Bargaining update for May 2

The administration has been slow to respond to our salary proposal, but we hope to see their response on Thursday. Come to bargaining from 12:45-3:30 in Chiles 125 (or Zoom) and help support your bargaining team. As a reminder to members, our salary proposal is based on an economic analysis of faculty salaries, comparator institutions and economic data about inflation; our bargaining strategy is not to bicker back and forth until we meet in the middle, but to say “this is what we the faculty need to be excellent” and to stand by that proposal.

In our last bargaining session on May 2nd, we managed to work through and discuss a number of proposals and have made progress on several issues.

Your team pushed again for more transparent notification of policies that affect faculty members' working conditions (Article 6); timelines for addressing the needs of faculty with ADA accommodation, increased protections for Pro Tem employees, and provisions that call for Career hires when enrollment needs justify such a position (Article 15); dedicated FTE for professional development with a concomitant reduction in course load for instructional faculty teaching 9 or more classes (Article 17); credit for service for Career faculty who have been reclassified from Pro Tem and an accounting for lack of necessary services and resources in evaluation processes (Article 19); sanctioning remote teaching capacity during emergencies and parking accommodations for faculty members in their final stages of pregnancy (Article 34). We are coming closer on several of these issues but the administration seems to remain intransigent on Pro Tem protections and remote accommodations in particular cases.

With their proposals, the administration restored provisions related to information requests and we are pleased about that (Article 9). They also restored the number of union releases and accepted our provision that faculty not be compelled to take service releases unless they choose to do so (Article 11), though they did make this contingent upon the union only being able to purchase course releases for faculty members with .5FTE or lower. We are still not in agreement over the kind of offer letters considered valid for incoming faculty nor on notification given to limited duration faculty in the event of a layoff (Article 16), and were disappointed that the administration once again rejected the modifications proposed to the faculty tuition program (Article 28). There is still a lot of streamlining to do in terms of Leaves (Article 32) and we are still not in agreement about percentages of salary provided for one and two-term sabbaticals.

We look forward to continuing these conversations this Thursday and anxiously await the administration's counterproposal on salaries. We were very pleased to see many faculty members show up for bargaining, in person and on Zoom, and we will need to maintain that involvement through the rest of bargaining.