Welfare Note #8
Another offering in a series of "Welfare Notes" that has been created by the Welfare Committee which are intended to ensure that all members of the Faculty Association are educated, informed, or updated in terms of welfare-related concerns and their rights contained within the Contractual Agreement.
Files, Files, & Files!
On occasion, questions arise regarding the various files with employee-specific information kept by the College. It is important the each faculty member know what is in "their" file. Our Negotiated Agreement speaks to at least five different types of files at the college which may contain information about a specific faculty member. Of particular note are the Working files and the Temporary files kept within the division. There tends to be a Working file on each full-time faculty member. This file may be referred to as a division file, or Dean's, Associate Dean's or Director's file and are maintained throughout the assignment of that faculty member to that division. Temporary files tend to be event specific. Depending on the event, the Negotiated Agreement may define some limits to keeping these files. These are addressed in several different sections of the agreement
The Welfare Committee hopes that this will heighten your awareness of the type of information about you that is appropriately residing in various files here at the College. We also encourage you to review the relevant sections of our Negotiated Agreement for more detail.
If you have not yet taken the opportunity to review the contents of your personnel file in the Human Resources Office, the Welfare Committee encourages you to consider doing so. Your right to review this file and the parameters within which the review may occur are detailed in section C. 10 PERSONNEL FILES. My [tvj] recent experience in going through the process of reviewing my personnel file was a positive one. I called in advance and set up an appointment time to review my file. The appointment time is important because a staff member from the Human Resources office is required to be present while a file is being reviewed in order to insure that "no materials are . inserted or removed from the file at the time of the review." (Negotiated Agreement). She was very pleasant in describing her responsibility in the process and then sat quietly as I reviewed the material. There were some Human Resources forms in the file that I was unfamiliar with and she offered a brief description.
When a file contains information that the faculty member wishes to dispute, the Welfare Committee encourages each of you to first, review our Negotiated Agreement for relevant sections and discuss your concerns with the administrator responsible for the file. The conversation with the administrator may result in resolution of the concerns. You may also wish to discuss your concerns with any member of the Welfare Committee or Grievance Sub-Committee. Finally, our Negotiated Agreement (section C. 10.1 CONTENTS) provides for a mechanism to rebut the contents of "supervisory memos and correspondence" placed into the files, if necessary.
