Important information about Library scheduling

Hello Library MEA Members,

You all have been through quite a bit over the last few months.  From waiting to see what the final decision would be in the budget, to receiving conflicting information from the City, to trying to understand where you are going to end up and why, because of the new Library operating hours determined by the City Council.

All your concerns have been valid, and MEA has pursued several opportunities with the main goal that no one in the Library Department would lose their job because of the City’s budget challenges.  Our advocacy with the City Council has led to all filled Library positions being saved, aka, everyone continues to get a paycheck and benefits.  However, this doesn’t come without changes.

To close the Budget gap, the City Council made the difficult decision to eliminate Sunday hours and could only afford to restore Monday hours in some branches, leading to the biggest question you have had over the last few weeks, what will happen with the schedule.

Fast timeline

We’ve had to move quickly. Although MEA and Library management began discussions regarding the Library schedule in late July, upper City management failed to share that there was a looming deadline. On August 13^th, City upper management let us know that there was a September 1^st deadline for having to have everything “figured out” because money for Monday hours would run out after September 14^th.

In response to this sudden notification, your MEA LMC (Labor Management Committee) members and I worked tirelessly alongside Library management on addressing staffing issues that include not only the new budget reductions but what we hope to be a blueprint for having a staffing solution moving forward so that all employees know what will happen when hours are altered or restored in the future.

What’s Next?

You will be receiving a lot of information from your management soon on specific processes, but MEA and your LMC want to highlight what this process is.  Due to the short timeline imposed by the City, our focus was employee choice.  Not necessarily a choice to be exactly where and when everyone wants, but an ability to choose based on seniority.  This is how you will be determining your schedule moving forward.

All employees will be choosing their schedule/shift based on seniority which has been determined to be Time In Department.  The choices will be made by classification.

For example:

• Librarian IV’s will be given a list of all available branches and the shifts for Librarian IV’s at that branch.
• The Librarian IV (we’ll call them Melissa) with the highest seniority will make a choice of which branch they want to work at.
• That branch for a Librarian IV will no longer be available with that shift, and the next Librarian IV will make their choice with the shift that Melissa chose blocked off with her name in it.
• That cycle will continue until all Librarian IV’s are done picking their shift. Then the Librarian III’s will follow the same process, and so on down to the LAIs.

For half-time employees the process will be the same, but you will have the most significant change.  The Library already has pre-determined shifts for each branch for half-time employees.  You will bid in the same manner as full-time employees; however, those shifts will be the only shifts that are available.

We know that what management and the City have put together will not work well for some of you.  We know there will be impacts to childcare, school schedules, family routines and just daily life.  We know that the City’s imposed timeline that they sat on for months has tied everyone’s hands in this process to be able to come up with more creative solutions.

MEA’s focus and fight has been to maintain employment for all current Library employees, make the current situation as fair as possible for everyone, and that almost every single employee will have at a minimum two choices of where and what shift they want to work.

Thank you to our Library LMC members for their diligence and commitment during these long, difficult discussions.

And thank you. Without all of us standing together, the Council would not have done what was needed to save Monday hours and the filled positions. It was not easy. And thank you for your dedication to the City residents.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Labor Relations Officer, Nick Wright at nwright@sdmea.org.