Taylor Hermance works in environmental services at Bard. She spends the first couple hours of her workday cleaning communal areas in the dorms. "We're cleaning up a lot of gross things, you know?" she told me. "We're cleaning up the bathrooms. We're cleaning up blood after students."
Dan McKenna works on the college's buildings and grounds team. "What I do is mostly landscaping on campus, planting of flowers, you know, leaf cleanup, litter pickup, tree removal, pruning..."
Taylor and Dan are both members of SEIU Local 200 United, and since July 1st, they've been working without a contract. Earlier this week, the union voted to authorize a strike. They've been trying to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement with the college since March, but so far, they haven't been able to come to terms.
One of the biggest issues in the negotiations is health care. Historically, Bard has covered 100 percent of the health insurance premiums for individual employees. The college says it can't do that anymore. Union representative Sean Collins doesn't buy it. "You know, this is a billion-dollar institution now. It can afford to provide the quality benefits that it has for years."
Bard's endowment has indeed grown past $1 billion. McKenna says the college is expanding in other ways, too. "They've been spending a lot of money on buying properties, like millions of dollars. $30 million to buy two adjacent properties, and about $100 million or so to build a new dorm complex, and another performing arts center. So we just don't see the fact that there's no money here."
Collins says the union also wants staffing to match the college's ambitions. "There's been hundreds of thousands of square footage, hundreds of acres added to the campus in the past decade, and our staff in both departments has remained flat during that time. So we're hoping for an increase in staffing. And then lastly, we're trying to bring the two agreements for each department, respectively, into greater alignment."
Among other things, the union wants a higher hourly wage for environmental services workers like Hermance. Starting pay is currently $19.50 an hour. The workers are asking for an increase to $22.75, with annual cost of living adjustments. "We believe that this will help reduce turnover in the department," said Collins. "There's about 50 ES workers. Thirty of them at least have all started in the in the last three years. There's an incredible amount of turnover, and we believe it's because of the low starting rate of pay and the workload, because the department is ridiculously understaffed."
The strike authorization vote, which took place earlier this week, does not guarantee that the workers will actually go on strike. Collins says it's a measure of last resort. "If we are forced to to go out on strike, it'll be timed in a manner that will send a message that without us, Bard doesn't operate. Bard works because we do. Our working conditions are students' learning conditions, living conditions that we help facilitate and maintain."
Hermance says union members don't want things to get that far. "We all want to come to work and do our job. That's essentially how we get paid and put food on the table for our family. But if that's what we have to do to make a point, we are all willing to do it."
McKenna agrees. He's worked at Bard for over 20 years, and says the union has authorized strikes before. So far, they haven't had to actually go through with it. "Hopefully, we won't need to get that far. We have two more negotiating sessions scheduled for later on this month, and we're just waiting to see how those two go."
In a statement, a Bard spokesperson said, "We deeply value the contributions of our Environmental Services and Buildings and Grounds employees, including continuing our commitment to shoulder nearly all employee healthcare costs, even as those costs have risen significantly over the past decade."
For context, the college pointed out that the cost of covering employee healthcare premiums has more than doubled over the last 10 years. They argue that it's not financially sustainable for the school to keep pace with the rate of price increases. They've also countered the union's request for higher wages for environmental services workers with the creation of a promotional pathway for ES employees that "will result in a wage increase upon promotion."
Bard also says the sides have reached more than 40 tentative agreements on a range of issues, and that the school has offered to bring in a third-party mediator, which the union has rejected. Asked about that, Collins, the union rep, said, "We do not believe a mediator would be helpful at this time."
