Laurie Meeker, a member of faculty in film and video, says representatives of the organizing committee had talked to every single member of the UFE unit since filing cards May 1 petitioning for an election. The vote reflected faculty’s dissatisfaction with salaries and increasing workloads—concerns, she adds, that the state Legislature has some responsibility for addressing in their funding decisions. “People want some way to strengthen the faculty voice,” she says, both on campus and in the state capital.

“UFE ran a positive campaign based on Evergreen traditions of collaborative discussion, debate and deliberation, and we pledge to continue listening to and working with all our faculty colleagues across campuses, planning units, programs and disciplines,” says Jose Gomez, who teaches constitutional law. The next step for the union is to get out a bargaining survey and generate more ideas.

This was the fourth election in the state college and university system to occur since Washington passed a collective bargaining law in 2002. The chapter at Evergreen, which is in Olympia, Wash., joins chapters at Central, Eastern and Western Washington universities, which have all voted for UFWS representation.

This year, UW set up a Tuition Remission Task Force to study how the university funds graduate employees. Its restructuring proposal would increase the individual departments’ cost of hiring assistants so much that the departments would be forced to drastically cut the number of assistants they employ. The new system would charge appointing departments a flat fee—$8,000—instead of the varying percentages used in the past. It is, says Jay Gates, co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association/AFT, designed to get around TAA’s collectively bargained contract, and would affect from 300 to 700 project assistants, out of a total of about 1,000. In addition, the TAA anticipates that perhaps hundreds of research assistants would lose their positions.

“There are not faculty who have left yet over this,” says Gates, “but it seems pretty clear that when you tell people they can’t have their labs or their assistants, they will go somewhere else.”

To keep that from happening, graduate workers have formed the Coalition for Affordable Public Education (CAPE), which includes faculty, TAA members,undergraduate associations, alumni, labor and community leaders, to demand of the chancellor that the policy not be implemented. It is presently scheduled to go into effect January 1, 2007.

“We need to convince the chancellor that it’s a very bad idea,” says Gates, “or convince the regents.” Joining in the effort is the faculty union, United Faculty and Academic Staff, as well as the faculty senate, whose leader told Gates that people in his department “are swearing like sailors about this.”

Just two weeks after CAPE formed, it had doubled in membership, and had launched a Web site (CoalitionforUW.org). It holds weekly meetings and is formulating a clear set of demands.

The message to the university administrators, says Gates: “You need to lobby the Legislature for adequate funding. You need to not consistently cut your budget on the backs of the lowest paid people in the university.”

Full-time faculty represented by the CCCTU went on strike Oct. 18 through Nov. 6, 2004. While at its founding the union held a series of strikes to secure the strong contract it has today, in 2004 it had been 26 years since the last strike. In preparing for this strike, the union urged adjuncts, half of whom are represented by the Illinois Education Association, not to cross the picket line, citing the protection of Article XIV of the union’s contract. (The other 90 part-timers are professors emeriti of the CCCTU, and their grievance was handled separately.) The “no reprisals” clause reads:

“It shall be a term and condition of this Agreement that there will be no reprisals by the Union or the Board against the Board or the Union, Union members, students, clerks, or any other person as a result of participation or non-participation by anyone of the above in a strike by Local 1600.”

When the strike ended and faculty went back to work for an extended semester to make up for lost time, the colleges did not rehire the adjuncts and part-timers. The administration claimed that the adjuncts had a no-strike clause in their contract, as well as a clause saying that if they did not report to work for three consecutive days, they would be considered to have abandoned their jobs.

After the union filed a grievance, the arbitrator ruled in January 2006 that the employer’s actions constituted a reprisal against the IEA unit in violation of the CCCTU—not the adjuncts’—contract. “Article XIV protects the Union’s institutional right to secure reprisal-free sympathy support for a strike,” the arbitrator wrote. He ordered the employer and union to negotiate a remedy.

The union’s offer, says Perry Buckley, CCCTU president, was for the colleges to rehire everyone. The colleges refused. Once again the arbitrator stepped in, asking for a monetary remedy. The union computed to the dollar the amount of compensation each fired adjunct and part-timer would have received had they maintained their teaching loads from before the strike, and that is what the arbitrator awarded. CCCTU will distribute the damages award to the 180 when the college’s board divvies it up.

The damages award and the cease and desist order came at a very significant time, says Perry, when the CCCTU chapter at Harper College was preparing to go on strike in September. “We blasted that ruling everywhere,” he says. “The adjuncts have a nonstrike clause in their contract, but the contract doesn’t say they can’t honor a picket line.”

Declaring that access to healthcare is a right, not a privilege, the AFT has pledged to support a national single-payer system as one possible way to prevent cost shifting and to pare down administrative expenses. Other endorsed solutions include employer mandates, wider eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid, and responsible state initiatives.

The resolution also warns that free-market approaches to healthcare, such as health savings accounts, “would lead to even greater fragmentation of a ‘system’ that is already dysfunctional due to its lack of coordination.”

So, what is single-payer national health insurance? According to John Abraham, deputy director of the AFT research and information services department, it’s a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private.

One reason for interest in the single-payer model is that the United States now has a crazy quilt of financing and payment for healthcare that relies on public (Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans Administration) and private insurers alike. The current yearly cost for healthcare in the United States is nearly $2 trillion, or about 15.5 percent of the gross domestic product.

Private, for-profit insurers spend lots of money on overhead, sales and marketing—things that have nothing to do with patient care. Doctors and hospitals are forced to hire large administrative staffs to deal with different procedures from each insurer. What’s more, profit-taking by vendors also removes money from the current healthcare system.

According to Physicians for National Health Insurance, about $350 billion per year could be saved by rolling the administrative functions provided by insurance companies into one administrative agent.

A single-payer system would:

■ Be financed in part by eliminating private insurers and recapturing their administrative costs.

■ Ensure that all Americans are covered for medically necessary services, including physicians, hospitals, prescription drugs and medical supplies.

■ Pay physicians a “fee for service,” according to a negotiated schedule, or pay doctors a salary through a health maintenance organization (HMO). Hospitals would negotiate an annual global budget for operating expenses. Expansion and medical equipment purchases also would be managed by regional health planning boards, eliminating the “medical arms race.”

■ Replace premiums and out-of-pocket costs with taxes. Overall costs would be controlled by a combination of negotiated fees, global budgeting and bulk purchasing.

Other options for achieving systemic healthcare reform include:

■ A national law requiring that employers either provide a legislated set of benefits for all employees or pay the cost of an equivalent plan into a state or regional fund that provides the benefits for workers.

■ An expansion of Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover all Americans.

To see the AFT’s resolution on single-payer healthcare, go to www.aft.org/about/resolutions/2006/healthcare_system.htm.