MANSFIELD — The irony was not lost on James Beverly Jr. that the Mansfield Correctional Institution was conducting a hiring event on Monday.
If the State of Ohio would compensate its employees fairly, it could hire employees quicker, according to Beverly, a former MANCI corrections officer and a current staff representative for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association.
A group of local OCSEA members — including workers from MANCI and the Richland Correctional Institution, as well as the Ohio Department of Transportation and the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation — stood along Ohio 13 on Monday to demonstrate solidarity for a new statewide union contract.
The hillside gathering in freezing temperatures and a biting winds was part of a statewide “bargaining blitz” the OCSEA planned March 14 to 19.
“We are here to inform the public we are in contract negotiations,” Beverly said. “The state is not willing to negotiate and make things right with public employees.
“(Workers) at 20 other (Ohio) prisons are doing the same thing at the same time (Monday) across the state because they feel this is the right thing to do to try to express their concerns about what they’re facing every day,” he said.
Beverly, who said he began working at MANCI in 1998, said the state government has not done enough to compensate workers, who he said took concessions during tougher economic times and “stepped up” to work extra shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The state is facing a shortage of applicants to work in these state jobs. They have asked, ‘What can we do?’ We told them — until these wages match up to the cost-of-living (increases), to the wages in the competitive market in the private sector — you are not going to get the (number of) applicants you want,” Beverly said.
“Through the lean times, state employees took zero pay increases and were made to take (furloughs) during the Great Recession. State employee wages have not kept up with inflation,” he said.
The state’s three-year contract with the OCSEA took effect in April 2021. It provided 3 percent annual increases for union members and also maintained emergency pay language the state wanted to eliminate, according to the union.
Negotiations have not yielded a new contract as of yet and issues could be headed to a fact-finder, he said.
“When you can walk into a fast-food restaurant and only be a couple of dollars off what a new hire comes into a state prison to watch the people society deems no longer responsible to be in public … We’re just asking the governor, the director (of the Ohio Dept. of Rehabilitation and Corrections) and the directors of all these state agencies to step up and do what’s right for state employees,” Beverly said.
Ben Valentine, a MANCI correctional officer and president of the local union, said the close-security prison is about 80 correctional officers short of where it should be.
A 19-year officer, Valentine said the staffing shortfall has led to COs working multiple double shifts (16 hours) per week in the prison that houses about 2,600 inmates in January.
“When I hired in, that didn’t happen,” he said. “We had the proper staffing.”
Beverly said it all comes down to fairness.
“Give us what we have coming in this contract as we move forward. That’s all we want. We need fair wages and an end to attacks on our union contract.
“Management needs to make a good faith effort and stop attacking our fundamental rights and benefits,” Beverly said.
