Your bargaining team met with the administration's team and the state-appointed mediator for our first session on Friday, January 24. It was a long day but ultimately productive in terms of working through some of the non-economic proposals still left to resolve.
The day began with introductions and a description of processes during mediation, and we then met with the Provost for a conversation. We were pleased that the Provost engaged with our team. Provost Long expressed that he understands the concerns faculty have that led us to mediation for the first time since unionizing. We made sure to convey to the Provost the level of discontent that faculty currently feel and the support your bargaining team has from members.
While we hope this might represent a fresh start to a stagnated process, the warm and friendly feelings conveyed will signify little until we begin discussing economic issues in mediation. In the end, we were able to come to a tentative agreement on a package of four proposals. We finished discussions on Articles 19 and 20(Career and Tenure Review and Promotion) as well as Article 15: Academic Classification and Rank and Article 34: Caregiving.
The main issue left to resolve in Articles 19 and 20 was whether to continue using the category of "exceeds expectations" for reviews disconnected from raises, versus simply "meets" or "does not meet" expectations. The pressure to prove one is “exceeding expectations” in reviews where no additional raise is on the line seemed counterproductive to faculty and administration alike. We agreed to the proposed change (and will be vigilant in how this is operationalized in our salary article, as well as unit policy revisions in the future), in exchange for language that we have been advocating for that shores up how units utilize Pro Tem faculty on campus.
We agreed to language in Article 15 that will mitigate against unreasonable denials of reclassification attempts and strengthen the process for determining credit for prior service for our Pro Tem faculty members when reclassified or hired into Career positions.
We agreed to concede some of our demands in our Caregiving Article (Article 34). In that article we were pushing for more transparent language that would allow faculty to work remotely when the University is open but 4j is closed due to inclement weather. While the admin team was not eager to incorporate this language into the CBA, we were reassured by the most recent iteration of the inclement weather notice that went out to faculty during last year’s ice storm. That notice gives faculty sufficient autonomy to decide whether they can arrive safely to campus. We also ceded on our demand that faculty be allowed to work remotely for a term when faced with particularly difficult care-giving situations. Administration fears that this would be prone to abuse by faculty members - mistrust of faculty has been a theme of this bargaining season. This would have been a benefit to a small group of faculty members ultimately, so exchanging these demands for agreements that benefits our Pro Tem faculty was an important concession to make.
We were also able to schedule our next two mediation sessions for February 7th and February 13th. In these sessions we will begin to work on economic proposals and will likely know soon in the process if the administration will be willing to agree to fair raises and avoid any future job actions. In any case, if they should fail to do so, we will have steps in place to continue to push for a fair contract through the PECBA process. We informed Provost Long that faculty have never been more prepared to do so.
A note on Article 26: Salary and eligibility for raises
Several members have reached out in the last few weeks to express their concern that, according to the administration’s proposals on Article 26, faculty would only be eligible for annual raises if they held an appointment on July 1 of the prior year. We have used October 31, both in our current proposal and in the most recent Agreement, as the appointment date to qualify for CBA-mandated raises. This allows recent hires to be eligible for increases. We will maintain our proposal that utilizes the historical raise window for faculty eligibility and hope that the administration understands the importance of this issue in terms of retention and morale of our newest colleagues.