The Final
Chapter?
For
the better part of the last ten years, the Tacoma Public Library has suffered a
seemingly endless string of labor problems: bitterly contested sets of contract
negotiations, protracted court fights over the disclosure of public records, as
well as numerous employee grievances and unfair labor practice charges. Of the
court battles and grievances, the library has in most cases, lost.
The
job of guiding the library to this succession of glorious defeats has been the
domain of an exclusive Bellevue law firm, which not coincidentally, has an
ideological bent towards union busting.
Ideology
figures heavily in the library’s troubles. Over the past years, time and again
the library’s postions were drawn along ideological lines, with little apparent
rational thought towards present legal realities. The matter of the public
records fight illustrates this.
About
four years ago while in contract negotiations, the library workers union
requested certain payroll data and other public personnel records they said
were necessary to aid them in bargaining. The library flatly refused to provide
the data.
Now
this is not a controversial or unsettled area of law. Public disclosure case
law is well defined, with many precedents that clearly obligate public
employers to divulge most all pay and benefit data. Under prevailing case law,
generally very little can be withheld from disclosure except for example,
employee social security numbers and other confidential material in an
employee’s personnel file – all of which any competent attorney could have told
the library in fifteen minutes, without any extensive legal research or
exorbitant fees.
But
legal precedents and common sense notwithstanding, the library chose to fight
an expensive, three-year-long legal battle against disclosing the documents – a
legal battle which, predictably, they lost at nearly every turn.
Sadly,
this sort of fight was not unique. There were many other, less high-profile
incidents.
There
were a series of long, drawn-out conflicts over free speech rights. These
disputes involved what could be posted on employee bulletin boards, what kind
of reading material could be left in the workplace, and in some instances, even
what sort of political cartoons the employees could read on break.
Added
to this, were policies which made it clear the library administration didn’t
trust the employees: for example, the fact that the employees were made to use
time clocks while management employees were not. Another example is that
employees have to pass through scanners to leave the library, while management
employees can use unmonitored back doors.
The
net effect of the anti-employee policies, the court battles and the other
disputes was to devastate employee morale, and to promote an adversarial,
divisive atmosphere. Over a period of years, the employees became fearful and
distrustful of the library administration. This spread even to the point where
the mid-level managers formed their own union in 1995.
The price-tag for creating
an atmosphere of fear and distrust, demoralizing their employees, and mostly
losing their court battles was not cheap. The library spent $250,000 of
taxpayer money over the last four years.
By
comparison, the Pierce County Library system spent just $76,986 in the same
period on labor relations. The Timberland Regional Library system spent only
$6,720 in the same four years.
Another
way to put this in perspective is that the library spent only $230,000 on the
acquisition of juvenile materials and adult fiction, out of a book and magazine
budget of more than $1 million during the same period. The quarter of a million
dollars the library spent fighting and demoralizing its employees equals
perhaps as much as a quarter of the entire amount spent on books and magazines.
That’s dead wrong.
Thankfully,
it now appears the tide is finally beginning to turn.
Director
Susan Hardie resigned recently. This is a good start to remedy the library’s
problems. But the big questions is whether or not she was the person actually
responsible for the fiasco.
Many
people familiar with the situation now point a finger at Michael Taft, the
library Personnel Director. Many feel he was the driving force behind a
majority of the library’s bad labor relations decisions.
In
the final analysis, what it boils down to is that the library spent about a
quarter of a million dollars to impose an ideological position counter to the
best interests of the public – even when it knew it could not likely prevail.
That is a grave misuse of public funds and trust.
This
cannot be tolerated, because public employees have a right to be treated
fairly, with respect and dignity.
The
responsible parties, whoever they may be, should be removed from office at
once. Only then may the wounds start to heal.