After Complaints, Meetings But Still Tensions in King County

-- Library Journal, 6/5/2006

After union workers voted "no confidence" in Bill Ptacek, the director of the King County Library System, Issaquah, WA, Ptacek said he'd be in "listening mode." He's heard an earful. More than 100 members of the library staff protested outside the KCLS headquarters last week, and Susan Veltfort, president of Local 1857 of the Washington State Council of County and City Employees, described workers' feelings of disrespect and low morale. Ptacek, who earlier had met with the union's executive council, said, "We had a good discussion, and we agreed we needed to start meeting on a regular basis, and try to find ways to work together."

Ptacek continued to defend one of the contentious issues, the clustering plan, in which staffers are assigned to a cluster of (usually three) libraries, and are rotated one day a week to one of the them. "As we grow, we can look at this pool of staff...for expanded hours," he said. While other libraries use clusters, he wasn't sure how many had adopted a plan in which staffers rotate. "There's nothing like KCLS, we're so big and so busy," he said. "Our goal is to be able to have this library organization flexible enough as we meet changing demands." The library board, he said, is committed to clusters for a year and will evaluate it after that. As for the Friends groups, nearly 20 of which have expressed dismay with library management, "I guess we've got to rebuild relationships with some of those folks," he said.

Veltfort told LJ that having "monthly joint labor-management meetings is not only long overdue but something we tried to negotiate in the first place." She said, "We remain skeptical that Mr. Ptacek is serious" about addressing the union's concerns. As for the clusters, "We have grievances we're working our way through that discuss moderations of the system," she said. "We're fine with a cluster, but not if staff has to work in different locations than they were hired at." She said that staffers wanted Sunday hours filled by those who volunteer for service, rather than being mandated to work on Sundays.