NEA Affiliates in Action

Organizing
The Illinois Education Association adjunct organizing bandwagon continues to roll through Chicago and its suburbs. The adjunct faculty at the seven Chicago City Colleges are the latest group of part-time faculty to climb on board, joining their part-time colleagues from the College of DuPage, Columbia College, and Roosevelt University, all of whom have unionized in recent years.

In a union representation election held at the end of February, Chicago City College adjunct faculty chose IEA-NEA over a competing union and a no-union option by a vote of 87-63-2. A number of votes were challenged and the number of part-timers eligible to vote was limited by Illinois’s arcane bargaining law, which now requires that adjuncts must teach six hours in two consecutive semesters to be eligible to vote, but the outcome was not in doubt.

IEA continues to work in the state legislature to broaden the Illinois bargaining law to include adjuncts teaching three hours in two consecutive semesters.

Contracts
The Southern Illinois University Carbondale Faculty Association has reached an agreement on a new contract with the university’s Board of Trustees, avoiding a strike scheduled to begin last February.

“We have gained much, such as a fixed faculty-student ratio, job security, and salary increases that are not contingent on money allocated by the legislature for salaries,” said Association President Morteza Daneshdoost. “But we are not satisfied. There is much more to be done. We must now work to achieve workload definitions, administrative accountability, and faculty involvement in programmatic changes.”

The new contract provides that no faculty will be laid off during the life of the contract, and the university agreed also to a good faith effort to ensure a student FTE to faculty line ratio of not more than 26 to 1. In addition, a joint labor-management committee will meet this spring to create binding contract language on intellectual property, copyrights, and distance learning.

Campus Activities
The Massachusetts Teachers Association Higher Education Leadership Council has launched a campaign to stop Governor Mitt Romney’s attempt to reorganize the state’s higher education system.

Romney’s plan includes mergers and consolidations of campuses and the privatization of at least two of the state’s colleges. Overall, the governor’s plan would cut more than $150 million in state funding from higher education and produce massive layoffs.

The governor also proposed changes to the state’s collective bargaining law, retirement system, and employee health insurance program that would negatively impact higher ed faculty and staff. For more on the MTA fight to preserve public higher education, visit www.massteacher.org and click on the higher education icon.

Despite the state’s dismal budget picture, the California Community College Association, (CCA) NEA’s California community college affiliate, is battling through letters, visits to legislators in Sacramento and in district offices, and in appeals through the media, to save higher education from the budget ax.

In one major effort, CCA brought over 400 local presidents to lobby the state legislature in Sacramento and continue to keep up the pressure in their home legislative districts.

CCA is fighting a proposed $530 million—or 10 percent—cut in state funding for 2003-04 and a proposed increase in student fees from $11 per unit to $24 per unit.

"We are trying to be very clear that California’s community colleges cannot afford to take these massive cuts,” said CCA President Dián Hasson.

A campaign by the Southwestern College Education Association (CA) to elect at least one new trustee to the college’s Board of Trustees last fall appears to have been a key factor in the announcement of the retirement of the college president, who, the faculty said, had excluded them from decision-making and taken other actions detrimental to the college.

”In December, the new board was sworn in, and in January the president announced he would retire by 2004,” said Corina Soto, president of the Southwestern College Education Association.