TEXAS CITY — A labor union has sued College of Mainland claiming policies adopted in April governing employee grievance procedures violate state law.
The lawsuit filed Friday in Galveston’s 56th Judicial District Court asks for a ruling that the new regulations violate state law, for a permanent injunction preventing the college from enforcing the new rules and for attorney’s fees and other expenses.
David Michael Smith, president of COM-Unity and a professor of government at the college, said the union negotiated with college administrators for 11 months in attempt to resolve the dispute before filing the lawsuit.
The new regulations violated state law in numerous ways, including by denying employees the right to file grievances over terminations, by denying employees representation during informal steps in the grievance process, and by limited grievances to allegations of specific code or policy violations, Smith said.
Spokesman Jim Higgins said college officials had not seen and may not have been served notice of the lawsuit and had no immediate comment.
However, Higgins said he was a member of the union and opposed the lawsuit. He said litigating the issue would take money from scholarships.
Smith called the new grievance policies a radical departure from the college’s past practice of granting employees more rights than mandated by law.
He said the college board began trying to bring those rights down to the legal minimum.
“Unfortunately, in many cases they went below the legal minimum,” Smith said.
The new rules particularly eroded the rights of hourly employees, whose wages, hours and working conditions are not protected through employment contracts or by other means, as are those of faculty members and professional employees, Smith said.
