The University administration has provided the campus community with a useful comparison of our respective final offers and cost summaries, which were submitted to the Employment Relations Board on February 27. However, some of the commentary that accompanies this comparison, as well as a second University Statement about Ongoing Negotiations with AAUP, would benefit from additional information and perspective, which the AAUP collective bargaining team (CBT) offers below.
1. New Shared Governance Processes in the CBA?
The administration states that our proposal would “create a new shared governance process to be completed before any layoff notice period starts.” The second part of that statement is correct, the first is not. We have not proposed a new process, only that the process established by the Faculty Senate for making curricular and programmatic changes be completed before layoff notices are issued. The administration is correct when they assert that “the CBA governs employment relations, not shared governance.” However, when the contract conditions certain employment relations on the fulfillment of certain shared-governance obligations, even when the latter live outside the contract, the two realms are not so neatly segregated.
The administration has objected, primarily in its responses to grievances submitted on behalf of laid-off nontenure-track faculty, that requiring the completion of shared governance processes before layoff notices is “nonsensical.” They say that requiring the elimination of course offerings before effecting layoffs means employing these faculty without assigning them any work. But notice of layoff is one thing, actual layoff is another. In many, if not most, cases of curricular change due to program reduction or elimination, faculty are retained after notices have been issued for teach-out purposes. And if there really is no work for someone who has received a layoff notice, we have proposed – and the administration has accepted – contract language that allows the University to substitute severance pay for timely notice.
2. Weakened Job Protections for Tenured Faculty?
According to the administration, “the AAUP proposal appears to reduce the job security of tenured faculty by allowing the University to lay off tenured faculty without going through the Article 22 process.” If Article 22 really was the only way to lay off tenured faculty, we would not be proposing new contract language. In fact, the PSU Standard 580-021-0315 provides for tenured-faculty layoffs, including for reasons related to program or department reductions or eliminations, when the president determines that they are “consistent with institutional goals and needs.” These protections seem too flimsy to us, so we want to incorporate language from the Standard into the contract so at least these protections would be subject to contractual grievance procedures absent from the Standard itself. This strengthens job security, it does not weaken it, and we cannot explain why the administration arrives at the opposite conclusion. In any event, if the administration wants to stipulate that tenured faculty may only be laid off pursuant to Article 22, they will meet with no resistance from us.
3. Severance Package for Laid-off Faculty
The administration notes that we did not directly counter its proposed MOA providing severance pay and other assistance to the NTTFs who had received layoff notices. That’s true, but why would we? We have always hoped that we could negotiate a reversal of the layoffs and turning to the matter of severance packages would be to concede. We did, however, engage on the matter of tuition benefits for the dependents of laid-off faculty who, in addition to losing their jobs, might be faced with the additional prospect of pulling their kids from attendance at other Oregon public universities. We agreed to the scholarship idea proposed by the administration, which would help fund the continuation of these dependents’ education at PSU for up to four years, long enough to finish their degrees. But we wanted this in the contract as a benefit available to members who may be laid off in the future. This was a compromise on our part because we believe that the University’s Reduced Tuition Policies provide that laid-off employees remain eligible for the staff fee privilege.
The administration does not tell the whole truth about another provision in their MOA, severance pay. They state the MOA was provided in December, and that it included a one-time payment of $20,000. Not so. It wasn’t until the end of January that they proposed an actual amount for this severance payment, but even then, it was contained in a separate Voluntary FTE Reduction (VFR) proposal they floated, not the MOA, which simply included placeholders for severance payments. We did finally see the full severance package being proposed by the administration on February 27; it is contained in their final offer.
4. Voluntary FTE Reduction and Layoff Reversal
When we informed members that the contract negotiations were at an impasse, we stated that the administration’s willingness to consider a VFR program to generate cost savings sufficient to reverse the NTTF layoffs had given us hope that a mutually agreeable solution was on the horizon. The administration’s summary of their proposed program is accurate, as far as it goes. However, the proposal also included the requirement that we accept their proposals on all other issues still outstanding in the contract negotiations, both economic and non-economic. Although their VFR proposal stipulated that, upon agreement, we and they take joint ownership of the collaboration necessary to arrive at a solution, their initial midnight take-it-or-leave-it deadline did not exactly live up to our (perhaps naïve) notion of collaboration and joint ownership. Nevertheless, we persisted and have continued to refine our version of the VFR program, which we have presented to the administration for their consideration. We are still determined to find a way forward.