Mead workers may picket

Local football fans may be greeted by picketing Mead School District employees at games Friday night.

The 65 custodians and maintenance workers who are members of the Mead Classified Public Employees Association are working under an expired contract. The union accuses the district of bargaining in bad faith and is threatening to file an unfair labor practice complaint.

“These are the people that clean up the schools. These are the people who make sure the schools are safe for children,” said Mike Boyer, who represents the workers for the Washington Education Association.

At issue is salary, with Boyer arguing that the salary paid many classified staff barely qualifies as a living wage.

The Washington Legislature last year mandated 4.4 percent cost-of-living increases for school employees statewide. The Mead employees are getting that. But Boyer says the contract – even after expiration – entitles them to an additional 1 percent.

Further, the district received an additional 1.2 percent in state funding for classified employees, and Boyer contends that was supposed to be passed along to the employees as an additional 1.2 percent raise.

Mead administrators won’t talk about offers they’ve made or other aspects of the negotiations. But Kelly Shea, Mead’s executive director of human services, said the 1.2 percent “salary equalization” money was intended to even out the funding received by districts, not necessarily to be passed along to employees.

The state doesn’t mandate how much classified employees earn, and the amount varies from one district to the next, Shea said. There’s no mandate that it be equal.

As a money-saving measure, the school district decided not to replace four custodians who left for various reasons after last school year, noted Pam Amell-Neu, a Colbert Elementary custodian who is secretary of the union local.

To fill the slack, “they’re asking us at this point to pick it up,” said Amell-Neu, a 17-year employee. “You can do only so much in eight hours.”

The Mead High School and Mt. Spokane High School football teams have games Friday at Albi Stadium, and Boyer said union members may picket one or both of those games. They’ll also be handing out fliers alleging that district Superintendent Tom Rockefeller received a 14 percent pay raise over the summer of 2007, at the same time the district “was crying poverty” and trimming the budget.

Shea said the superintendent’s actual pay increase was 3.7 percent. It only looks like 14 percent, Shea said, because the contract was rewritten to combine his salary and the money going into a tax-sheltered annuity that had been previously listed separately.

Rockefeller’s salary is $160,735.