We are thrilled to share news of an important court ruling for educators at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Darci Thoune is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse. UW-Lacrosse recently formed a faculty union.
Cary Nelson is the President of the American Association of University Professors.
Emily Plec is an Associate Professor of Communication at Western Oregon University.
Michelle Fecteau is the Executive Director of the Wayne State AAUP-AFT chapter.
Students, faculty, and staff at University of Oregon face an inexplicable double whammy of rising tuition and miserable salaries and wages. While it is true that the Great Recession pummeled state budgets, and consequently budget outlays for public education, the tide of rising tuition and falling salaries preceded the 2007-2009 recession. Adequate explanations – and we do not mean the knee-jerk “blame the public employees” rant – are lacking. Incomes for CEOs, University administrators, and millionaires and billionaires have seen dramatic upward swings, contributing to the highest level of income inequality in the U.S. since 1928, with the top one-percent netting a quarter of the nation’s income. Blaming public employees – including University staff and faculty – works well as a political diversion, but not as an explanation. As faculty at the University of Oregon who support unionizing under United Academics, we invite you to engage in a public dialogue about the attack on higher education.
Many of you may have read the recent reports on faculty salaries from the American Association of University Professors reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times. The trends show stagnating salaries at public universities, a growing gap in pay between private and public institutions, and the erosion of tenure-related hires with a resultant increased reliance on faculty who lack tenure protections. These trends are not always the product of a lack of money, as we know the University of Oregon is flush with reserves totaling $55 million. Rather, a lack of faculty voice in the legislature combined with a lack of imagination for dealing with these challenges is largely to blame. Solutions to these long-term problems will not happen quickly or easily, but surely sitting and waiting for others to decide appropriate action without faculty input is no solution at all.
The attacks on public employees are not just a problem for others in other places. Some of you may have noticed the recent decisions to modify our healthcare benefits as well as pending legislation to dramatically reduce employer contributions to retirement plans. As you read this, at least 26 pieces of legislation that specifically target PERS benefits are on the table in Oregon’s legislature. Elected and administrative officials often face difficult fiscal choices and they often make choices that affect people who have little to no input in those decisions. Having a voice in the process is at the heart of democracy and accountability. Presently, faculty at the University of Oregon have no collective voice in the legislative process. As active members of United Academics, we believe this lack of input is not in our professional or academic interests or in the interests of higher education in this country. Maintaining a vibrant intellectual space at any major university requires input from the faculty. We are the people on this campus in the best position to positively shape our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions. If we do not speak with a strong voice, we will continue to give permission to others to make these vital decisions. A sitting duck will surely be the first to get cut.
Join us on May 24th at Knight Library Browsing Room from 3-5pm to hear more about the attack on higher education. Cary Nelson, the President of the American Association of University Professors will be featured. Recently Professor Nelson remarked on the current attacks on collective bargaining and faculty rights: “Those who care about higher education and academic freedom should spare no effort to defeat these efforts and restore the fundamental right of all employees to organize their voices as they choose” (see back side for more from Professor Nelson). It is incumbent on those of us who retain our right to organize our voices to exercise that right. Faculties across the country are fighting to keep their voice and their ability to have meaningful input into how their university confronts the challenges they face. It is time for the faculty at the University of Oregon to exercise our rights and raise our collective voice for the betterment of profession, institution, and the education of our students.
Our sister campaign at the University of Illinois-Chicago is reporting success! With over 60% of the faculty signing authorization cards, the faculty have voted “Union Yes!”
Representatives from the University of Illinois-Chicago United Faculty campaign delivered hundreds of signed authorization cards to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board on April 29, marking the first time in Illinois history that a large public research university’s faculty have organized a union.
The UIC United Faculty campaign is a partnership of the AFT, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors. The union must still wait for official approval from the state.
“My academic research and management consulting over the last 40 years have focused on improving organizational performance, often through employee empowerment,” says Darold Barnum, professor of managerial studies. “I support the UIC United Faculty union because faculty collective bargaining offers the best, and indeed only, way that UIC can accomplish its mission at a reasonable cost to the state and its students.”
UO Professor and United Academics Organizing Committee member Daniel Pope was recently interviewed about UO salaries and our unionization effort.
Watch the video here:
After unionizing last August, adjuncts at Central Michigan University have reached agreement on a new contract that would increase job security and, more modestly, their pay. The four-year deal, announced Tuesday by the Union of Teaching Faculty and CMU, would apply to about two-thirds of the unit’s 340 members who work part-time or more. The bargaining unit includes adjuncts and graduate students. A separate unit, affiliated with the Michigan Education Association, represents tenured and tenure-track faculty.
CMU administration confirmed that a tentative agreement had been reached, but withheld further comment pending the deal’s ratification. Sources familiar with the terms of the deal said that, a year from now, adjuncts who have taught for five years will become eligible to sign multi-year contracts. Job security was achieved in return for modest pay increases, mostly directed to lower paid workers. The lowest paid adjuncts who work full-time would see their wages rise from the current level, less than $20,000, to $24,000, sources said. The union recently began campaigning for higher wages for adjuncts by highlighting members who worked full-time, but needed to rely on public assistance to make ends meet.
From a NYT blog:
A conversation about unionization and higher education between Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
SF: In over 35 years of friendship and conversation, Walter Michaels and I have disagreed on only two things, and one of them was faculty and graduate student unionization. He has always been for and I had always been against. I say “had” because I recently flipped and what flipped me, pure and simple, was Wisconsin.
When I think about the reasons (too honorific a word) for my previous posture I become embarrassed. They are by and large the reasons rehearsed and apparently approved by Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent op-ed piece “Why unions hurt higher education” (USA Today). The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats. As Riley points out, even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) used to be opposed to unionization because of “the commonly held belief that universities were not corporations and faculty were not employees.”
WBM: But at UIC, where I worked for Stanley and where many of us are working right now to build a union, “a lunch bucket faculty for a lunch bucket student body” is a standard way of describing us, originally intended as a form of condescension but increasingly accepted as a badge of honor. Why is it a bad thing that our students aren’t as rich as the ones at Northwestern or the University of Chicago? Why is it a bad thing to accept the fact that we are workers? We’re fortunate that some of us are pretty well-paid workers, but many of us aren’t and, well-paid or not, we all have less and less of a say in what our university does and how it does it. When workers want a voice, what do they do? Unionize! So even though our job descriptions range from professor to principal investigator and we make more books than widgets, that’s what we’re tying to do.
UW-Stout Faculty Defy Threats and Vote for the Union
Despite Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s threat and the recent state Senate vote to strip faculty and staff of their collective bargaining rights, the union is growing stronger. Here’s proof: Faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Stout this week voted overwhelmingly in favor of union representation through AFT-Wisconsin.
The March 9 vote was 196 in favor, 31 against, in a unit of 283.
Rather than discourage them, Walker’s threats galvanized faculty eager to raise their voices in protest, says Barb Flom, an associate professor of education. “When it became clear that the governor’s extremist legislation had nothing to do with balancing the budget and everything to do with denying workers’ rights, UW-Stout faculty realized the urgency in this vote,” she says. “Together, we stood up, took notice, and turned out to vote.”
The decision is an extension of union support across the state, she adds. “Our state is at a crossroads. The vast majority of Wisconsinites have made it known that they want to preserve our state’s rich tradition and move forward, not backward. Today, UW-Stout faculty stood united and echoed that message by saying, ‘We deserve a voice in the workplace.’ ”
Their spirit has been buoyed by overwhelming support for the union at ongoing rallies and continued demonstrations of resistance in the state capitol and elsewhere across Wisconsin. The crowds are further inspired to continue the fight since Walker’s recent budget proposal includes drastic cuts in funding for higher education.
UW faculty and academic staff were extended the right to collectively bargain in June of 2009. Since that time, faculty at three campuses—UW-Eau Claire, UW-Superior, and UW-La Crosse—have voted in favor of collective bargaining representation. [Virginia Myers, AFT-Wisconsin]
United Academics of the University of Oregon 