I don’t normally read the AAUP emails I receive once in a while, but I clicked on this one this morning and I thought it was an interesting read: “Negotiating Under the Radar: Preserving contract language is far more important than fighting for insignificant pay increases.” Here’s the opening paragraph:
This January, the Inter Faculty Organization, the union representing nearly 3,300 faculty members at the seven Minnesota state universities, took the unusual step of making an offer that broke dramatically with past practice and with typical union negotiating. We offered to accept a pay freeze while holding current contract language unchanged, and we tentatively agreed to this contract months before any other state contracts were settled and even before formal negotiations began. In response to those who wonder why we would take such an action, we answer, why not? Because of the current economic situation, our union faced the realities of necessary union concessions, the layoff of tenured faculty, and the cutting of vital academic programs. In this context, we conceptualized ways to weather the economic storm while preserving the protections of our current contract and the academic integrity of our institutions. We quickly concluded that engaging in the normal protracted adversarial bargaining process would be the equivalent of many of the battles of World War I, in which armies, knowing full well the outcome, lined up and slogged through predetermined killing zones, suffering many casualties with little or no gain.
I think this is mostly the case at EMU; I say “mostly” because (for reasons that are not entirely clear to me) that the finances at EMU are a little bit better than at least some other places. I don’t think anyone is talking here about laying off tenured or tenure-track faculty, for example. But I do agree with the imperative about first working to preserve current contract language and protections and not worrying about money this time around.
