Massachusetts gov. reneges on pay raises

In a move unprecedented in state history, Massachusetts acting governor Jane Swift vetoed raises for 13,200 employees in the University of Massachusetts system, which all of the parties had negotiated and signed off on more than a year ago. Just a week before the Legislature wrapped up its summer session, Swift announced she would rescind $29.6 million from the university's budget that was to cover contractual obligations to faculty, administrators and support staff in five unions in the system. Some of this money was to cover raises owed retroactively for the 2001-02 year.

Dan Georgianna, president of the University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth) Faculty Federation/AFT, says his members are angry and frustrated at the betrayal. "We have a contract we worked hard for," he points out. "We did all the right things--worked with the Legislature, worked with the governor, wrote letters to the editor, went on talk radio." In the end, "having friends is insufficient. We were a target."

"What the governor did was unconscionable," says an outraged Kathy Kelley, president of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, who spearheaded an 11th-hour scramble to persuade the Democrat-controlled Legislature to override the veto. She said its failure to do so was also unconscionable.

The UMFF is going into the second year of a three-year contract that provides 5 percent annual increases. When the state's budget took a nosedive last year, thousands of faculty and students from Dartmouth and other campuses rallied at the Statehouse to support a revenue package that would avoid massive cuts to higher education. Although the Legislature did raise taxes, the revenue is not going to education. Instead, faculty have had to watch as waves of colleagues take advantage of an early retirement incentive offered this past spring. Most of these faculty will not be replaced, which increases the workloads of those who remain. In a word, faculty, Georgianna says, are "shocked."

UC lecturers fight for their jobs

Lecturers at the University of California are fighting a policy shift that has the university terminating them in their prime--after they hit the six-year mark teaching there. This used to be the point at which lecturers could be considered for three-year continuing appointments, however, the UC dean recently began reducing the appointments to half time. In the spring semester, she stopped making the appointments altogether.

The lecturers, who are represented by the University Council-AFT, have been trying to negotiate this and other issues in contract talks that have been stalled for two years. On May 29 and 30, they went on strike at the UC-Davis campus to make sure the student and faculty communities were aware of what was happening.

Although the university claims the new policy was put in place to shift the teaching now done by temporary faculty to full-time tenured faculty--the reality is quite different, says UC-AFT. The experienced lecturers are being replaced by graduate assistants and cheaper, less-experienced temporary teachers. In some cases, tenured faculty are being asked to pick up classes, but they are not in a position to increase their workloads. A week before the lecturers' strike, the tenured faculty repudiated the dean's actions at a meeting of the Academic Senate.

Over the summer, the California state auditor released a report that threw into question the university's stated priorities and provoked outrage among its teaching staff. The auditor found that the university had greatly increased its spending on administrative costs from 1997 to 2001, while shortchanging the instructional lines. Ten percent of its new hires were faculty and 43 percent were administrators. This had occurred at a time when enrollment had increased 13 percent.

The university and the state governor agreed in May 2000 that if the state increased funding for the university, the university would make progress on certain instructional goals.

"The university has not lived up to its promise," says Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers. "The administration claims it cannot afford to pay fair salaries and provide administrative support for its 4,000 lecturers." These findings help explain how so many UC administrators make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year. Some administrators got pay hikes last year that were larger than many UC lecturers make as an annual salary!"

In addition to Davis, the policy is being imposed at UC-Riverside and Santa Barbara, the California Federation of Teachers newspaper California Teacher notes. As the union starts another semester without a contract, further job actions are planned.

N.Y. rescinds immigrant tuition hike

Bowing to heavy community pressure, the New York Legislature passed a bill to allow undocumented immigrants attending the state's two university systems to pay at the state resident tuition rate. Among the loudest voices speaking on the immigrants' behalf were their professors, counselors and fellow students at the City University of New York. Through the Professional Staff Congress, they have been mounting protests, lobbying and going on hunger strikes since the CUNY board of trustees announced in November 2001 that the affected students would have to pay out-of-state rates.

CUNY's rationale for hiking the tuition was that the university system needed to be in compliance with a federal law, the 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which stipulates that non-citizens should not receive benefits that U.S. citizens don't receive. The university system had reviewed all of its immigrant student policies in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The State University of New York was several years ahead of CUNY, having decided to charge undocumented immigrants at the out-of-state tuition rate in 1998, to be in compliance with the same law. But CUNY's community was more severely affected by the change.

Thousands of CUNY students come from disadvantaged families that immigrated to the city years ago. In fact, some of the undocumented immigrants have spent their school-age lives in the city's public schools. Serving these students is a large part of the university's mission, the PSC stressed.

When the change was announced, the union rallied the community, religious groups and other unions through the Central Labor Council to raise hue and cry. They pointed to actions taken in other high-immigrant population states, such as California, Texas, Utah and Washington, to accommodate the residents and not be out of compliance with federal law.

At CUNY, the November policy more than doubled the tuition rates for immigrant students--from $1,600 per semester to $3,400. The university did, however, provide a "hardship deferral" for the spring 2002 semester. Through the strong actions of the union coalition, the Legislature was persuaded to move quickly to rescind the policy and, by the end of June, the governor had signed it into law.

"The PSC's work on this issue shows how socially committed trade unionism works," PSC president Barbara Bowen told the Clarion, the union's newspaper. "Yes, our members' jobs could be affected by a drop in enrollment. But the PSC was also in this fight because we believe in democratic access to education."