April 22, 2010
Professional Staff Organization will look back as it turns 20 with April 28 celebration
The Professional Staff Organization will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Wednesday, April 28, in the Walker-Ames Room, Kane — the place where it all began. It was in that room that the Association of Professional Advisers and Counselors held a “show and tell” session for legislators in 1988, during which selected professional staff talked about what they did.
“APAC took the lead because they felt they’d fallen off the map in terms of recognition from the University administration,” said Bob Roseth, director of news and information, who was there that day. “They were losing people to the community colleges because the community colleges paid better.”
That session was only the beginning. Afterward, Roseth and a number of others began meeting informally and became convinced that in order to make an impression on Olympia, they needed a more permanent organization to represent professional staff.
“You have to understand what it was like back then,” Roseth said. “In the early 1980s, when there was a recession, the University made what it thought was a very practical decision to lobby for salary increases only for faculty. So faculty had an advocate, and at that point classified employees were represented under statewide public employee bargaining agreements through the legislature — they weren’t yet represented by a union. But there was nobody representing professional staff. Like the counselors, we’d fallen off the grid.”
In 1989 the group sent out a survey to all professional staff and got an astounding 50 percent response rate. The survey asked, among other things, two key questions:
- Do professional staff need better representation on campus?
- Do professional staff need better representation in Olympia?
More than 70 percent answered yes to both.
“That gave us the feeling that we had a mandate,” Roseth said. And in 1990, the Professional Staff Organization was formed, with Roseth as its first president.
Roseth will be speaking at the celebration, which runs from noon to 1:30 p.m. and includes music and food. Current President Ethan Allen will hand over the gavel to the new president, Anita Rocha. In addition, staff have had the opportunity to submit appreciative comments about fellow staffers, and these will run as a slide show during the event.
Roseth said one of PSO’s early tasks was working with what was then the Personnel Department (now Human Resources) to get a system of benchmarking in place, comparing University salaries to those in the community with similar positions. With that data in hand, he began going to Olympia with two more politically experienced colleagues who tutored him on how it’s done.
“Most legislators were interested to hear from us,” Roseth said. “They had never heard about this group before. It took a while to make them understand that we were not lobbying against the University, but lobbying for a group that really had an important role to play providing high-quality services to students and others. Underpaying them systematically was not in the University’s best interests.”
The Legislature ended up setting aside a percentage of the general state employee increase for professional staff equity, so that those in job categories that were seriously behind market rates could receive additional “catch-up” money.
The other deficiency PSO tried to address in those early days was the lack of recognition for staff, Roseth said. The Distinguished Teaching Award had been in existence for many years, but there was no such award for staff. When they met resistance in getting a University-sponsored award in place, the PSO started its own.
“We went out and solicited things like gift certificates to give the winners because we didn’t have a big budget,” Roseth said.
The first staff award was given in 1991; it later became the Distinguished Staff Award and was broadened to include classified as well as professional staff.
A lot has happened in the last 20 years, but Roseth said he’s still proud of the work he and other PSO founders did. “It’s nice to see some of the ideas we were exploring 20 years ago being carried out officially by the institution,” he said. “It goes without saying now, that when the administration talks about the institution, they mean faculty, staff and students. Nobody would think to omit staff from the lobbying. The University now says that having a well-trained, well-compensated, recognized work force is really important to achieve its mission. I can’t say that we made all that happen, but we certainly engaged the whole community in that discussion at a time when it wasn’t a concept most people were paying attention to.”
The PSO celebration is free and open to all professional staff. Refreshments will be served at noon and the program will begin at 12:30 p.m.
