Higher education staff and leaders, as well as our members, are interested in what happens on the local level. Telling The Advocate about your organizing, contracts, lawsuits, and grievances activities can introduce your colleagues to new concepts in bargaining, warn them of pitfalls you've encountered, or begin a discussion around an issue of importance to a number of campuses. Join the discussion now!

Organizing

Campus Activities

Contracts

Organizing

The Central Washington University has refused to recognize the United Faculty of Central as collective bargaining agent for the university's faculty.

The Board of Trustees took this action despite a majority faculty vote last year for representation by the union, a joint affiliate of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

State law permits---but does not require---the university to bargain with the union. The UFC has vowed to keep up the pressure for recognition.

Waukesha (Wisconsin) County Technical College full- and part-time faculty and their community supporters delivered 300 signed pro-union cards to the college's board of trustees recently.

The message: stop using taxpayer money to try to thwart faculty unionization efforts.

The administrators at the Waukesha college have bitterly resisted an Association campaign to win union rights for all faculty.

Campus Activities

A survey of NEA members in California's community colleges and state universities finds they like their jobs and support their NEA affiliates in bargaining and political action.

Other findings: California members want autonomy for their colleges, higher standards for themselves and their students, and more professional development support from their colleges and Associations.

A jury has awarded a Texas Faculty Association activist $250,000 in damages and lost wages.

The jury made the award after finding Prairie View A&M University guilty of maliciously violating the civil rights of William A. Foster, III, a former math professor at the college.

Foster, an outspoken defender of faculty rights, was the leader of a movement that created a Texas Faculty Association chapter on campus.

In defending Foster, the TFA charged the university with violating Foster's First Amendment rights.

Contracts

Full- and part-time faculty members of the Massachusetts Society of Professors and the Faculty Staff Union, NEA's higher education affiliates at the University of Massachusetts, have won significant improvements in a recently negotiated contract extension.

The three-year agreement, already approved by the faculty and the governor, is awaiting final legislative action.

The contract calls for a 15 percent salary increase over three years for full-timers. The pact also provides salary increases and, for the first time, full health and pension benefits for part-timers who teach at least two courses per semester.

You can view details on the settlement on the Web at: www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~msp2.

After a three-year organizing effort, faculty members at the College of the Siskiyous in Weed (California) have won a first contract providing an 11 percent salary increase.

Faculty began to organize more than three years ago for a unit that included part-time instructors.

Besides the pay increases, negotiators were able to compress the salary schedule to max out after 20 years.

Determined faculty action has produced a new contract and a 12 percent salary increase for faculty at Kern Community College in California.

The faculty organized picketing, support demonstrations for the negotiating team, and other actions, including a membership drive that increased the Association's numbers by 50 percent.

Pasadena City College faculty have also conducted a membership drive to demonstrate negotiations support for their NEA local affiliate.

The result: a one-year contract with a 4 percent salary increase and enhanced severance pay for retiring faculty.