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PSU-AAUP President Emily Ford expressing PSU-AAUP’s solidarity with PCCFFAP
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Late last night our union siblings at Portland Community College Faculty Federation and Academic Professionals (PCCFFAP) won tentative agreement with historic improvements. The tentative agreement (pending members’ ratification) includes roughly a 20% pay increase for faculty and Academic Professionals between September 2023 and September 2024 and more for part-timers. This bargaining breakthrough came after PSU-AAUP folks and many more rallied alongside our PCCFFAP colleagues on Sunday.
An exciting revitalization is happening across the labor movement nationally and across the academic labor movement regionally. Portland Community College faculty and Academic Professionals’ win comes after University of Oregon grad workers won up to 45% raises, and workers at Washington State University won 39% raises in just the last two weeks.
Just as our PCCFFAP colleges cultivated sufficient people power to move intransigent administrations to win historic improvements, across our campus PSU-AAUP members are reverse engineering similar gains by doing a couple of things:
- Filling out their bargaining survey, asking colleagues to fill out theirs, and thereby getting each department to supermajority support on bargaining surveys, to make a strong case to administrators why we need a fair contract.
- Attend the practice picket happening for SEIU classified staff on Feb 8th at noon starting at the Urban Plaza. This is a statewide day of action as classified staff at Oregon's public universities demand respect and a fair contract on the first day of mediation for their new contract. There will also be a 5 pm picket at the Helen Gordon Center. More info here.
- Reply to this email to schedule a time for your departmental colleagues to discuss with our bargaining team what improvements in our teaching and working conditions you'd like in our upcoming contract. Additionally, to discuss the next steps as a department to get ready to win a contract that appropriately invests in us, the faculty and academic professionals who make PSU run.
- Joining the Contract Action Team to help make sure your department is taking all the steps to win a great contract by replying to this email.
- Attend our February 22nd general membership meeting (rescheduled RSVP links below).
As unionized Portland Community College faculty and academic professionals showed us, if enough of us take the above steps now, we’ll reverse engineer the power we need to win the learning conditions our students deserve in bargaining. |
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