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UMass Campus Coalition Rallies To Keep Campus Services Public
More than 200 University of Massachusetts staff, faculty,
students, and community leaders rally against the university's attempt to
privatize university operations, including the campus bookstore.
"Privatization decreases the quality of life for our students, " NEA
director Rosemary Riley told the demonstrators.
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NEA Affiliates in Action
The first vote, in January, is for administrative assistants, with elections for professionals and supervisors to follow. The administrative staff began the unionization process because they were fed up with a unilateral and arbitrary merit pay system instituted by the university. Higher education organizing is in high gear in Illinois, where NEA’s state affiliate has filed petitions for an election to determine if nearly 700 faculty at Illinois State University will begin collective bargaining there under the NEA banner. Check out the campaign at: www.iea-higher-ed-website.org/isufa/. Illinois organizers will also file election petitions for 450 part-time faculty at Roosevelt University in January.
The agreement also strengthens the employment rights of part-time faculty and creates an academic forum, of faculty, administrators, plus an outside facilitator, that will use a problem-solving approach to resolving academic issues such as the impact of technology on faculty. The Maine Technical College Faculty Association has ratified a new two-year agreement that provides an average increase for faculty of over 11 percent for two years, with some faculty gaining 14 or 15 percent increases over the life of the agreement. The Association, an NEA affiliate, and the Maine Technical College System worked for two years using an interest-based bargaining process to achieve these results.
The law, passed this fall with the support of the California Community College Association and other NEA California affiliates, increases the funding available to the state’s community colleges for part-time faculty health benefits. The new law also increases student access to faculty by providing funds to pay part-timers to hold office hours to meet with students. NEA local affiliates will now negotiate the distribution of the extra state funds on the individual campuses. The law also calls for a comprehensive study of part-time faculty employment and compensation patterns. California community college instructors have also had their say this fall in a California Teachers Association ad campaign aired on commercial radio stations during morning drive time. In the messages, California Community College leaders speak of the coming tidal wave of students and the need for more instructors to teach them and renovated facilities to house them. The campaign is a reminder to the politicians downtown and in Sacramento that “all politics is local,” says CTA. After a successful fall demonstration, the Massachusetts State College Association is continuing its campaign to defeat a Board of Higher Education attempt to take the concept of just cause dismissal out of the current agreement and open the door to arbitrary decision making by the colleges' chief executive officers. “Tenure would be meaningless as a protection against political pressure,” notes MSCA president Bill Murphy. “Academic freedom would be reduced to some kind of romantic afterthought. The spoils system would rule.” The current collective bargaining agreement already gives the employer the right to terminate incompetent faculty, while requiring the employer to shoulder the burden of proof, Murphy notes. |
