Secretaries wary of deadline woes

The department secretaries who filed a classification grievance against SF State asked for and received late last week an extension of the deadline to send their case to the chancellor's office.

The previous deadline was Friday, but on Tuesday the secretaries requested that the date be moved back so they could continue to prepare their case, according to Jerrie McIntyre, a department secretary in the history department and a California State Employees Association representative in the case.

The university, through the human resources department, granted the request late Thursday. The new deadline is Nov. 1.

Denise Fox, director of human resources, said the deadline extension was granted in good faith, and she understood why the secretaries requested the extension.

"It might take any of us additional time to prepare our side," she said.

McIntyre said she took the administration's gesture as a sign of cooperation.

"Everybody's got their role to play in this," she said. "I don't think they necessarily wish us ill, they just have their role, which is sort of to keep a lid on things."

Forty-four secretaries filed a grievance with the university in April, claiming, among other things, they have been misclassified for three years. They are asking for reclassification into the Administrative Operations Analyst class, permanent status, back pay, and seniority rights.

The secretaries turned down an offer from the university two weeks ago that would have increased their salary by roughly 5 percent, but would not have placed them in their desired class.

McIntyre said the department secretaries needed the extra time to comb through materials they received late from a task force that was set up over the summer by the university to assess the secretaries grievance.

"We were still getting Xeroxes of all the task force information, all the questionnaires that they had used in their study," she said. "We wanted to counter-study the information and make sure they had drawn the conclusions that a reasonable person might draw, rather than just wiggle it around and say, 'well, we know what the answer is.'"

But McIntyre also said the secretaries needed to get better organized to present their case to the chancellor's office.

"It was a matter of, 'do we just Xerox everything we have without organizing it very well and send it off to meet the deadline,' which we could have done," she said. "But in the long run, it makes it easier for us to argue our case if we have it all organized and paginated. It's a little bit like an encyclopedia at this point."

[ Golden Gater Online October 24, 1995 ]

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