NEA Affiliates in Action

Organizing
A quarter century after their first attempt at unionization, the faculty of Florida Community College at Jacksonville has won collective bargaining rights. By an almost two-to-one margin, the college's full-time professors voted in April to join the United Faculty of Florida, an affiliate of the Florida Education Association, a merged NEA-AFT state organization.

Nearly 80 percent of the college's 375 eligible faculty members voted in a campaign that took 18 months to bring to fruition.

The Illinois Education Association has kicked off a campaign to bring bargaining rights to about 400 nontenured faculty at Illinois State University.

These educators comprise about 40 percent of the university's teaching staff, notes the Nontenure-track Faculty Association, the NEA affiliate leading the drive. Issues center on equal pay for equal work in comparison with tenure-track staff. Other concerns are fringe benefits and job security.

Contracts
The California Faculty Association's new collective bargaining agreement with the California State University system, recently overwhelmingly approved by the Association's membership, contains a number of provisions aimed at making the California State Univ-ersity System a more family-friendly place to work—in addition to improvements in salary, benefits, and workload.

New provisions include expanding the definition of family to include blended families and domestic partner for bereavement leave, and use of sick leave for family care.
The contract also provides an opportunity for faculty members—if they choose—to stop the tenure clock for any year during which they choose to use parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child.

The new agreement also increases parental leave from 20 to 30 days. In addition, new parents have 60 days after the birth or adoption of a child to apply for paid parental leave. This means members who have June babies are entitled to apply for leave.

Campus Activities
The New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled that adjunct professors at Keene State College are not temporary employees and ordered the college to recognize the adjunct professors' union. In 1999, the state labor board had ruled that adjunct professors who were teaching at the time, and those who had taught in two out of the previous three semesters, were eligible to unionize.

Following this decision, a majority of the adjuncts voted to form a union on April 26, 2000. But the university system appealed the board's ruling to the State Supreme Court.

Even though the university and the adjunct union have been negotiating for 18 months, progress has been slow because of the pending appeal. "Now," says Keene State College Adjunct Association President Ellen Moynihan, "it's full speed ahead for a first contract."

The Lehigh County Community College Faculty Association is the latest Pennsylvania NEA local to reach 100 percent membership.

"Nils Hovik, the Association president, worked hard to reach out to all of the nonmembers," notes UniServ director Paul Gottlieb. "Plus, it's a negotiation year, and we've made an effort to develop a sense of solidarity among the faculty."

More than 90 percent of the 250-member faculty at Northwest Technical College in northwest Minnesota voted "no confidence" in the college's president last month, prompting him to announce his resignation effective this June.

The vote was a culmination of high faculty frustration with the president over the last few years, said Ed Schones and Larry Oveson, co-presidents of Minnesota State College Faculty, the joint NEA-AFT affiliate representing the state's two-year college faculty.

"The faculty of NTC has clearly said that it is time to find a president who is more in tune with the values of the communities of northwest Minnesota," Schones said.

MSCF Co-President Larry Oveson noted that the administration failed to seek faculty input on issues that affect them, or when it did gather that input, failed to act on it.