The day after bargaining collapsed, the administration sent an e-mail to the campus and beyond with the enticing title of “University Offers Significant Faculty Salary Increases.” This was a bold move, given that the administration is legally prohibited from bargaining directly with the faculty. Perhaps it is that prohibition, along with the administration’s often-stated commitment to the “facts” that led them to limit their advertisement to a series of terse and potentially misleading bullet points. Since the UFWW is legally obliged to represent the faculty and keep the faculty genuinely informed about bargaining, we would like to elaborate just a bit on some of the information in the administration’s morning-after missive.
Along with the compensation details, the administration e-mail included a list of some of the other aspects of their latest proposal. One of the items on that list was “Direct involvement of the faculty union on final and binding decisions of discipline and discharge.” This refers to the administration’s proposal for an appeal procedure in a case of suspension without pay and discharge. That proposal contains an Appeals Committee composed of three faculty members appointed by the Union, three non-faculty members appointed by the Board of Trustees, and the Board chair. The Board chair serves as chair of the Appeals Committee and votes only to break a tie.
We continue to believe that binding arbitration is a far superior way to resolve the rare disputes that reach this level. It is the process that the administration has already agreed to with all the classified staff unions on campus and it is in keeping with the fundamental academic principle of impartial outside review. But the administration has regularly expressed squeamishness about binding arbitration and throughout this long bargaining process we have been committed to listening and problem solving. Obviously we could not agree to the administration’s proposal as they offered it--a committee that was both charged with reviewing the firing of a faculty member and composed of a voting majority membership drawn from those who had done the firing would pass no one’s smell test. But after carefully considering the administration proposal we reluctantly offered to agree to the idea of an appeal committee with one small but significant change—that the chair of the committee be someone chosen by and mutually agreeable to both the UFWW and the Board. This would at least retain some degree of objectivity and fairness. The administration rejected our proposal completely.
The administration’s assertion of “Direct involvement of the faculty union on final and binding decisions of discipline and discharge” may be sort of true in the way that direct involvement of the faculty in the breakup of the College of Arts and Sciences was sort of true or direct involvement of the faculty in the hiring of President Shepard was sort of true. But when the career of a faculty member may be at stake, we cannot settle for a “direct involvement” that means three faculty members get to helplessly watch while an administration kangaroo court rubber stamps its own decision.
We can see a similar situation in the administration’s touting of its proposal for a “Complaint procedure” to resolve disputes about workload. This complaint procedure would include appeals to the provost and then to the president, whose decision would be final. The two sides have already reached tentative agreement on a workload article that would keep teaching loads at their current levels. Taking workload out of the grievance process that ends in binding arbitration and putting it into a complaint procedure that ends with the administration would, of course, make the workload article in the contract unenforceable. Maintaining or reducing current teaching loads is crucial to the strategic mission of the university and obviously we cannot agree to a contract where workload decisions are not fully grieveable. It took us sixteen months to get the administration to agree to a workload article that kept teaching loads at current levels, we cannot now give them a back door way to undo that. The members of the administration bargaining team have consistently stated that they have no intention of raising teaching loads, but these are the same people who have consistently stated that they are committed to bringing our salaries up to the 75th percentile of our peers.
Which of course brings us back to that headline of “University Offers Significant Faculty Salary Increases.” It is important here to note that every one of the items on the administration’s list of money temptations—merit pay, increase in chair stipends, senior instructor raises--originated in the very first UFWW proposal (January 31, 2007). The first administration compensation proposal (not presented until nine months after bargaining began) consisted of nothing but a general merit increase that was less than what the legislature appropriated. So an equally true headline for the administration’s e-mail might have been “After 16 Months of Bargaining and a Year With No Salary Increase, University Grudgingly Offers a Shadow of What This Faculty Needs and Deserves.”
We are not especially proud of the fact that there is now just a tiny gap between the administration’s compensation proposal and ours. The only real differences are that our proposal calls for an additional 2% increase in January 2009 and a token amount of money to address the tip of the iceberg of compression. That 2% in 2009 is an amount of money roughly equal to the combined amount the Board will pay its new president and its anti-union lawyer in one year.
The administration’s proposal would leave us falling further behind our peers. Our proposal might keep us from losing any more ground for a little while. Both proposals are woefully inadequate. If this administration were genuinely committed to “significant” faculty salary increases, they would have been working with us all along to do much better and we would have settled this contract long ago.
Instead, they have chosen to walk away from a contract that is 99% complete. They are fully committed to giving us as little as possible while continuing to expect us to do all the extra things that make Western a special experience for our students.
President Morse could retire with some dignity and President Shepard could arrive with some equanimity if they would only do three small things: agree to a legitimate process for discipline and dismissal, keep their promise about workload, and commit the small amount of money we need to keep our already low salaries from dropping any lower.
As they refuse to do these small things, we can only conclude that they are not genuinely interested in reaching a fair agreement with the faculty.