NEA Affiliates in Action

Faculty organizers at Columbus State Community College in Ohio began a card drive at the beginning of the fall semester intended to bring the college administration to the bargaining table.

The issues: erosion of academic freedom and over-reliance on part-time instructors. But the major impetus for organizing came when faculty discovered the college's internal grievance arbitration procedure had no teeth without a union behind it.

The California Community College Association used a 1998-99 NEA Higher Education Competitive Organizing Grant to spark a membership drive netting approximately 1,000 new members.

Most of the CCA membership growth came among part-time members after CCA produced a special brochure aimed at part-timers, visited 13 chapters, and held 44 workshops geared to part-time faculty interests.

Visit www.ccafca.org in October for more.

Faculty and classified staff at Youngstown State University in Ohio have reached new contract agreements. For the faculty, the three-year contract strengthens faculty rights in distance learning and intellectual property, increases salary, and holds the line on workload.

YSU classified staff won a 9 percent salary increase over the life of the contract and release time for union members to make recommendations on any university proposal to contract out unit work. This supplements existing contract language that bars layoffs resulting from contracting out.

Embattled full-time faculty at Oregon's Mount Hood Community College will begin the new school year with their contract firmly in place.

The agreement reached with a strike looming at the end of last semester provides faculty a salary increase and blocks management attemps to rollback academic freedom and other faculty rights.

Bergen County's GEAR UP project, one of 164 grants funded by the U.S. Department of Education is a cooperative effort that joins the Bergen Community College Faculty Association, the Englewood Public Schools Teachers Association, the Bergen County Education Association Retired Teachers, the New Jersey Education Association, and NEA.

"The project plan is simple," notes Bergen Community College professor and NEA Director Peter Helf: "to provide high-risk, low-income middle school students with rigorous academic preparation and supportive services needed to successfully complete their education through the associate and baccalaureate levels or higher."

Other partners include the Englewood Parents Association, the Urban League of Bergen County, the Hispanic American Alliance, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women/ Bergen/Passaic Chapter, and the First Baptist Church Nubian Academy.

Almost half of the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College faculty turned out for a first-of-its-kind "professional unionism" conference sponsored by the college's NEA affiliate Faculty Association this past August.

In the day-long meeting, NWTC faculty worked with facilitators to define New Unionism at the college. The college's president and vice president for learning attended the entire conference and took part in the discussion.

"What transpired on August 17 was phenomenal," said Association president Mary Cuene. "A new day has dawned and an amazing collaboration has begun."

In mid-September, 80 percent of the faculty ratified a new Faculty Association contract that opened up a new era of professional unionism, creating academic teams of faculty and administrators to work on planning and scheduling.

"New unionism is about taking responsibility for the quality of education," Sheila Simmons, a staffer in NEA's Public Education Advocacy Office, told those attending the conference. "It's using our advocacy tools to make things better for students."

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