Pitt workers agree to new one-year contract

The Pitt service workers union agreed to a new one-year contract amid uncertainties about the University’s financial future.

At the beginning of March, Pitt service workers, represented by the SEIU Local 32BJ, agreed to a new contract after negotiations began in December. The contract guarantees a pay raise of $1.25 per hour with an additional 3% increase retrospective to Jan. 1 and additional benefits for over 400 cleaners, housekeepers, groundskeepers and others. 

Pam Rall-Johnston, a union steward and Pitt janitor who has worked for the school for 33 years, said the pay increase was a “big deal” but was hard to get. The University began negotiations with a 10-cent raise before the union pushed for more and agreed to the standard rate for service workers across other universities in the area. 

“It sets us with the typical rate. We’re not above anybody or anything. We’re right up there, which a lot of our members really appreciated because they needed that,” Rall-Johnston said. “And it made us feel a little more respected when we finally got to that rate, because some people work two jobs, so it helps.”

Pete Schmidt, the Western Pennsylvania district leader for the local 32BJ, said the majority of the union members were happy overall with the raise. Schmidt emphasized the importance of the workers’ jobs on campus.

“They do an amazing job of doing stuff that the average person does not want to do at all. But that comes with a decent wage. You cannot expect people to keep doing this for substandard industry wages,” Schmidt said. “We know what our wages are in the region for all of our members that do similar kinds of work, so our main goal was to at least raise the wages to match.”

Some other benefits in the new contract include an additional personal holiday, a new rotational mandatory overtime system and an expedited grievance process. 

Schmidt said that prior to this contract, if overtime was needed for circumstances like snow removal, the least senior person would be mandated to do overtime to help, and then they would continue up the list until they had enough aid. When mandatory overtime was needed again, they would once again start at the least senior person, forcing the same few people to do mandatory overtime. Schmidt said the new system fixes this issue.

“It wasn’t a rotation, which is what most unions try to do,” Schmidt said. “We now are rotating it so that the same handful of people aren’t necessarily being dinged with mandatory overtime.”

The revised the grievance process streamlines the process for workers to make decisions about problems and cuts redundancies. 

“Sometimes you’ll have a complaint and you’ll talk to your supervisor, but they don’t have the ability to answer you, so then you gotta wait. And it goes to the assistant manager, and then you gotta meet with them, and then you gotta meet with the manager,” Rall-Johnston said. “And we got it to a point where you’re not waiting as long. So [when] you’re having an issue, it won’t be three months down the line when it gets resolved. This way, it’ll be resolved quicker.”

The new contract will only last for one year, as opposed to the typical three it had been in past negotiations. Both the union and the University agreed to the one-year contract due to concerns over Pitt’s budget and hiring with the recent cuts and freezes the Pitt administration has announced. Rall-Johnston said any jobs that need to be filled currently will be, but the hiring freeze and budget cuts will affect them eventually, especially since the workers are already shorthanded.

“We’re going to have to push a little bit. I mean, we made it through COVID. We were on campus. We didn’t walk away. It’s going to be a trying year, but we understand why we’re where we are. We don’t like the way the country’s going,” Rall-Johnston said. “We know it’s going to be harder on every worker. But I truly believe because we signed a year agreement, we’re both understanding that it’s gonna be a trying year, and we have to come in and do better next time.”

University spokesperson Jared Stonesifer said both the University and the union are in agreement for this one-year contract. 

“Recognizing the uncertain fiscal environment, the parties agreed that it was mutually beneficial to reevaluate the terms next year,” Stonesifer said.