1. Fun Facts! Administrative Pay, Part 1!
2. Hardball Tactics at the Bargaining Table to Shove Us Backward
3. What You Can Do Now to Push for a Decent Contract
4. Sign Adjunct Faculty's On-line Petition
5. PSU-AAUP Sponsored Workshop Bullying in the Workplace:
How to Create a Health Workplace Environment, Nov 6th, Noon, SMSU 327-328
1. Fun Facts! Administrative Pay, Part 1
Are you hearing that PSU is broke? Maybe we have odd priorities....
Salaries paid to administrators rose 13% over the last 2 years, by $5 million
(ok, by $4,959,634)!!!! $5 million would pay for
* 1.6 new Endowed Professorships a year, or
* a 5% raise for all AAUP bargaining unit members a year, or
* tuition and fees for more than 500 undergrads a year.
The Admin payroll expanded by
(1) adding new Administrators - PSU employed 51 people with ranks of
Assistant Dean and above in 2012, up from 31 in 2002!
(2) paying new Admin hires much more than people they replaced,
e.g. the Provost "earns" $65k MORE than our previous Provost, and
(3) giving all administrators the same pay increase AAUP negotiated for members,
though, you know, they come in high, don't pay dues or help bargain.....
2. Hardball Pressure at the Bargaining Table to Shove us Backward
After a single exchange of full package proposals and more than 5 weeks before the contract expires, the PSU Admin negotiating team is calling in a mediator, because "we're so far apart." But formal "mediation" is not what you think - there's no fact finding or facilitation to find common ground. There's just a mediator spending a day shuttling between the two negotiation teams in two different rooms, asking if anyone's changed their minds.
It's a power play to cut off negotiations, by a team that seems to lack
* decision-making authority to engage in any real negotiation,
* an understanding that they need provide any evidence for their assertions,
* much sense of the academic enterprise or conditions at PSU, and
* quite possibly, any influence with the real decision-makers.
I don't know the legal definition of good faith negotiation, but this
sure doesn't feel like it.
While the PSU-AAUP team has compromised from initial proposals for a contract like that just ratified at the U of O, the PSU Admin has not budged, from an "offer" to:
* Cut Salary, after accounting for inflation
* Cut Job Security: no multi-year contracts for Fixed-Term Faculty; less notice of non-renewal than now; a new "understanding" that junior faculty on the tenure track can be let go, despite good performance and high program demand
* Cut Protection for Promotion & Tenure and Evaluation Language: Learning about higher education on the job while being paid $166k, PSU's new, first General Counsel is pushing to gut the PSU contract because he doesn't "think this language belongs in the contract" despite its inclusion in U of O's and universities all over the country. We'll lose decades of shared governance work with no evidence that it doesn't work well, other than the ridiculous assertion that it's AAUP's fault that PSU faculty don't go through Post-Tenure Review in adequate numbers. It couldn't be that PSU Administration doesn't request individuals to go through review, or that faculty don't see the payoff to volunteering.
I don't see how the PSU-AAUP negotiating team could possible recommend that its members ratify a contract like this. When VP Rimai has presented budget forecasts, she has assumed a salary increase for faculty of 3% each year, keeping faculty just marginally ahead of inflation. That's not what we're being "offered" at the table.
If we don't agree to this package in "mediation," we'll be on track toward a moment when the PSU Admin can impose this contract on us, unless we strike.
To get a decent contract this fall, PSU's classified staff had to vote to authorize its bargaining team to call a strike if they couldn't negotiate a deal that they thought their members would ratify.
It's time to bring all the pressure that we can to bear on the PSU administration to offer its faculty decent wages and working conditions, and build the University our students deserve. Increasing use of part-time instructors and failing to commit to retention of full-time faculty, all the while relying on student debt to expand Administration and finance lousy real estate deals is destroying public higher education in Oregon, with PSU in the lead.
3. What You Can Do Now to Push for a Decent Contract
The PSU Admin won't move unless they believe that faculty are following bargaining and care about the outcomes. They'd rather think it's just a few cranks in the union who think our students deserve a full-time faculty.
The most effective things you can do now are
1. Wear your PSU-AAUP lanyard at work every day!
2. Talk to your colleagues about what's going on.
3. Most Importantly, come out to Faculty Senate on Monday, Nov. 4th in CH 53
anytime you can between 2:50 pm and 5 pm, in red shirts and lanyards.
PSU-AAUP VP for Bargaining Ron Narode will update the Faculty Senate on
Bargaining. Come out to show the Administrators that we can't be taken
for granted.
4. Come to the Caucus Meetings to plan next steps:
AP Caucus: Tues, Oct. 29th, Noon - 1:30, SMSU 238
Fixed Term Teaching & Research Faculty Caucus: Weds, Oct. 30th,
Noon - 1:30, SMSU 294
Tenure-line Caucus: Weds, Nov. 13, Noon to 1:30, SMSU 333
4. Sign Petition in Support of Adjunct Faculty
Conditions for adjunct faculty are abominable, and make it entirely too tempting to replace a full-time, stable faculty with inexpensive adjunct labor.
Send the Administration a message that tells them that full-time faculty recognize the contribution of part-time faculty to PSU by taking a moment to click on this link to sign their online petition.
http://action.aft.org/c/537/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=7283
5. PSU-AAUP Co-Sponsoring a Workshop on Bullying at the Workplace: How to Create a Healthy Workplace Environment, Noon to 1:30, SMSU 327-328
PSU-AAUP is co-sponsoring this workshop, with SEIU and PSUFA. Lunch provided!
Helen Moss of U of O's Labor Education and Research Center will present and facilitate.