Featured photos by Ethan Schmidt
Story by Ethan Schmidt
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Rick Kurtz, a James E. Walker Library service desk worker and United Campus Workers member, spoke to the Board of Trustees on Tuesday about biweekly pay at the Miller Education Center.
A dozen UCW members and concerned MTSU students attended the spring board meeting in solidarity with the labor union. The university’s labor union had circulated a petition since the start of the 2023-2024 school year, calling on MTSU administration to pay its workers biweekly, rather than monthly.
After meeting with MTSU President Sidney McPhee and receiving a follow-up email that they found underwhelming, the UCW decided to take their demand to the Board of Trustees.
“I’m hoping they at least have some discussion on it, rather than instantly moving on,” UCW Vice President Spencer O’Neal said.
Section 5.5 of the Board of Trustees’ policies grant the chair of the Board the option to “refer a matter raised during the presentation session to the President for appropriate response, or…refer the matter for consideration at a subsequent Board or Committee meeting.”
Board of Trustees Chair Steve Smith did not invite President Sidney McPhee to respond to Kurtz’s address, dashing O’Neal’s hopes for the meeting.
“I didn’t think it was appropriate because I already had discussions with the president about the matter,” Smith said after the meeting. He did not elaborate on those discussions, referring to them as an “internal thing.”
“[The board] doesn’t stick our nose in how people are paid,” Smith said. He then added a caveat.
Smith said the board would advise against something egregious, such as if students were only paid once every two years. However, some new employees’ six-week wait for their first paychecks do not fit Smith’s view of an egregious delay in worker compensation.
“Keep in mind that our current system can force any new hire to face the possibility of having received no actual income for over six weeks into their employment,” Rick Kurtz said in his address to the board.
Kurtz said that out of the six locally governed institutions in Tennessee and the University of Tennessee system, “Middle Tennessee State University, Tennessee Tech are the only two remaining institutions by July 24th that will not have implemented a biweekly or semimonthly pay schedule for hourly employees.”
Last year, in a late-October meeting with a UCW delegation, President McPhee suggested a timeline of one year for implementation but specified that it was not a promise.
The following month, he stated in an email that MTSU administration “will explore processes that would allow the University to move to multiple pay cycles for our hourly staff,” but he did not confirm a switch to biweekly pay.
“We explored with the new system,” said President McPhee. “A new system will give us, hopefully, the ability to do that.”
McPhee said that the state set aside $50 million for all universities to change their administrative software.
“It’s not that the university doesn’t want to do it,” the president said after that meeting last fall. “We just have to make sure we have the system to be able to do it.”
The meeting left both students and UCW members unhappy.
“What is the benefit to the school for keeping students from getting biweekly pay?” sophomore Sterling Martin said.
“I, personally, was really disappointed,” sophomore UCW worker Levi Dandridge said. “We didn’t think that they were going to say ‘Yes.’ That was best case scenario.”
“It was more that we were hoping that they would at least say ‘Maybe’ — at least acknowledge it — and they didn’t acknowledge it at all,” he said.
UCW Vice President O’Neal said on Wednesday in a text message that plans for further action would be the “major topic” of the union’s next meeting.
Ethan Schmidt is a contributing writer for MTSU Sidelines.
To contact News Editor Alyssa Williams and Assistant News Editor Zoe Naylor, email newseditor@mtsusidelines.com.
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