Announcements:
1. Membership Meeting: Jan 24, Noon to 1:30, SMSU 333, Lunch Provided
Bargaining Update, Strike FAQ, Talk and Q & A with:
Howard Bunsis, Public Sector Accounting Expert, National AAUP
"PSU: Broken Priorities but NOT Broke!"
2. Weekly Tabling Around Campus:
Ask Me Why PSU Faculty & APs May Have to Strike for Students & PSU
Please sign up to help! Details below: marissa@psuaaup.net
3. Join the Flyer Committee! An Easy, Effective Way to Help!
Plaster your building, twice as fast with a friend! E-mail: maryking219@gmail.com
4. Meet up at Henry's! Thursday, Jan 23, 5 - 7pm. Happy Hour until 6
No-Host chance to hang out together
Take the Street Car to 10 NW 12th!
5. Save the Date: Everyone Needed for Info Picket,
Thurs., Feb 27th, 11:30 - 1:30, in the Park Blocks.
News:
Will We Have to Strike?
Current Status of Bargaining
Will We Have to Strike?
The PSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors is working to:
Reverse the Momentum to De-Professionalize Our Work
It’s Bad for Students whose Tuition and Debt Pay the Bills
Stop the Slide to Short-term Contracts, Weak Retention and Limited Advancement
Renew our Commitment to Students and Education as Driving Priorities
Stop Bleeding Academics for Administration & Auxiliaries, like Athletics & Real Estate
Maintain Faculty and AP Power
Educators Should Continue to Hold Power to Co-Govern Our University
Clearly, it's not just PSU; all over the country, faculty & APs are up against the bad ideas. But it's here at PSU that we can push back, in the interest of students, higher education and the future.
Will we have to strike to stop the erosion and reverse course?
We might. Gains in bargaining result from either:
a) a strong, shared sense of where we need to go.....oh, well....OR
b) bringing effective pressure to bear.
There's only so much we can accomplish at the bargaining table, with arguments, data, creativity and staying power, even with the students hanging in there with us.
The ultimate forms of pressure available to us are a No COnfidence vote in the Administration and/or a Strike.
And over 400 people have signed cards, calling on the AAUP Executive Council to consider all options, up to and including a strike. But don't worry, before we would call a strike, we would both conduct a confidential, on-line survey of members and hold a formal Strike Authorization Vote.
Hopefully we can shift the PSU Administration without having to go that far.
Our best strategy is to
* continue to negotiate to the best our abilities, as we will in a 5th all-day mediation session scheduled for Monday, Jan 27,
* bring as much pressure to bear as we can, short of a strike or No Confidence vote, and
* prepare to strike or hold a No Confidence vote, if need be.
To create that pressure, we need to get our message out that PSU's going in the wrong direction, and faculty, including APs, are determined to turn it around via
Weekly Tabling: contact Marissa Johnson (marissa@psuaaup.net) to sign up for a one or two hour shift - more fun than you might guess! The first available opportunity is Weds, Jan 22nd, 3:30 - 5:30 at the Max stop near Cafe Yumm.
Regular Flyering of Campus Buildings: contact Mary King (maryking219@gmail.com) to join the flyering team - easy and effective!
Write a Letter to the Editor, to the Oregonian, the Tribune, the Willamette Week, the Mercury, anyone you can think of!
Save the Date for an Info Picket: Thurs., Feb 27th, 11:30 - 1:30 in the Park Blocks - We'll Need Everyone!
* * * * * *
Current Bargaining Status
Our goals are big, but the process of bargaining is incremental, where we're pushing to
1. Maintain faculty control of promotion and tenure guidelines - which includes the fixed term ranks, post-tenure review and language governing merit pay - as well as guarantees of "past practices," which means unwritten policies governing working conditions.
For decades our contract has required the Admin to obtain faculty consent to change Faculty Senate language or past practices. The Admin wants to eviscerate these contract protections while positioning the President as "President of the Faculty," capable of over-riding the Faculty Senate. The timing is not accidental, as a new governing Board for PSU may no longer be subject to the legal weight given promotion and tenure guidelines by the Oregon Administrative Rules.
The Admin HAS given up on yanking language governing AP evaluations out of the contract, and on eliminating the developmental & participatory aspects of AP evaluations, though they still want to gut Article 8 on Past Practices and Article 14 on Promotion & Tenure Guidelines.
2. Provide multi-year contracts after 4 years at PSU, as at U of O, to all fixed term faculty, who now represent 42% of full-time faculty.
Students and colleagues must be able to rely on the continued presence of experienced, productive fixed-term faculty members, currently being officially "non-renewed" every December, regardless of Chairs' wishes to retain strong contributors. Buzz on campus is that a record proportion of fixed-term faculty received notice that they would not be renewed this year, including someone who's been teaching at PSU for 25 years!
Intensive English Language Program faculty fear that their entire program is slated to be contracted out. That would mean not only the loss of a unit that regularly "turns a large profit," but also is both integrated with and accountable to the larger University.
In the last mediation session, the Admin backed off their proposal to shorten non-renewal notice requirements for fixed term faculty, but has yet to agree to any improvements in stability for fixed-term faculty, or to "non-renewing" only those people who won't be hired back in the fall.
3. Obtain nominal pay increases that AT LEAST keep us up with inflation, and make some progress on comparators. In my department, we spend way too much time and money replacing people who've left in mid-career, and we hear that recruitment and retention are wide-spread problems. We are also pushing to repeat the AP "compression adjustment," to provide some reward for experience.
During mediation on the 13th, the Admin team moved slightly to suggest a 1.5% pay increase to everyone in the unit in Feb 2014, and 1.5% pay increase - all in merit pay - in Jan 2015.
This proposal would NOT even keep us up with inflation, and would put us even farther behind our comparators. Nothing but a small pool of merit pay is a repellent prospect and very poor management: maximum hard feelings for very little money.
PSU-AAUP is arguing for recognizing merit in the form of significant raises upon evaluation, promotion and post-tenure review. In addition, we've made proposals for compensation at historical rates for summer session, when courses are canceled abruptly, for development of on-line courses and for paid parental leave as at the U of O. To these proposals, we've had no response, until last week, when the Admin proposed a joint task-force to look into family-friendly policies.
4. Improve Academic Quality. When bargaining the previous contract, we called for goals and benchmarks for several metrics of academic quality. For this contract, we are proposing the creation of task-forces with representation from ASPSU, Faculty Senate, the Admin and PSU-AAUP to propose a path forward in several areas. In addition, we have proposed a cap on the size of on-line courses.
On this proposal, we have heard nothing, other than that our suggestion is "ludicrous" that Administrators be evaluated by the campus community.