Cornell Workers Set Strike Deadline

Cornell University service and maintenance workers, without a wage settlement since June, have set a strike deadline of next Tuesday, the president of Ithaca's United Auto Workers (UAW) said yesterday.

Negotiators from both the university and the union said that they made some progress in meetings this week when Cornell adjusted its earlier offers, but they were unwilling to reveal the details of the new proposals.

Cornell has 900 service and maintenance workers, 700 of whom are represented by the UAW. They include the university's dining hall workers, custodians, and groundskeepers.

"This is not a basis for settlement," said Ithaca's UAW President Al Davidoff of the new offer. He said the union and the university were still at odds over the extent of poverty among union workers, and over the system by which wages should be increased for senior workers.

The university opposes the step system for wages that the union prefers, under which the wage pool would be redistributed so that long-time workers would automatically receive higher wages than new workers.

E. Peter Tufford, chief negotiator for Cornell and manager of the university's Employee Relations Department, said that Cornell's new proposal does not offer the union any more money for the fiscal year 1987-88 then the earlier ones did. But even though Cornell opposes the step system, the university has offered as a concession a new way of distributing wages to the workers, he said.

The union bargaining committee is now considering the university's conciliatory proposal. It offers a split increase in wage raises, under which half of the increase would be added to the wage pool at the start of each half of the fiscal year, Tufford said.

Davidoff said that next Tuesday the two bargaining committees will meet again, and union members will vote that night to decide whether or not to strike.

One of the main points of disagreement between the union and the university centers around their different perceptions of the poverty level within the union, Davidoff said.

The university "doesn't acknowledge the true extent of poverty," he said. UAW bargainers have stated that many union workers exist at income levels far below the federal poverty level.

But Tufford said that this it is not true that there are many workers below the poverty line. He said that although there are over 200 people in the union receiving yearly salaries below the official federal poverty level of $11,200 for a family of four, none are below the individual level of $5500.

He said the union has no way of knowing whether the 200 workers who do receive less than $11,200 are members of families of four. He said he thinks there may be about 20 individuals who do fall into that category.

Davidoff said that the union's battle at Cornell has drawn attention from New York state assemblymen on the higher education and labor committees.

State assemblymen have become interested in solving the work dispute, especially after discovering that "some of the people worked a 40-hour week and had to get Food Stamps to survive," said Edward C. Sullivan, chairman of the New York State Assembly higher education committee.

"I said to President Rhodes that I thought Cornell really should be embarrassed by that," Sullivan said.