PrintThis was not the first time UFF members addressed the board. They’ve attended meetings at their home campus in Tallahassee. But to avoid UFF encounters, the board scheduled its March meeting at the new FAMU School of Law in Orlando. The timing coincided with the joint AFT/NEA higher education conference (see p. 12). The union brought charts making graphically clear that FAMU faculty are the only ones in the state university system that have been denied raises, and that they are at the bottom in terms of pay and workload.
FAMU UFF president William Tucker notes that the treatment of the 700 faculty working under the contract reflects vestiges of longtime discrimination. FAMU and Florida State University share an engineering school, for example. “We’ve got FAMU faculty and FSU faculty working side by side teaching the same students, but FSU got bigger raises for doing the same thing.”
After the March 2 demonstration, an influential board member, the Rev. R. B. Holmes, conceded during a conference call with Tucker that “it’s not a good thing to have the fact out there that the board has never voted for pay raises in its entire existence,” Tucker reports. Since then, the college has scheduled four negotiating sessions. In addition to salaries, the union will be tackling other significant issues relating to working conditions and termination, layoff and rehire provisions.
“This is a really important issue that disproportionately affects women,” says Mike Quieto, chair of the political education committee for the Teaching Assistants’ Association/AFT at the University of Wisconsin, the oldest graduate workers union in the country. Wisconsin offers only unpaid leave—up to six months—for childbirth or adoption and, says Quieto, the union there is busy hanging onto basic healthcare benefits. In practice, female faculty and graduate assistants time their pregnancies so they give birth over the summer, on break. Alternatively, they can use sick leave: Quieto says assistants get six days per semester. “If you didn’t use any sick days in the fall and you have your baby at the end of spring, you may be able to get a couple weeks off using 12 sick days,” he says.
Manipulating one’s schedule this way is far from ideal, but when TAA members argued for paid parental leave in the 2001-03 contract, they were unceremoniously struck down.
At the University of Illinois, Graduate Employees’ Organization/AFT member Kate Roark sees Stanford’s new maternity provision as a powerful recruiting tool. She chose to come to Illinois for her Ph.D. in theater history because of child care—not provided by the university, but by her mother, who lives nearby. When she gave birth, she used the two-week paid maternity leave GEO bargained into its current contract; the university also grants unpaid leave provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act. “Paid maternity leave is a great first step,” says Roark, “but graduate student parents have a greater need for assistance with child care after maternity leave expires ... You just can’t write a dissertation with an infant or a toddler in your lap.”
Aleksondra Hultquist, also a graduate employee at Illinois, feels lucky she was able to time her pregnancy around the summer months, but she still worries about handling child care once her baby is born. Paid maternity leave plus help with medical bills and child care, she says, could ease the burden and “ensure that departments everywhere don’t miss out on the great work that mothers can achieve.”
