Late last week PSU-AAUP was approached by Administration with a request:Would we agree to Administration sidestepping necessary layoff notices for NTTF employees?
Our bargaining team unanimously said no.
Our contract stipulates how NTTF must be notified of layoffs resulting from programmatic changes; Department Chairs must tell NTTF why they might be laid off 60 days or more prior to official termination notice.
“As soon as practicable, but no later than 60 days prior to issuing a notice of termination, the Department Chair must provide written justification for the decision and explanation of the applicable shared governance procedure to the faculty members, the Dean, the Provost and the Association.” p. 40
Administration claims that they don’t yet know which programs will be directly affected by their cuts this year, though they are already preparing to send termination notices in December. Instead of following the due process bargained by PSU-AAUP and ratified by you and your co-workers, Administration seeks “flexibility” from PSU-AAUP to terminate positions without the notice to which members are entitled.
This is not the first time Administration has asked PSU-AAUP to subvert our hard bargained contract. The termination of 12 Intensive English Language Program faculty members this June happened outside of contractual provisions. Administration made the decision to eliminate this program and terminate these employees before the Faculty Senate had reviewed any program elimination proposal (which failed in Faculty Senate after employees were already to be terminated), and too late to abide by the necessary notification schedules in the contract. Per the MOU, the IELP layoffs were negotiated to be non-precedential, now Administration is referring to them as having worked well.
In bargaining, Administration continues to assert that they cannot agree to contractual layoff provisions because they need “flexibility” and that they want to attend to layoff situations on a “case-by-case” basis. At the table, Administration proposed eroding our contract so that contractual provisions and discussions with AAUP would apply when layoffs affected more than 10 people in any given unit.
Why do we need to keep these notices?
- Documentation. It offers employees and PSU-AAUP the purported reasons for the termination of positions. This means that together we can work to show why these reasons aren’t good enough.
- Keeping Administration accountable and strategic. It’s clear to us that Administration is scrambling to meet the demands of the Board of Trustees, instead of investing in the mission-critical functions of the university: teaching and learning.
- Contract enforcement. It’s taken 46 years to win all of the protections in our contract. As Administration’s attempt to normalize layoffs outside of our contract as they did with IELP, it’s especially critical we defend the protections in our contract.
- Pushing back against the casualization of academic labor. Nationwide the adjunctification of higher ed has had severe consequences. Mid-twentieth century a supermajority of faculty were full-time and tenured. Today the opposite is true. Administration asserting that an NTTF faculty member getting 60 days notice in the event of a layoff would only exacerbate this trend towards devaluing our work.
What do I do if I get one of these notices?
- Save the email
- Send it to aaup@psuaaup.net
- Organize (see below)
In bargaining our colleagues on the bargaining team are looking to win real, tangible layoff protections. To expand layoff notifications to 12 months to make them equitable across PSU-AAUP’s membership and to win new benefits for faculty and staff who are laid off. The amount we can win depends on the number of members in the room. 122 of us showed up for the last bargaining session, a substantial increase from 86 the previous session and from 44 in our first session. You can help defend and expand our layoff protections by RSVPing to our October 3rd bargaining session here and asking coworkers you know to join you in PSU-AAUP t-shirts. The more colleagues each of us turn out, the stronger we are at the bargaining table.
RSVP to future bargaining sessions
Thursday, October 3rd, 8:30am-4:30pm, Vanport Building, VB 515
1810 SW 5th Ave, Portland, OR 97201