Cotati-Rohnert Park schools weigh cutting cafeteria workers’ hours

Cotati-Rohnert Park school district officials want to lay off the equivalent of 12½ full-time cafeteria workers and hire nine of them back at reduced hours with no benefits, a move intended to save about $150,000 a year.

District Superintendent Robert Haley said the decision was forced when the district lost a customer for which it used to prepare food - Bellevue Union School District. That widened a deficit in the district’s $1.6 million cafeteria budget, he said.

“It’s absolutely unfortunate, but the cafeteria fund can only afford so much,” he said. “This isn’t anything that anyone’s excited about.”

The cafeteria workers, many of whom have put in well over a decade at the district, said they were bewildered by the proposal.

“After working there for so many years, it feels rotten the way they’re doing it,” said Karen Sladowski, a food service worker who is a 26-year veteran of the district’s lunchrooms.

Sladowski said she works 7½-hour days and, after paying a little over $300 toward her medical benefits, brings home $1,400 a month.

The district has to offer partial benefits to any cafeteria worker who works more than four hours a day. It plans to hire back laid-off or new, replacement employees at 3.7 hours a day, removing that obligation.

“To cut everybody down to 15 minutes below where you could actually buy insurance is to me just so disrespectful,” Sladowski said. “Most of those women work their butts off. It’s a disgrace.”

As well, she said, the workload will be staggering for a reduced staff.

Union officials representing the cafeteria workers said the district was going where it hasn’t before.

“They’ve never stooped to this level, going after lunch ladies,” said Russell Hatcher, president of the California School Employees Association, Chapter 645.

“These ladies are just devastated, they’re our lowest-paid workers and some of the hardest workers,” Hatcher said.

Without cutting staff, the district would have to move $305,000 from its $58 million general fund into the separate cafeteria fund to make up the latter’s deficit, as state law requires, said Anne Barron, the district’s chief business official. Last year, it took $137,000 to close the gap.

That would subtract from instructional budgets, Haley said.

“We need to balance the needs,” he said.

Both the district and the CSEA charge the other with being intransigent.

“We’ve been negotiating the reduction in hours for quite some time,” said Haley. “From our perspective, CSEA has been uncooperative.”

The talks started in July 2014.

“So long as the district’s management employs union-busting lawyers and engages in union-busting tactics … there will be no new relationship,” Hatcher said in a statement submitted to the district’s board of trustees.

The board voted to approve the proposed job cuts Tuesday night, according to Hatcher.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay.