Last Thursday 79 PSU-AAUP members attended bargaining, 57 online and 22 in person. Additionally, a City Council candidate, SEIU 503 member, and Jobs with Justice staffer attended. The number of members who attended allowed us to reach a tentative agreement on one article of our contract. Keep up our momentum through RSVPing to our September 5th bargaining session.
Progress is moving more slowly than we would like.
Reduced tuition benefit
The administrative team repeated their objections, based on their perceived difficulty of administering the benefit. At stake is the ability for members who have been laid off and remain on the recall list to continue to access the benefit. We made no headway due to Administration’s delay in providing the data for their presentation of this scheduled topic and eventually moved on to discuss the upcoming economic bargaining process and set future bargaining dates. To this point, we have been bargaining every other Thursday. In order to have a chance of concluding bargaining within the 150-day Oregon public sector bargaining window, we added several additional dates in October and November, and we will have several back-to-back sessions on Thursdays and Fridays in October. RSVPs for these dates are forthcoming.
Equitable union release time
The teams then turned to release time, and the union team is looking for, among other things, equitable release time for Academic Professional (AP) faculty. Since many APs do not teach term-long courses, they need an alternative method for calculating their release time allotment. After a lot of back and forth, the union team felt the matter was well resolved, but the administration team was unwilling to commit to an agreement, saying they needed more time to review the potential language changes.
Lower level issues
Early in the day, the teams reached a tentative agreement (TA) on a lower-level matter, which is the placement of a union bulletin board on campus. The original language required that the bulletin board be located in the Smith Memorial Student Union. The updated language allows for it to be placed in any agreed-upon location on campus.
RSVP to our next session Thursday, September 5 - 8:30am-4:30pm - RMNC 316
Based on the pushback from administration in bargaining over reduced tuition benefit and equitable union release time yesterday, it will be important we have additional members in the room at our next session. Please RSVP and invite your departmental colleagues to do the same here. Ideally, as many of us as possible can attend in person for whatever portion(s) of the day you’re able as that will give us the most bargaining power. |
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