NEA Affiliates in Action

Organizing
The Waukesha County Technical Educators Association's four-year battle to restructure the college's faculty bargaining unit has finally produced a single faculty union representing virtually all of the college's faculty, after faculty in the last unorganized sector of the college voted for unionization last month.

"The college's unionized faculty saw that more and more of the college's courses were being taught by non-union teachers and recognized that this trend was not in the long-term interest of the faculty, the college, or the students," notes Wisconsin Education Association Council staffer Leigh Barker.

In the wake of the success in Waukesha, WEAC and its counterpart, the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers, met last month to create a joint task force to begin looking at strategies for organizing the unorganized part-time faculty and professional non-faculty staff in the state's technical colleges.

Campus Activities
The Massachusetts Society of Professors, NEA's affiliate representing University of Massachusetts at Amherst faculty, won a breakthrough agreement in protecting faculty rights in cyberspace recently when university negotiators voluntarily extended the Association's jurisdiction to include the work the Association's members perform in continuing education.

"This is an important first step in negotiating a collective bargaining agreement to cover distance education," notes MSP President Jane Giacobbe.

The recognition agreement comes as the University of Massachusetts works to expand its distance learning capabilities through UMass Online.

Efforts are also under way at UMass Boston to win bargaining rights, through a union election, for those faculty teaching in continuing education or online who are not already represented in a bargaining unit. UMass Boston faculty are represented by the Faculty Staff Union, also an NEA affiliate.

Contracts
After three years of contentious bargaining and ongoing grass-roots activities on campuses across the state, the members of the Massachusetts State College Association have a new contract.

MSCA, NEA's affiliate representing nearly 2,000 faculty and librarians at nine Massachusetts state colleges, reached agreement with the state in March, and the agreement was ratified by the membership and signed by the governor in May.

The new contract provides a 15 percent pay increase over three years for faculty with satisfactory performance ratings, as well as additional merit bonuses of up to $1,500 in the first year of the contract and $2,500 in the second year.

"The membership made enormous sacrifices during the past three years to support the bargaining committee's efforts to preserve tenure and academic freedom and to achieve significant economic gains," notes MSCA president Patricia Markunas.

View details of the settlement at: www.mscaunion.org.

Eighteen months of negotiations finally produced a first contract for members of the Goddard College Employees' Union, one of NEA's newest affiliates.

The new union represents all regular full and part-time faculty in both the campus and off-campus programs at the progressive liberal arts college in Vermont.

The historic ratification vote by 75 percent of those eligible to vote was unanimous in favor of the contract.

The agreement includes pay raises and bonuses of 5 and 6 percent, a grievance and arbitration process, and increased job security. The contract is for three years, except for the salary provisions, which will be rebargained beginning in 2002.

Goddard is one of only a few of the nation's private colleges with a unionized faculty.

The Goddard faculty won recognition by the college's board of trustees during a three-year organizing campaign that gathered momentum after 16 faculty and staff members were fired in 1996.

In November, 1998 the faculty voted overwhelmingly to unionize.