By Patty Shillington
When the Donahue Institute became part of UMass Amherst in 2020, Meghan Flanagan and her colleagues in the institute’s economic and public policy research division became part of PSU.
“All of a sudden, we were in a union, and everything was a little different,” says the senior research analyst, who serves as a PSU delegate. Flanagan was a quick study, winning a salary increase for herself while also assisting her coworkers in seeking equity reviews when they all realized they could demonstrate they were being underpaid.
Other than a summer gig as a stagehand, it’s the first time Flanagan, who graduated in Smith College’s first class of engineers, has had a union job—but she remembers the union involvement of her parents, both teachers, in her Long Island hometown.
“When I was about 9 or 10 and my mother’s school’s contract wasn’t being renewed on time, she took me and my baby brother out to the picket line for a couple of days after school,” Flanagan says. “So I come from a union family, but engineers aren’t generally unionized.”
With a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Minnesota and years of study in a multidisciplinary engineering Ph.D. program at Tufts University, Flanagan combines many of her skills and interests doing population projections in her current post with Donahue. “I’ve always tried to mesh various fields together because in my mind, you can’t just do engineering in a vacuum. It has ripple effects. I stumbled upon this position because I could do mathematical modeling, and I knew how to keep a database, and I did a lot of mapping work. In my mind, math is math.”
Flanagan became a PSU delegate almost by default. As a person who pours over instruction manuals and reads the fine print of every Apple agreement, she was a natural. “I want to know, what am I getting into? What am I signing here, how is this going to help me? What’s going to be different?” Flanagan says. “So when my colleagues were having a lot of questions about the PSU documents, I was like ‘page 7.’ And when they were asking for delegates, my peers basically said, ‘You’re doing this anyway, you might as well just show up to the meetings if you’re going to be reading everything.’”
Flanagan couldn’t argue with that logic.
Once the Institute’s union job positions were described and given a pay level, Flanagan realized that she and two of her co-workers were being unfairly compensated. “I was the lowest paid out of all of us, and then they said, ‘We are the lowest paid out of anybody in the university for the level of job that we were doing,’ so we successfully got an equity review, which made a big difference. I’m grateful for the help of the SAP [Salary Administration Program] when we first got here.”
Part of what makes Donahue’s PSU members unique is that many of them live all over the US and rarely, if ever, come to campus. “My group has always been split between two offices—Boston and Hadley,” says Flanagan. “Though post-Covid, many people are fully remote or hybrid. And a good portion of Donahue’s staff works out of state, particularly those involved in Head Start programs.”
This means that, though they share many concerns with PSU as a whole, like the need for fair pay and full staffing, PSU members in Donahue also have some unique needs, like finding health insurance that works with their local providers.
Furthermore, the Donahue Institute is funded through grants and contracts, and not by the university.
Outside of work, Flanagan recently started taking fencing lessons and continues taking the improv classes she signed up for during the pandemic “to get me out of my COVID bubbleness. I couldn’t talk to people. I felt super awkward and weird. I needed a place where I’m supposed to be super awkward and weird. So I decided — improv lessons. If they laugh at me, that’s a bonus.”
On the work side, Flanagan is hoping to move into a managerial position soon: “I like working for my immediate boss, who is great. The work is really interesting, too, and my colleagues are really lovely, so I’d like to stay.”
And though it’s still a little scary for her to be a delegate, she is enjoying being in and representing the union. “I’m not someone who sticks their neck out at all, but it’s nice to be encouraged to have a voice and to help people with your presence.”
Flanagan keeps her colleagues in touch with union issues and refers them to other union reps when they need specific help. And, of course, she keeps reading all the fine print. “It’s great that we have a say at the table, and that we have such good people bargaining on our behalf and coming up with good things to introduce that will make everybody’s lives better.”