The former College of Communication employee challenging his dismissal after allegedly improperly planting a security camera in a control room could end up returning to his former job, a union representative said.
The former employee, an engineer, was accused of breaking COM security protocol.
He is challenging his discharge through the Step 3 grievance procedure outlined in Article Fourteen of COM’s contract with Local 2324 United Auto Workers. He filed the grievance immediately upon his dismissal, according to the union representative.
UAW represents clerical, technical and service employees of Boston University, according to BU’s human resources website.
In the process, the engineer and his union representative would meet a designee of the Human Resources Department to discuss the engineer’s grievance, according to the contract. The department then has seven working days to reply to the union’s challenge.
If the challenge is successful, the employee will return to his former position.
The grievance procedure is not an uncommon recourse for union members who have been dismissed, the UAW representative said.
“It all depends on the individual circumstances,” he said, estimating that Local 2324 used the procedure for about fifty percent of all union member terminations at BU.
Though the union hopes that the engineer will return to his former position, some students, including COM senior Ryan Menezes, a blogger for the BU American Civil Liberties Union, said that COM was right to punish him.
“Hidden cameras by definition violate the expectation of privacy,” he said in an email.
“Why else hide them? Hiding them also takes more effort than installing them normally, so this was intentional, and likely malicious.”
The hearing was originally scheduled to occur Wednesday, but was rescheduled for next Tuesday, a union representative said. The representative said he wished to remain anonymous because he said BU tells the union not to take disputes to the press.
Because of this, the union representative said he was “not happy” that COM had leaked information to The Daily Free Press. COM Dean Tom Fiedler spoke to reporters from The Free Press on two separate occasions about the former employee’s actions.
The union representative said this was “upsetting,” and that talking to the newspaper “might affect the integrity of the case.”
“It’s my hope the school cooperates [in the future],” the representative said.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
