BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer
About 50 University of Cincinnati clerical workers filed discrimination complaints Wednesday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to protest wage practices they say are fueled by racism and sexism.
Members of the Service Employees International Union-District 925 say UC administrators won't give them pay raises and refuse to include a pay-raise mechanism in their new contract.
Two of 14 employee groups at UC have no such mechanism -- including SEIU-District 925 -- and those are the groups with the highest concentrations of women and minorities, union leaders say.
The union's current contract expires Aug. 31, and the pay-raise issue has stalled negotiations, union President Carolyn Schwier said. A strike vote is set for Sept. 2.
"I have been an office worker at UC for eight years and make the exact same pay as a secretary who has worked at the university for six months -- $9.58 an hour, which comes to less than $20,000 a year," said Jana Morano, a secretary in the UC College of Medicine's pathology department. "I am completely dead-ended in this job."
Ms. Morano and the other workers commuted from campus in a yellow school bus, parading to the EEOC office on Vine Street downtown with signs and banners demanding "Equal Pay for Equal Work." They wore purple ribbons to show solidarity and were joined by Cincinnati-area community leaders representing the AFL-CIO, American Association of University Professors, National Organization for Women, NAACP and other groups.
SEIU-District 925 union leaders said they filed the complaints Wednesday because it was the 78th anniversary of the day women won the right to vote in the United States. Workers took a vacation day to file the complaints.
UC spokesman Greg Hand said the pay scale is one the SEIU-District 925 union accepted after negotiating its last contract with UC. Tight finances translated into no pay raise for non-union employees this year, and union employees only got a pay increase if it already was negotiated in their multiyear contracts, Mr. Hand said.
Nearly 3,200 of UC's 6,344 full-time employees are represented by unions; about 800 workers are covered by the SEIU-District 925 union, he added.
EEOC Alternate Dispute Resolution Coordinator Mary McLain said EEOC investigators will review the complaints.
"The costs to society of this discrimination are high," said Kathy Lynch, a secretary in the UC College of Medicine's Department of Lab Animal Medicine. "Myself, as well as many others, have to work second jobs or rely on various forms of public assistance just to make ends meet. . . . So we say to UC today, this must change and the time is now."
