Vermont professionals vote for AFT

Professional employees at the four Vermont State Colleges voted in April to be represented by the United Professions of Vermont, the state federation of the AFT. The employees, who were defined as two units by the Vermont Labor Relations Board, include 115 professional, administrative and technical employees in one unit and 52 supervisory personnel in the other. Their vote for UPV/AFT representation gave the union a 70 percent margin of victory.

The professionals join the full-time and part-time faculty at the state colleges, who have been represented by the AFT since 1973. The newcomers started organizing 18 months ago, says Roy Vestrich, president of the UPV. They filed cards in May 2001 and went through lengthy unit determination hearings prior to being able to hold the election.

Despite a strong anti-union "informational" campaign over the three weeks preceding the vote, says Vestrich, the union was able to keep the tenor of the drive on a professional plane. "This campaign was about building a professional organization and building an institution we can be proud of," he adds.

The professionals first considered unionizing when the colleges imposed a unilateral change in benefits. Over time, however, the union's appeal centered on the issues of professionalism and the need for a say in the institution. "We voted yes for the union today so that we can sit down as legal equals with the administration and negotiate a legally binding contract," says Joanne Edwards, a librarian at Johnson State College.

The UPV has been on a growth spurt for the past two years. Since it became a state federation in 1999, UPV has also organized the full-time faculty at the University of Vermont, bringing its higher education numbers to 1,700. It is also organizing healthcare workers. "We've become a real labor presence in the state," says Vestrich.

Faculty, staff file at Eastern Oregon

A crisis in state funding, threats to tenure and erosion of worker benefits have convinced faculty and staff at Eastern Oregon University that they don't want to go it alone. In May, organizers filed cards to seek an election for a bargaining unit that would represent 115 faculty, librarians and instructional staff, says Richard Schwarz, executive director of AFT-Oregon.

Eastern Oregon is one of seven campuses in the state public higher education system. The AFT represents faculty at Western Oregon, adjuncts at Portland State, graduate fellows at the University of Oregon and graduate employees at Oregon State University.

The Oregon Employment Relations Board heard employer objections at a hearing in August. The organizing committee expects the election to take place this fall.

Kansas TAs score contract breakthroughs

Kansas may be a right-to-work state, but there's no denying the clout of the University of Kansas Graduate Teaching Assistants' Coalition. GTAC, affiliated with the AFT and the only union on campus, is also the only group of employees there to be getting a raise this year--despite a $5 million cut in the university's budget.

The unit of 920 ratified its second contract in August--just one month shy of the two-year anniversary of the expiration of its first contract. The university declared an impasse in December when the union refused the administration's offer of minimum first-year salaries of $7,000, $7,700 and $8,400 over the life of the contract. Although state law allows the university to impose its last and best offer, the union voted to let the negotiations end there. It was an act of courage that energized members, who staged events on campus and around town to keep their issues before the public.

In February, for example, six GTAC members donned black tie attire to attend the cocktail hour of a $100/per person alumni fundraising event. They handed out flyers to alumni, "who all took classes from people like us," says GTAC negotiating committee chair Robert Vodicka. The TAs worked the crowd for 45 minutes before they were kicked out.

This embarrassed the university, Vodicka reports, and is one of the reasons why KU settled, GTAC believes. The other reason was that administrators knew the TA salaries actually were a problem for the university. Later in February, a federal mediator met with the parties, and the university made an offer that was 15 times higher than what it had offered before.

The final agreement establishes the minimum salary of $10,000 by the third year. This is a major breakthrough for more than half of the bargaining unit, who earn less than that now--271 currently make under $9,000. "We think most of our people will get raises of 10 percent each year," starting in September, Vodicka predicts, when the KU board of trustees meets to approve the contract.

One aspect of the negotiations that was most rewarding, Vodicka adds, was the support of faculty. After the settlement, the chair of the humanities and Western civilization department sent an e-mail congratulating the union for reaching an unprecedented milestone. "To those of us who have strongly supported the GTAs--and that includes a number of my fellow chairs as well as many other faculty--in their efforts to achieve a 'iving wage' and an improvement of benefits, the new contract is truly the gratifying culmination of a long struggle."