Your bargaining team met with the administration once again on August 26th for our final session of the summer. Though we continue to make progress on several non-economic articles, we continue to engage them on several points of contention that your team feels are important to improve our current contract.
One of those sticking points concerns the grievance process. United Academics hopes to codify a time frame in which faculty members can engage in what we have called an Independent Conflict Resolution Process. Oftentimes faculty members do not immediately seek out assistance from their union when problems arise, and they attempt to work out such issues with their unit heads and supervisors. These attempts to resolve disputes can take some time and we want to ensure that faculty can continue to engage in conflict resolution without fear that a grievance timeline will pass, thereby depriving them of the ability to seek resolution in a formal process. We feel this is very important for community dynamics and will result in fewer grievances in the end, but the administration remains unmoved by our proposals.
Another contentious issue is providing funding-contingent faculty members with more notice of layoff than they have historically been provided. We have faculty members who have invested decades in the University but could be laid off with only 30 days notice. We propose, with some improved short-term planning, that the University extend the notice period to 60 days for those who have been promoted and 30 days for those in the second year or beyond who have not yet achieved promotion. We will continue to push for more stability at the bargaining table for this group of faculty. We also look forward to continuing our conversation in the future on our Researcher Support article, which the administration has not returned for many sessions.
We engaged in more conversation surrounding professional development and service FTE for our Career instructional faculty. The administration rejected our most recent proposal, in which we mandate .20 FTE for said responsibilities for those teaching 9 or more classes. We made this adjustment to reflect the diversity of commitments of our instructional faculty and remain adamant that sufficient FTE be devoted to such important endeavors.
Finally, though we did not exchange an article on salary, we did press the administration to hand over the data and methods they used to conclude (as seen in the Provost's recent email) that faculty are paid quite well at the University of Oregon. Our economists and mathematicians have been unable to reverse engineer the data to come to similar conclusions. We requested the data immediately following our last session but have still not received anything from the administration.
At our upcoming bargaining session, we plan on returning our salary article. We are very grateful for those who have continued to show up to bargaining during the summer sessions, in person and over Zoom. On September 26, we want to have a very strong showing, so that the administration recognizes our faculty's commitment to our proposals. We hope to avoid any possible job actions in the future and the best way to do so is to show the administration that faculty are united and engaged in the bargaining process.