New contracts in New York, Oregon

Full- and part-time faculty represented by the Faculty Association of Suffolk Community College breathed a sigh of relief in January when they voted to ratify a new four-year contract. Barring no snafus when it goes before the county legislature for approval, the contract will cover faculty from Sept. 1, 2001, to Aug. 31, 2005, and provide raises of 2 percent in the first year and 3 percent in the next three years. The raises are in addition to yearly 4 percent incremental increases. This package is no mean feat, given the perilous state of the New York state budget, notes FA executive vice president Kevin Peterman.

The union represents 425 full-time faculty and 1,000 part-time faculty on the three campuses of Suffolk Community College. Both groups got the same raises, with part-time faculty being compensated at a per-credit hour rate. By the end of the four years, for example, someone at the rank of adjunct full professor would receive $1,115 per credit.

Chief negotiator and FA president Ellen Schuler Mauk notes that the contract has some unique new provisions. It provides a $20,000 professional development fund to allow adjuncts to apply for grants to use to attend conferences or other professional activities. The adjuncts have to have worked five or more semesters and be teaching at least three credits to apply for up to $300.

The contract also adds new "just cause" language protecting faculty from peculiar disciplinary practices, such as fines and arbitrary suspensions, which have recently cropped up with a new employee relations director on board.

The college gets it funding from three sources--the state, the county and tuition. In these negotiations, it was helpful to have the county's director of labor relations at the table, Peterman notes. Once the money concerns were taken care of, the labor relations director helped speed along the adminstration's positions on other contractual provisions. 

Western Oregon averts a strike

Although it felt slow in coming last December, the agreement forged between the Western Oregon University Federation of Teachers and the university was reached just in time to avert a strike. Members ratified the contract in January.

The two-year agreement is retroactive to Sept. 1, 2001. It provides 2 percent increases each September and a 3 percent cost-of-living increase in March 2003 for the unit of 40 full-time faculty and 138 adjuncts.

It also retains a salary step schedule, based on rank and years of service, which the union fought hard to hold on to, and it sets minimum pay levels for adjunct faculty. Salaries currently range from $37,000 to $65,000 for full-time faculty and $18,000 to $20,000 for adjuncts. Under the new contract, the adjunct salaries could increase to as much as $24,000.

The contract also provides fully paid health and dental insurance.

The union came closer to going on strike than at any time in its 27-year existence, says Molly Mayhead, president of the WOUFT. After the university declared an impasse in November, the union membership authorized a strike, opened a strike headquarters and began preparations for picketing. A mediator reconvened the bargaining committees just before Christmas.

Mayhead believes that the courage of her members to vote for a strike led to the resolution of the impasse. "That act," she says, "coupled with our acquisition of a strike headquarters, gave us the leverage we needed to secure a good contract."

Court hears voucher challenge

A long-standing debate over private school vouchers came to a head on Feb. 20 as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a widely watched constitutional challenge to the school voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio. At issue in the consolidated cases now before the court is whether Cleveland's six-year-old voucher program undercuts the First Amendment's protection against government-promoted religion.

More than 99 percent of students participating in the Cleveland voucher program attend religious schools, which constitute more than four out of five schools currently participating in the program. The AFT argues that First Amendment protections are undermined by the fact that participation in religious observances is compulsory or routinely expected without regard to the family religion of any particular student in many voucher schools.

Taxpayer money collected by these schools is unrestricted, and "a dominating use" for these funds at many voucher schools "is the teaching and propagation of their respective religious beliefs," stresses an AFT brief that was filed in the case.

The state-funded Cleveland "scholarship" program provides vouchers of up to $2,250 each to more than 4,400 students in the city. The Cleveland program was found unconstitutional by a federal trial and U.S. appeals court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit drew heavily from the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Nyquist ruling, in which justices found unconstitutional a New York tuition reimbursement program because it had the effect of supporting religious education.

Voucher supporters have tried to blunt First Amendment challenges by arguing that choice rests with the parents of students participating in the Cleveland voucher program. In fact, voucher payments are distributed through an "automatic endorsement" process in Cleveland. Checks payable to parents are sent directly to schools; parents must show up at the buildings and endorse them back to the schools on the spot. This is nothing more than "a clumsy and ineffective device to avoid the conclusion that it was providing for payments directly to sectarian schools," the AFT brief stresses.

Attorneys for both the AFT and the National Education Association presented the case against vouchers at oral arguments, which lasted a longer-than-usual 80 minutes. Arguing in defense of vouchers were attorneys for the state of Ohio and U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who last year asked the Supreme Court to review the two lower court rulings at the request of the Bush administration.

During arguments, the justices focused on the distinction between funds going to public and private schools, and the different requirements placed on each under the law.

Robert Nielsen, former AFT higher ed director

Robert Nielsen, former assistant to the AFT president for higher education, died of cancer at his home in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 13. He was 68. Nielsen was a professor of mathematics at the University of Delaware in the late 1960s when he co-founded a charter chapter of the American Federation of Teachers "to insult management," he once said. Instead, he and his faculty colleagues found that the union evolved "into a better way of doing business."

In 1973, Nielsen came to the AFT to direct the union's colleges and universities department under the late AFT president Albert Shanker. Nielsen oversaw the union's rapid expansion into the higher education sector, especially at public universities and community colleges. He also steered the department's focus toward professional as well as union issues and wrote a monthly column, "Consensus," for AFT On Campus. When he retired in 1991, the AFT represented more higher education professionals than any other union.

In his later career, Nielsen's interests in labor organizing and mathematics education reform converged when, in 1989-90, he spent a sabbatical year with former U.S. Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs. There he worked on Marshall's Quality Education for Minorities Project and took up the challenge of reforming the teaching of mathematics to make it a more accessible subject for all children. He was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board and the D.C. Mathematics Coalition.

Nielsen is survived by his wife, Geri Anderson-Nielsen, five children and five grandchildren.