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PEP Jul-Aug 2014
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Public Employee Press

Brooklyn Public Library
INsourcing upgrades computer crew

Good riddance, Xerox Corp.

Computer workers at the Brooklyn Public Library are getting paid more now that they are doing work once contracted out to Xerox.

An April agreement between the union and the library upgrades their title to Computer Service Technician 2 and boosts their pay by thousands of dollars.

"Our members were doing a lot more work than they were being paid for," said Local 1482 President Eileen Muller. "Their responsibilities were increased over the years, but they weren't properly compensated."

The union filed a group grievance and criticized the library's maintenance contract with Xerox as it carried out a long fight to upgrade the information technology workers. The breakthrough finally occurred last year when the library decided to end its contract with Xerox and bring the work in-house.

Now the union workers are wholly in charge of all of Brooklyn Public Library's information technology operations - telecommunications, copiers, kiosks, printers, scanners, and software and hardware development.

The library refused to release the specific terms of its multimillion-dollar contract with Xerox. But it tacitly acknowledged the waste in the outsourcing deal by contracting in the work to its own employees. Before leaving, Xerox trained the Local 1482 members to take over the work, which included maintaining printers, copiers and kiosks.

Local 1482 member Ronald Barber was the principal voice of the seven-member IT team in the union's campaign for the upgrades.

"The main issue for us was that we were doing out-of-title work," he said.

Wasteful contracting out

The members studied the titles of city IT workers and found that they were being paid at the scale of Computer Aides, whose tasks include installing screens and basic maintenance, Barber said. The upgrade recognizes that the Brooklyn Library workers do more complex work.

"Our members wound up taking on a lot of work that they never should have been required to do, according to their old job description and pay scale," said former Local 1482 member Christopher Maisano, now the Librarian of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept., who worked on the agreement with Muller, Barber and DC 37 Research and Negotiations Director Evelyn Seinfeld. "We're happy we were able to help them win a new title, a salary bump and some retro pay."

"This was a classic tale of the wastefulness of contracting out," Seinfeld said. "Our members are better compensated now that the work is being done in-house. The library's decision not to renew the contract is saving taxpayers' dollars."

 

 
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