On Monday, September 9 and Tuesday, September 10, your AAUP Collective Bargaining Team was at the bargaining table with PSU Administration, concluding days 5 and 6 of full-day bargaining.
Dozens of colleagues, proud PSU-AAUP members, stopped by to observe bargaining. In the most visible way, your presence shows how committed and serious we are about using our voice to shape PSU.
Three main topics were the focus of bargaining (see detail below):
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Economic matters
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Placement of Academic Professional Faculty into new job families and career paths
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PSU Principal Investigator Eligibility Policy
Next Bargaining Dates
Day 7 of bargaining will be Wednesday, October 2, 9am - 4pm, in Smith 238
Day 8 of bargaining will be Friday, October 11, 9am - 4pm, EB 310
Day 9 of bargaining will be Friday, October 25, 9am - 4pm, in Smith 296/298
Days 5 and 6 We Made Significant Progress in Three Areas
Economics
The economics conversation has begun. We started it earlier than ever, recognizing that we want to allow ample time — months, rather than days — to articulate a vision of university budget priorities, and to obtain all of the budget data required to act on this vision.
The PSU-AAUP and PSU Administration team jointly identified all the issues with a significant budget impact. At our next bargaining date, Wednesday October 2, the economics conversation will continue: the team for PSU Administration will present their university budget process, and the PSU-AAUP will initiate a conversation of the values and priorities that should inform the university budget.
Many of the issues that you — PSU instructional, research, and academic professional faculty — identified as priorities in over 75 focus groups and an online survey have an economic component. To name a few: cost-of-living adjustments to prevent erosion of real salaries; eliminating salary compression/inversion; remedies for salary inequities; salary increases associated with the post-continuous appointment reviews for non-tenure track faculty (analogous to the salary increases associated with post-tenure review for tenure-track faculty); career advancement tracks for academic professional faculty; paid family leave, etc.
New Job Families and Career Tracks for Academic Professional Faculty
We have reported on this before — many times! PSU has designed a new set of job families for academic professional faculty We want to make sure this transition is fair and transparent, and that academic professional faculty get placed in the correct job level. We are also working towards having, for the first time, career tracks for academic professionals.
In our previous bargaining update we communicated with excitement that PSU Admin and PSU-AAUP agreed to put career tracks for academic professional faculty.
On September 9 and 10 we started working on the details of initial placement into new job families and levels. PSU-AAUP and PSU Administration agreed there are three parts to moving academic professionals into new job families and career tracks:
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Position descriptions need to be reviewed. Because inaccurate position descriptions lead to faulty classification that harms academic professionals, accuracy and significant involvement of academic professionals is key.
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Re-Classification Procedure. Because faulty re-classification will also harm academic professionals, the process for re-classification of these colleagues into new job families requires documentation, validation, and must be open to review and replication.
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Appeals Process. In the event there are disagreements about position descriptions or re-classification, an appeals process must be in place that is accessible, supported, and does not discourage or overburden colleagues in this predicament.
At the next bargaining session, on October 2, we will continue working out the details.
MOA on Transition to a New PSU Principal Investigator Eligibility and Responsibility Policy
PSU-AAUP and PSU Administration signed a tentative agreement (TA) on a process for implementing a new PSU Principal Investigator Eligibility and Responsibility Policy. This is something that we’ve been working on for the past year, many months before we started to bargain a new contract.