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Staff Council to focus on child care, shared leave, wages

When the university budget is tight, it’s important that staff voices be heard.

That’s the message that Staff Council President Stuart Ivy hopes resonates throughout the group’s 2009-2010
term.

“It’s a hard time to be a staff member, but it is not, contrary to public opinion, a good time to duck and cover,” said Ivy, who also is an information technology manager in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

“This is really the time that the staff needs to put their voice forward or else we might end up with more across-the-board cuts.”

The Staff Council has outlined broad goals to accomplish during the current term. Among them are keeping child care concerns on the table, examining the shared leave policy, protecting low-wage earners and starting a new committee to help departments reduce operating costs.

“I don’t want child care to fall under the radar just because it’s not a good time right now with the budget. I want to be sure that when the budget is back to normal, we should be able to move on it,” Ivy said.

The council also has been researching shared leave options.

Currently only university employees can benefit from the program, but council members are trying to find out if the policy can be extended to employees’ immediate families.

“For instance, if you have a child at home and they get ill and you need to take time off to be with them, we’d like shared leave to be able to be applied to that situation as well,” Ivy said.

“Another thing we’d like to look at this year is how we handle across-the-board increases such as health insurance and parking fees, which are very regressive.

We’d like the UGA administration and the University System of Georgia Board of Regents to consider making it a more graded system,” he added.

“If you’re making $21,000 a year, it would be better if you didn’t pay as much in the increase as someone making $50,000 a year. The percentage of income taken by the increase is greatly different.”

In order to help ease the burden of tighter budgets, Staff Council created the Cost Savings and Reductions Committee about two months ago.

Its goal is to find out how individual offices and departments across campus have cut costs and share that information with the rest of the university in the hopes that other departments can benefit from similar measures.

“I’m positive there are situations on campus where there’s an office that’s doing something that is saving them $50 a month, and there are other offices on campus that could do that same thing and they’re not,” Ivy said.

“If there are 100 of those offices that implement this change, that’s a $5,000 savings.”

Staff Council meetings are open to anyone at the university. The next meeting takes place at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 2 in Room 201 (second floor auditorium) of the Pharmacy South building.

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