Uncommon Sense
The Newsletter of the United Faculty of
(an FEA [AFT & NEA] affiliate)
Volume 12, Number 1 Summer, 2004
The Voice
of the University Professional
Waiting for a Contract
We are going into our fourth semester without a contract.
The two teams began bargaining in earnest last November, after UFF USF Chapter President Roy Weatherford growled at the Board.
The union pushed for the language of the old contract, while the administration presented a sequence of novel proposals, generally unsuccessfully. Twenty-four articles have been TA’d, with language very similar to the old contract. That leaves seven, including Article 23 on salary. On May 28, the administration presented proposed language for all seven articles as a single take-it-or-leave-it package, with the warning that the press would soon have it (and indeed the press did have it within hours).
In negotiations, from employment contracts to peace treaties, the standard theory is that when someone starts broadcasting proposals to the press, they aren’t serious. The reason is that broadcasted proposals are difficult to modify in bargaining: broadcasting a proposal either underlines an ultimatum or is meant to impress someone outside the bargaining room.
The proposal presented was for a very complex pay system that combined compression/ inversion (for faculty who
have low salaries as a result of low raises over decades) corrections with merit and
a large, completely unrestricted discretionary component, all into one pot. And that was just for generating scores used to determine raises: there was no indication of how the scores would translate into raises except that at least a fourth of the faculty would get no raises at all. The summer school payroll would be plundered to make it go. And it was a three-year plan, with raises for the second and third years to be offered only if the administration felt like it.
And this was advertised as a 12 % raise, or 11.5 % raise, over three years. (Actually, it would have been an average 11.9 % raise if the administration hadn’t been counting as “raises” a $ 1,000 bonus from the legislature).
Anyway, while
this package has consumed a lot of time, and is still consuming time, it looks
like the teams will be able to present the Board and the
Mechanics
All the previous contracts had been negotiated in
The USF
Administration agreed in March, 2003 to bargain a new contract. This is not
the same as a successor contract: when
there is a disagreement over what contract language means, the dispute is taken
to an impartial arbitrator, whose ruling is binding. All the rulings over past contracts would
hold for a successor contract, but not
for a new contract. To that extent, the
USF Administration has already reneged on President Genshaft’s
assurance that the USF Administration would not use the university reorganization
to harm faculty or the union.
The two sides quickly agreed to go by the table of contents of the old contract.
The old contract (which is on-line at < ftp://ftp.cs.fiu.edu/pub/berkt/UFF/2001-2003_BOR-UFF_CBA.pdf> as a huge .pdf document) consists of 32 articles.
The bargaining procedure was a standard one: an article would be bargained, and once the language for that article was agreed upon, the two chief negotiators would tentatively agree (TA) to it by initialing it. Once the entire contract is TA’d, it must be ratified by the Board of Trustees and by the faculty. Only after ratification do any of the terms and conditions of the contract come into force.