gia Davis, a research analyst for the Division of Community, Culture and Belonging at the Boston campus, echoed this statement.
“I was really proud of the folks in the Union, the LA folks, the Boston folks, for really sticking to it and applying that pressure,” they said. “The college didn’t want us out there, we didn’t particularly want to be out there either. We wanted a cost of living increase for our colleagues.”
The Emerson administration approached the five staff members with a proposition last Friday afternoon, offering COLA raises and a full contract proposal within two weeks, in exchange for the cancellation of the planned action, according to union officials.
“This was definitely movement. It was a positive movement … I am grateful that management came to the table offering some serious things to try and get us not to come to the Picture Yourself at Emerson event,” Sotelo-Reiner said.
Illona Yosefov, an instructional technologist and union leader, said the college threatened it would take disciplinary actions against staff members who showed up at Picture Yourself Day.
“I have never heard of anybody like management threatening discipline or something that’s considered protected union activity at Emerson,” she said. “And that has thrown us on a loop.”
While the staff did not end up leafleting, therefore avoiding the threats of repercussions, Yosefov said that it’s still “hanging over us.”
“As a union, we’ve always done actions … If we believe that something is right, we need to get it out there so students and faculty and everybody understands what we’re here asking for, and supports us,” she said.
An Emerson spokesperson said in a statement that it remains committed to “bargaining in good faith with the intention of reaching an agreement with the five staff members who are in the process of being organized.”
“The Boston staff union’s decision not to hold an action that would interfere with the college’s Picture Yourself Day was an important step forward and an acknowledgment that their activity would have undermined our recruitment efforts at a time of great instability for higher education,” the statement read.
The spokesperson also said that the contract must comply with California employment laws.
For Davis, these explanations feel like a way to keep staff divided.
“Us as a staff, we have a unified mission of supporting students,” they said. “The idea of slicing and dicing us up and keeping us divided, just feels so … at odds with this unified mission we have of, like creating a really positive student experience.”
As of now, Emerson’s administration has only provided eight articles of the ELA staff’s contract, which the union describes as a copied and pasted version of the Boston staff union contract, which has 32 articles, with minor changes according to Yosefov. Sotelo-Reiner believes that the college’s refusal to send the full proposal thus far has been a negotiation tactic designed to stall the process.
“I think their hope was that the five of us wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight, and so we would concede to a contract that had worse protections than the staff in Boston have,” he said. “I think they were hoping to wear us down.”
The ELA and Boston faculty unions, as well as the Student Government Association, have submitted statements in support of the ELA staff unionizing efforts.
It is still unclear whether the new proposed contract will include the five staff in the Boston union, their original goal, or simply create a new one that more closely follows California’s labor laws.
ELA staff are set to vote on accepting four new members to the union this weekend, bringing the total to nine.
Daniel Crocker, the coordinator of electronic resources at the Iwasaki Library, and Boston staff union member, emphasized the need for a strong contract.
“We will find the most expeditious way possible to get them a solid, strong, good contract, and we’d like to do it efficiently,” he said. “We’d like to not waste tuition dollars on college hiring lawyers and so on. We’d like to just do it as simply as we can, and we believe we have a path to do that.”
Sotelo-Reiner said that these negotiations have taken valuable time from the already stretched-thin ELA staff. Over the last two years, four staff members were laid off out of the 25 full-time staff.
While Emerson has experienced a dip in enrollment, the ELA program is designed primarily for upperclassmen, so this decline hasn’t yet affected the West Coast campus. Despite this, staff said they have had to contend with the same number of students, but significantly less resources and help, making fair contracts an essential part of the job.
“The work hasn’t gone away. We still have the same number of students. We’re still outputting the same that we need to and we’re doing it with a lot fewer staff than we had a few years ago,” Sotelo-Reiner said.
Sotelo-Reiner said that while there’s still a long way to go, this interim agreement and the granting of COLA raises are a good first step.
“I know at the end of the day, we want to wrap up this process as soon as possible, and I think they do as well,” he said. “We’re very hopeful with what they’ll present to us in a couple of weeks that that will be a good jumping off point to arrive at a final contract sooner rather than later.”
