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Advocate Online
Speaking Out
Keep in Touch With Members
Serving a local of almost 1800 members, comprising academic and support professionals, ranging from physicians to administrative assistants to Web developers and more than 100 other staff classifications, has proven to be a challenge. At Michigan State University, our members work in more than 100 separate buildings and are classified into at least that many separate work categories.
Though this may not sound like your higher education institution, we probably share a concern: the need to increase outreach and member participation.
We can all agree that the best means to achieve a strong union is through active participation of the membership. So, while we all have our personal lives to attend to and responsibilities beyond our job, it is important to find ways to be more effective in communicating with members.
Over the past year and a half, the executive board of our local Association has implemented new avenues for communication, using the Internet. Leading up to bargaining for our new contract last year, we canvassed the membership using an online survey to gain a better understanding of what their concerns were. While the bargaining was taking place, we created a listserv and e-mailed the membership frequently, keeping our members informed of progress during bargaining. We again surveyed the members after the contract was ratified to provide an open forum for members to ask questions that may have resulted from the newly negotiated contract.
Another technological tool we implemented a year ago was online voting, using it for the first time in ratifying our tentative agreement. Historically, contact ratification vote participation was marginal at best. It was common for only 10 percent of our general membership to even cast a ballot on the issue. Electronic voting substantially increased levels of participation. During the most recent contract ratification vote, roughly 600 members cast ballots.
Change was scary and difficult for my local at MSU, but once we embraced these opportunities they proved to be for the betterment of our Association. As a result, we were better informed of the topics our membership wanted negotiated in our contract; online voting resulted in an increase of nearly 300 percent in ballots cast; finally, improved communication through our Web site and listserv has led to higher member turnout at our monthly union meetings.
 Maurice Koffman, serves on the executive board of the Administrative Professional Association/MEA-NEA at Michigan State University. For more on the challenges and successes in implementing new technology, contact Maurice at Koffman@msu.edu.
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I'd like to say!
December’s Thriving in Academe concludes by asking, “What can faculty do to help students and push them to finish their reading?”
As an adjunct assistant professor of professional communications at Farmingdale State College of New York (SUNY Farmingdale), I teach two classes: Report and Technical Writing and Documentation Procedures. These evening classes meet for 150 minutes once a week. Keeping student’s attention is a challenge, and their ability to participate is greatly reduced if they have not done the reading.
Students do come to my classes having read the assigned texts. I believe that these students do the reading for two simple reasons:
Affordability: Books in my classes never cost more than $30 total. Keeping book costs reasonable shows thoughtfulness. Many students have told me that they do the reading because they are grateful for the low cost of the books.
Outcomes: The reading assignments support writing assignments, and many writing assignments may be published. Of the 96 students in my classes over the past five semesters, 17 have published 21 articles in local and regional media, ranging from local community weeklies to The New York Times. The possibility of being published in a newspaper was a great motivator for students.
—Howard Gold
SUNY Farmingdale
Share
your opinion
Write to the editor at:
Clehane@nea.org
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