To the editor:

If you've seen the news lately you have probably noticed the increase in union activities where workers are organizing and using collective bargaining to demand fair wages and good working conditions. Most recently, UPS and the Teamsters ratified a contract to increase wages, improve working conditions, and end a two-tier system that creates separate classes of workers based on seniority. Prior to UPS, unions at Amazon, Starbucks, Kellogg's, and John Deere were in the news. In addition to wages and working conditions, eliminating, or pushing back against a two-tier system was key aspect with many of these negotiations.

For those that are not familiar, these two-tier systems are techniques usually employed by large corporations to gain concessions from the union and eventually break solidarity within the union. They create a class of worker that will never have the same opportunity to reach the rate of pay, vacation, or benefits as current employees. These agreements systematically take middle class jobs and reduce them to a level where people working them struggle to provide for their family.

With this in mind, I was pretty upset to learn that the Barrington School Committee and Administration have been using tactics like these for the employees at our schools. If you look at the contract between BPS and the Steelworkers Union (our maintenance, facilities, and janitorial staff) you will notice a two-tier system that seems to have been in place since 2013. BPS employees in this union who were hired after 2013 will never have the same opportunities as those hired prior to 2013. They will earn less, pay more for health care, accrue less vacation time, and have fewer retiree benefits. How is that equal pay for equal work? Eventually, when the workers hired after 2013 start to outnumber the ones hired prior to 2013, solidarity within the union will be broken and we can cut their benefits too! Think of all the money we could save!

The most recent target of our cost cutting initiatives seem to be the Barrington Educational Support Team (BEST). These are the teams of professionals who directly support our children every day. They are the Teacher Assistants, Special Education Assistants, Administrative Clerks, Secretaries, friendly faces at the front door and in the office that greet us and our children, and so much more. As our children return to school, the BEST team has returned to work, without a contract. As for their previous contract, over the last three years members of this union have received a 2 percent year over year cost of living increase. We all know that inflation has been much more than 2 percent. What that means to the BEST team is a year over year decrease in their standard of living.

As a community, we are starting to think about spending $250 million on new buildings and facility improvements. We should take this time to think about what has made and continues to make our schools special. It is the people inside, the people that care for our children as if they were their own. Whether they are teaching, assisting, coordinating, supporting, maintaining, or cleaning the building, the people in those buildings are taking care of our kids and we should make sure we take care of them. They are much more important than shiny new buildings and state of the art technology and I think we can afford to pay all of them (even if they started after 2013) a fair wage.

Brian Rua

Barrington