Category Archives: EMU-AAUP

Via a Facebook “friend” (really, just someone I kinda know) comes this piece in stltoday.com, “Impending strike at SIUC could disrupt classes for 20,000.”  That’s Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and as far as I can tell, the threatened strike comes after sluggish negotiations and after working without a contract for over a year.

I’m sure there are very different issues there than there are here, but I thought there were a couple of passages that are interesting to think about as the faculty head into a negotiation year.  First, there’s this:

If they do strike, it’s unclear just how effective they’ll be. The school, like others around the nation, faces financial difficulties at a time when states are cutting back on higher education funding. And unlike many schools in the region, SIUC has not seen significant increases in enrollment and tuition dollars.

While campus strikes aren’t seen all that frequently, several strikes or threats of strikes have taken place recently at schools around the nation, including Rider University in New Jersey, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College and Central Michigan University.

And this:

Yet even when a work stoppage happens, it doesn’t tend to last long, said Richard Boris, director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in New York.

“Faculty strikes are mostly symbolic and very short-lived and exist to jump-start conversations that have stalled,” Boris said. “The brake on every faculty strike is the harm that lost classes will bring to students.”

I’ve always been for whatever other options for a labor action rather than a strike. I think strikes are an early 20th century approach to 21st century problems, they tend to be more about symbolism than anything else, and I’m not sure how much we’ve gotten at EMU as a result of walking out versus working without a contract.  On the other hand, sometimes the number of available tactics are pretty slim.

I heard this story on Michigan Public Radio too, and here’s a link to the annarbor.com story about the EMU administration coming to agreement with part-timers on a union and a contract.  Here’s a quote:

The contract, [Sonya Alvarado, a full-time lecturer in the English Department,] said, does three very important things for adjunct faculty: Creates an official pay scale, sets an evaluation process and mandates that contingent faculty be given longer terms of employment under certain circumstances. EMUFT secretary and part-time lecturer Zachary Jones says the new pay scale “is the strongest part of the contract.”

“Before, there was some contingent faculty getting $600 a credit hour and now the floor has been raised to $1,125 a credit hour,” Jones said. “It makes us more competitive and helps us keep talent here.”

It’s actually something they agreed to over the summer, though it is a deal/contract that I hadn’t heard much about, and I like to think I keep in touch with these things.   Anyway, I’m glad they got a deal, but it raises three questions for me:

• What’s the difference between the lecturer’s union and this union?  Even the people are in the same group (for example, Alvarado is not a part-timer but a full time lecturer).  Have full-time lecturers (who have all kinds of things as full-time employees– TIAA/CREF, benefits, better pay, better job security, etc.) and part-time lecturers (folks who teach a class at a time here and there for a flat rate and have few benefits even under this contract) become one union?
• How did this group get this administration (and this board) to agree to a union deal in this economic climate and with seemingly no strife with the contract?  Maybe it’s just because it is the first deal this group has formed, but it sure looks like this group has pulled off a big win.  Maybe there are things the EMU-AAUP can learn from all this.
• And finally, what are the implications here for full-time lecturers and tenure-track faculty?  Is this a group that is fighting against the presumed wisdom that faculty-types have traditionally had, that universities ought to hire fewer part-timers and more full-time and tenure-track faculty?  Now that there will be a union that gives part-timers some rights and benefits (though nothing even close to what faculty have), will the administration use that as an excuse to not make a similar deal with the EMU-AAUP?

I think I’m all for part-timers unionizing, but I worry that this has the potential to hurt the faculty union.  Which is perhaps why the administration seemed to have raised no fuss over this deal.