GORHAM – About three dozen members of the only union not to have reached a contract settlement with the University of Maine System picketed the board of trustees meeting at the Gorham campus of the University of Southern Maine on Monday.

Negotiations between the roughly 1,100-member University of Maine Professional Staff Association and the system’s administration are snagged on pay increases and the degree that health insurance premiums will rise.

A computer database specialist at the Muskie Institute for public policy at the University of Southern Maine, Kerry Sullivan, told the trustees that morale among union members is extremely low.

The pay situation is so bad, with workers bolting for higher-paying work outside the system, she said that some staff are staying home sick with stress.

Despite having met more than 40 times in the past 18 months, talks between the two sides have become so bogged down that even mediation is on the verge of collapse.

Though the mediator has not officially told the Maine Labor Relations Board that mediation is over, the university system’s understanding is that he will shortly, said Tracy Bigney, head of personnel for the University of Maine System. The next stage would be arbitration, she said.

Contract discussions reached such an impasse last summer that a fact-finder was called in to try to settle the matter. In the fall, the fact-finder recommended that the system increase the union members’ salaries by 8.5 percent over two years, hold insurance premium increases to roughly 35 percent, the same level as that for faculty, and establish a procedure to deal with salary inequities.

System health claims have rocketed upward during the past few years, driving up health insurance premiums. Even this year, claims will outpace premiums by a projected $4 million, according to Bigney.

The head of the union, Bruce Littlefield, the computer and network manager in UM’s electrical and computer engineering college, said that the union agreed to accept the fact-finder’s recommendations.

The salary raise was less than the 9 percent the union asked for, but more than the 7.5 percent the university system offered, he noted.

Though, there was no “up front money” to deal with salary inequities, Littlefield said the union took the recommendation because it set in place procedures and deadlines to deal with the inequities. In particular, new employees are being hired at salaries almost equivalent to longtime employees, union members at the trustees’ meeting complained.

But the university system did not accept all the fact-finder’s recommendations, Bigney said. Subsequent negotiations narrowed the gulf between the sides but didn’t close it.

System Chancellor Terry MacTaggart said he is puzzled that they cannot come to agreement because, “We’re offering substantially the same settlement as we made with all the other unions.”

On top of the overall negotiations possibly heading for arbitration, the union has filed a “prohibited practices” complaint with the Maine Labor Relations Board against the system, according to Littlefield.

In submissions to the fact-finder, he said, the system made a number of “significant errors” in representing provisions in other university union contracts.

Bigney admitted that she could understand why the union had misunderstood some of the submissions but, “We stand by our information.”

The problem, she said, concerned what was “planned and what was in place” at the time the information was given to the fact-finder.

No hearing dates have been set on the complaint.

The union’s membership reaches from librarians to computer technicians to machinists to admissions officers to registered nurses. Members from the Orono, Farmington, Augusta, Portland and Gorham campuses rallied at the trustees meeting.