Hello everyone. I am Pam Miller, President of PSU-AAUP and Professor of Social Work. Thank you for being here. Today is the last day of our September 1, 2013 to November 30, 2015 Collective Bargaining Agreement. These two years have passed quickly. The negotiations for our next contract are being done utilizing Interest Based Bargaining or IBB. Today, and thank you to Dr. Gina Greco, in the spirit of IBB, we have a joint presentation today from our union and from administration. Both teams received training in the IBB process and we are all grateful to Janet Gillman, our facilitator from the Employment Relations Board, who without, IBB would not be possible. IBB involves a 7-step process where we identify common interests, we exchange data, we brainstorm options, and we eventually agree on a solution. We began bargaining in May, continued diligently through the summer, and have 4 sessions or 24 hours scheduled in December. We also have many sessions scheduled in January and February with our contract extended to February 29, 2016. We promise we will not wait for another leap year if we have to extend out further. We have bargained about 150 hours or so.
Our bargaining team members are: Leanne Serbulo, VP for CB, Michael Clark from Engineering, Anh Ly, Ron Narode, David Hansen, Gina Greco, Phil Lesch, and Pam Miller. Two students also serve: Eric Noll and Liddy Champion.
Shelly Chabon Vice Provost from OAA will speak to introduce administration’s team and to talk about the numerous accomplishments of IBB to this point.
There are two very important tentative agreements we have made so far. Briefly, NTTF will have job security through continuous appointments. Annual or yearly contracts will be used very little. This is a huge win for us! Thanks to those who sat in the hours and hours of bargaining about this and to those who served and worked on the Article 18 Task Force as this was the backbone for our negotiations.
Second, summer school wages are now IN THE CONTRACT. If you teach in the summer you will be paid at the same rate as during the academic year. Both PSU-AAUP and administration want to take a look at summer session after 2016 to see if there may be other changes or additions to summer employment. Thanks to all of our members who participated in our focus groups, coffees, and at department visits as your efforts contributed to our ability to bring summer pay into our contract.
Shelly will talk about APs and what we are doing now.
We have lots of work ahead and most likely some rough water, with the chance of lightening and thunder! We need to finish our work on APs, and soon move into economics that is a fancy word for money. We will be looking at cost of living adjustments, salary increases, compression, inversion, sabbatical pay, continuous appointments for research faculty, professional development and retirement options. I had a brand new tenure line faculty member pose this question to me recently, “COLAs are automatic, right?” Noooo, I replied. We have to bargain cost of living. We then discussed this faculty member’s serious concerns about rental costs in Portland and whether or not staying at PSU is feasible. This concern is widespread among our membership. Our wages must keep up with inflation!
We also have briefly discussed the possibility of a contract longer than two years so we aren’t in bargaining so much.
Let’s work towards and live our Imagine theme: Higher education that is student-centered, educator-led, and debt free. We have to work together to make this happen. Union is a noun and a verb. Our part-time colleagues in PSUFA are also in negotiations and we are working together for contracts that are fair and equitable for our respective members.
WE will need to ratify all of the tentative agreements that come out of this process. Come to bargaining, participate in our organizing efforts, wear your AAUP swag, monitor the bargaining updates on imagineportlandstate.com, have some fun, talk to your colleagues about their working conditions, consider running for an elected position, continue to demonstrate to our students that we care deeply about their education and their experience on this campus, and last not least…be proud of our union! PSU-AAUP!!