College settles contract, then reneges

After arduous negotiations and the execution of the first strike in its history, the Elgin Community College Faculty Association negotiating team was pretty pleased with the tentative agreement they brought in Feb. 6. The major issues related to workload and health insurance were settled, and the negotiators were able to secure 5.25 percent average salary increases annually over the life of the four-year contract. Faculty voted to ratify the contract six days later.

What they didn't count on was that management would renege on the tentative agreement it initialed. The sticking point was the source of money to provide the raises. As AFT On Campus went to press, the faculty was looking at an unpleasant prospect--a return to the picket line.

Until management balked, the negotiations had been difficult but the process ending with a settlement had been almost a model demonstration of good practice, says Gary Christenson, ECCFA spokesperson.

The four-day strike was the first in the history of the union, which represents 116 full-time faculty and 86 part-timers. It came at the end of a process begun with interest-based bargaining, then traditional bargaining, then mediation.

The college had sought to impose a managed indemnity health plan that would have given insurance companies intrusive powers over members' health care decision-making. The compromise was creation of a labor-management committee that would review policies and bid out plans that would save money while not reducing quality. The union also managed to get extra pay for one category of faculty who are required to carry an annual load of 34 contact hours a year as compared to credit-hour faculty who carry 30-hour annual loads. The solution was voluntary overload pay for the four-hour difference. The contract also provides salary improvements for adjunct professors.

As the dispute lingers on, the union draws strength from how well it has mobilized its support. For one thing, 100 percent of the full-time unit and 90 percent of the part-timers belong to the union. And these members freely share their time and talents--from setting up and maintaining a lively Web site (www.eccfa-aft.org), to talking to community business owners and garnering their support, to being information specialists. Both the business community and the students know the value of what faculty provide, Christenson notes.

Florida colleges try to dodge the wrecking ball

The reorganization of Florida's system of higher education is advancing at breakneck speed, much to the consternation of the faculty unions and other supporters of the current system. Last year, the Legislature voted to restructure education in Florida-- from pre-K through postsecondary. A key part of that overhaul was the decision to abolish the board of regents, a 14-member governing body that oversees the state's 10 public universities.

Replacing the regents would be a system in which the governor appoints individual boards for each of the 10 universities. These groups would report to a "superboard," which would oversee the entire preK-20 system. It is widely reported that the reason the Legislature acted was in retaliation for the board's not having recommended some legislators' initiatives to create a new medical school and two new law schools at their alma maters.

Although the dismantling of the board was originally slated for 2003, staff have been leaving so steadily that the Legislature now is considering a proposal to abolish the board this summer--two years early. Faculty at the university and state university systems, who are represented by the United Faculty of Florida, (which became a joint affiliate of the NEA and AFT after the Florida merger last year), are covered by a contract that runs through 2003. Even with the contract, which union lawyers feel the state is bound to honor, many faculty are nervous about what the future holds. Other faculty seem not to be paying attention at all to what lies ahead, says AFT vice president Maureen Dinnen, president of the Florida Education Association. "We have fair dismissal and tenure issues, and all kinds of agreements that we've entered into throughout the years with the board of regents," she says. "We don't know what will happen to those."

The union has been working on several fronts in response to the breakup, says Dinnen. On one front, it tried meeting with legislators to persuade them to reconsider the decision to include higher education in the restructuring. The union leadership also is using the new developments both to organize new members and to raise faculty awareness of exactly what they will lose with the board's demise. And taking an active stance, the union also is considering how it will train a much larger cadre of union leaders to conduct campus-based bargaining with the new boards each institution will have at the helm.

Into this volatile situation walks a champion of the board of regents system. U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, Democrat, was governor of Florida for two terms, starting in 1979. In 1980, within a politically charged environment similar to today's, the Legislature passed a measure to end the board of regents. As governor, Graham vetoed the bill. A passionate supporter of the public university system, he felt strongly then, as he does today, that the board of regents acts as a firewall keeping political influence to a minimum in the policymaking and funding arenas, while also ensuring public accountability. Prior to the board's creation in 1965, the universities went through several periods of political turmoil.

In January, Graham appeared before the Education Governance Task Force, which is in charge of directing the breakup. He proposed that the task force recommend a constitutional amendment that would be submitted as a ballot initiative for the November 2002 elections. The amendment would make the state university system a "constitutional entity," governed by a gubernatorially appointed board with eight-year terms. Funding would be made directly to the system (rather than being earmarked to individual institutions), which would protect against politically powerful legislators directing pork to their pet institutions.

Regardless of whether the task force accepts the recommendation, the AFT and other nonpartisan and business groups in Florida are rallying around Graham's proposal. In the immediate future, it won't stop the board's dissolution, but it could halt what Graham and others believe would be a disastrous decline for the system and the state. The point, Graham says, is to keep politics out of the governance of the higher education system. The senator told the task force that to achieve a level of excellence necessary to ensure that Florida's citizens can compete in the high-tech economy, the state university system must be seen as "independent, free from inappropriate political interference."

"These are strange times," says Dinnen, noting that Florida is a microcosm of the nation. "At the same time that there is a process under way here to de-emphasize state government, a lot of control is getting focused in the hands of a few."

Michigan TAs file for an election

Teaching and graduate assistants at Michigan State University have formed the Graduate Employees Union and, in February, filed for a union representation election with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. MSU has 1,500 TAs and GAs. The GEU, which is affiliated with the Michigan Federation of Teachers and School-Related Personnel/AFT, filed 900 signed cards with MERC.

Teaching assistants teach about 30 percent of the undergraduate credit hours at the university, says the union, mostly in discussion and lab sections. Graduate assistants perform administrative and other duties. All graduate employees are in need of better health benefits and salaries to sustain themselves as they work and study their way to advanced degrees at the university, which is located in East Lansing.

"Health care is the number one issue for TAs," says Victor Cerovski, an international graduate student studying theoretical condensed matter physics. "MSU is a great school, but frankly I had better health care in Serbia under Milosevic than I do here."

In addition to salary and benefits, the graduate employees want "a voice in the decisions that affect our lives," says Sally Theran, spokesperson for GEU, who is seeking a degree in clinical psychology.

The MSU graduate employees are benefiting from strong expressions of solidarity from sister unions in the state. At Ann Arbor is the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization, one of AFT’s oldest unions; and in Detroit, the graduate employees union at Wayne State University is also an AFT affiliate.

GEU will hold an election this spring.