Contract Ratifies! But the fight for higher ed isn’t over.

Greetings, my excellent colleagues!

First of all, I want to express enormous gratitude for our Bargaining Team:

Maram Epstein (East Asian Languages and Literatures)
Jake Searcy (Data Science)
Charlene Liu (Art)
Dan Howard (Business)
Debbie Green (Religious Studies)
Josh Razink (CAMCOR)
Keaton Miller (Economics)
Nathan Whalen (Romance Languages)
Heather Wolford (UA staff)

They met, planned, and drafted proposals for months before negotiations started on Feb 1 of last year. Over the following fourteen months they met innumerable times to plan, strategize, and draft (and re-draft, and re-re-draft...) proposals to bring to the table.

Anyone who observed the public bargaining sessions knows that our team did a fantastic job representing our union and advocating for the needs of our membership. They were always prepared, professional, and passionate. And they were admirably composed in the face of frustration and occasional stubborn and/or confusing resistance.

Second, I want to thank the Contract Action Team, whose efforts moved the needle week by week, month by month, on what was possible for our union to envision and do.

United Academics is forever transformed thanks to the efforts of the faculty and UA staff of the B-Team and CAT.

Whew. What a week it has been!

We came even closer to a strike than the GTFF last winter term, learning of a prospective tentative agreement a scarce fourteen hours before the spring term's classes were set to begin--or not begin!

Especially given the broader federal context, the stakes of whether or not to go on strike were abnormally high and deeply unsettling. Separate from the stakes, the prolonged uncertainty about whether we would be at work or on the picket lines made it diffcult to prepare for whatever might come next.

We learned a lot of things on Sunday night--including that the Zoom account we use from the American Federation of Teachers has a cap of 500 attendees for our meetings. (Thanks for your patience, flexibility, and ingenuity in seeking workarounds in the moment!)

More importantly, we learned that a tentative agreement had nearly been hammered out and that the planned strike would not begin the following morning.

Most importantly, we learned about the substantive provisions of the agreement: the structure and sizes of the raises, as well as the fate of the other proposals not yet settled on at the table or during the formal mediation period.

I want to validate and echo the mood and replies in the town halls on Sunday, the subseqent informational sessions, and emails before and since. Reaching this tentative agreement was a great relief. Overall, though, the substantive provisions are bittersweet.

The sunsetting of the Tenure Reduction Program (Article 31) is a real and unwelcome shock to many of the Tenure-Track faculty who have been planning for years (or decades) with its predictable structure in mind.

The failure to instate a new article on research supports is a blow to Career Research faculty (although portions of some of the ideas made it into other existing articles).

The continued absence of guaranteed professional development time for Career Instructional faculty is a second betrayal on this issue, after the process of changing prefesional resposibilities policies unit by unit (explicitly encouraged in the previous collective bargaining agreement as the proper path for changing course loads and introducing professional development time!) failed to produce the intended course loads or professional development time for a single unit on campus. (In short, we were collectively lied to in the last CBA, and still there has been no accountability or redress.)

While the sizable increase in salary floors is terrific and long overdue, I want to acknowledge that the set of raises planned over the next year and a half aren't the raises that we had hoped for. Nor are they the raises that we deserve. At the outset, we framed our asks with the overarching goal of becoming more competitive relative to our peers. We asked to be paid not at the top of that set, but merely the average of our comparators. This contract doesn't get us there yet.

Our asks at the bargaining table for more competitive salaries would have had the nice feature along the way of recovering the purchasing power lost over the last five years. Even when overall compensation is used to make the comparisons with peer institutions [the preferred frame of the administration], the plain and stark truth is that the raises outlined in the tentative agreement do not close the gap in the purchasing power our salaries have lost to inflation (and will yet lose to inflation over the years of this agreement).

Lest United Academics or the bargaining team be pilloried for creating unreasonable expectations in the minds of our membership over the last year, it is not unreasonable to expect that pay keep up with the cost of living. That is basic stewardship.

More to the point, we faculty weren't alone in crafting lofty visions for what the university might have to offer or the atmosphere we'd like to see permeate our campus. President Karl Scholz could have arrived at UO, looked at the ledgers in consultation with Jamie Moffitt, and stated in austere, Churchillian fashion that he had "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."

Instead, in November 2023 (four months after his arrival), he began declaring his oft-repeated goal to create an environment in which everyone could flourish. After meetings with numerous constituencies, the strategic plan "Oregon Rising" was carafted and presented. I reiterate what I have said before the Board of Trustees and at gatherings of the Provost's Teaching Academy: Yes. Please. Absolutely. The faculty yearn for the flourishing. We absolutely want to see Oregon rise. But none of it can happen on words or ideas alone.

Let us be clear--both union and management alike! This new collective bargaining agreement is a fairer contract, but not yet a fair contract. There is a lot of work stlll to be done to improve pay and working conditions in the next contract and beyond. This time around we--on both sides--have been limited in what we could accomplish by internal financial constraints resulting from inadequate planning over the last few years as well as by wholly unanticipated external financial and political constraints.

I invite the administration to proactively look for ways to improve our pay and working conditions even before we are scheduled to negotiate over the next collective bargaining agreement. The CBA doesn't put upper bounds on raises; they can be higher than those agreed upon. For example, when Interim President Patrick Phillips unilaterally announced that the 2% across-the-board raise scheduled for January 2023 would instead happen three months early, in October 2022.

There is much that can be done to rebuild trust and strengthen our relationship over the months and years to come. Clearly, that will be increasingly important for our university, its people, and our communities during those same months and years to come.

Speaking of community, take a moment to pause and reflect on what we have accomplished together, my faculty colleagues.

United Academics is the strongest that we have ever been. We have seen a surge in membership over the last several months and the broadest and deepest engagement we've ever witnessed. It has been phenomenal to feel the energy at General Membership Meetings, Representative Assemblies, the Contract Action Team, and beyond. Our Final Quackdown rally and practice picket event was an incredible--and indelible--moment in our union's history.

Thanks to our collective efforts, bargaining will never be the same for our union. We have shown the administration--and just as importantly, we have shown ourselves and one another--that we are ready and prepared to go on strike if need be. That we are ready to stand up for ourselves and for one another when called upon.

This new reality will be undeniably important for future contract negotiations. But it also matters now, as we stand up for what is right. As we stand up for academic freedom. For our scholarship and teaching. For shared governance. For the protections of tenure. For transparency. For the fair-minded application of policies and good-faith implementation of the provisions of this new CBA.

It may not be the time to strike, but it is still the time to fight. Our voices, individual and collective, are needed for labor campaigns on campus and in our community. The UO Student Workers--who worked for years to forge a new bargaining unit all on their own--are weeks away from a potential strike. UOSW needs and deserves our full-throated support: figuratively or literally, should it come to that.

Our voices, individual and collective, are needed at the State Legislature in Salem, to promote the values and resource needs of education and higher education during this year's long legislative session in which budgets and funding are decided.

Our voices, individual and collective, are needed in defense of our academic programs and our research increasingly threatened by funding cuts--and in defense of our colleagues, our students, and our community members imperiled in their freedom of expression and freedom of movement.

Let us keep up this momentum! Not at a sprinting pace, as we had been gearing up for in recent weeks. Rather, let's run at a marathon pace, sharing the burdens and supporting one another as need be. (Or switching to a duck-themed metaphor, taking turns flying in the lead of the formation.)

Continue to stay engaged, informed, and ready to take action. There are more challenges ahead, and there will be many opportunities to take action. Hopefully, not only side by side with each other in United Academics and the broader Campus Labor Council (UA along with SEIU, GTFF, and UOSW), but also side by side with the administration in defense of the mission of university, the values of higher education, and the freedoms and dignity of our communities.

On a personal note: thank you, my cherished colleagues. Thank you for your work, for your passion, and for your dedication. I am so happy to be here on this campus with you.

On a broader note: make no mistake, this new contract has been a group effort, and that group is all of us: United Academics of the University of Oregon.

United in Strength.

United in Progress.

United for All.

Best wishes in the new term, and have a lovely weekend.