As seen in The Daily Tar Heel. 

For years, the UNC housekeeping staff and University administrators have butted heads on the issue of workers' rights. This summer, a housekeeping committee was created to address employee needs and housekeeping requirements.

The committee, composed of housekeepers, supervisors and management-level employees, held its third meeting with UNC department leaders last week. Yet we have seen little or no improvement for our housekeeping staff.

Housekeepers' most recent grievance regards changes made last winter, when a new policy required UNC housekeepers to work weekends and to take a day off during the week. They were compensated for the weekend work until June, when UNC administrators stopped giving out overtime pay due to changes in the economy.

It is unmerited to require workers to put in hours outside of the workweek and even more unfair to refuse to compensate them for their labor.

The housekeeping committee was created as a forum for employees to express their complaints - a good idea in theory. But even with a long history of injustices to workers, are we sure that UNC is listening to their voices now?

The answer for housekeepers could lie in collective bargaining, negotiation between employers and employees to determine employment conditions.

Right now, North Carolina is the only state to prohibit collective bargaining, leaving N.C. public employees among the 2 percent of U.S. citizens who can't argue for their right to certain working conditions. This leaves many manager-employee issues unresolved and many employee voices unheard.

If the housekeeping committee was created to act in place of collective bargaining, it needs to start providing the solutions that collective bargaining could. Although the committee is a fairly recent development, it will continue to meet weekly until Oct. 15, when it will receive housekeeping's suggestions. Committee members should carefully consider these recommendations and act on them in a timely way.

Constructive decisions should be made with the participation of all parties involved and awareness of any changes before they occur.

If this doesn't happen, UNC needs to put employees higher on its list of priorities.