Bargaining Update for June 13, 2024

Your bargaining team recently met with the administration on June 13th. Thank you to everyone who turned out! It was a lively time. There was even an impromptu singalong of union solidarity songs courtesy of UA’s Vice President of Diversity & Equity, Ed Wolf of SOMD. Enthusiastic members filled the bargaining room and showed up on Zoom. We estimate that 150 faculty members showed up at some point. Your presence was felt by the administration team as well as your bargaining team!

As a reminder, we will be having bargaining sessions throughout the summer, so please consider joining in person if you are on campus or Zooming in if you’re not. Our next session is Tuesday, July 2 from 1:30-4:30 in Chiles 125. (Note the day and time change from usual). As we ramp up to a potential job action next year, your presence really helps underscore the concern faculty have around salary and working conditions.

Unfortunately, we remain stuck on salary. At the previous bargaining session, the administration’s team had put forward a new proposal, which they characterized as a "significant move," that offered 2 percent raises per year to our faculty who are notin the Tenure-Related and Career categories. This group had been excluded from any salary consideration in the administration’s initial proposal. However, the administration showed zero movement on fixing the salary problem for Tenure-Related and Career faculty. Given the current inflation rate and cost of living in Eugene, the administration’s current proposal would amount to a salary cut. This is unacceptable. As a show of good faith, we dropped one proposal related to penalty fees for late pay. But we stand by our current salary demand, which would bring faculty up to the average among our comparator AAU universities, just as senior administrators already are. We were able to engage with the administration in conversations on equity as well as merit and we hope that the University will agree on the kinds of allocations we propose (across-the-board, equity, and merit) so that we can move forward constructively. You can see our most recent proposal here.

We also presented a proposal for Article 17: Assignment of Professional Responsibilities. As many of you know, the administration is reluctant to lower the current cap for Career instructors from nine to eight courses, in order to free time for professional development and service. Many departments have proposed making this adjustment in their unit-level policies on professional responsibility. In several colleges, however, deans have blocked these proposals. It is possible that the departments’ proposals may still be approved at the level of Provost review and we urge the Provost to see the wisdom of doing so. Either way, we remain adamant about the need to guarantee FTE for such responsibilities to ensure a reasonable work/life balance for our Career faculty. Colleagues with nine-course teaching loads are among the lowest-paid Career faculty on campus.

Once again, thank you to everyone who showed up. We will continue to bargain over the summer with our next session on July 2nd from 1:30 to 4:30 in Chiles 125.