Why be active in the union? 

For Kris Fink, it was a decision to shift her energy from a personal quest that felt hopeless to a collective endeavor that would improve her life and those of others. For Jeff Morford, it was seeing the mess that results when people aren’t active in the union. Both say the payoff is knowing your work makes a difference.

Fink, 33, has been teaching part-time for nine years, the last six of them in the English department at Portland Community College. She got involved in the union, she says simply, because she was unhappy. “But I don’t like to complain without being part of the solution.

“I didn’t fully commit to the union until I gave up idea of getting a full-time job,” she says. “The union won’t help me get a job. It will help with things that improve our lives.”

Michael Dembrow, president of the PCC Faculty Federation and an English department colleague, drew her in by volunteering her for the college’s staff development committee as the part-time representative.

“She really gives a lot of value added to the job,” he says. “She does a lot more than her contract calls for, both within her department and professionally” in the disciplinary organizations.

“When somebody asks me to do something,” says Fink, “I usually will say yes.” Before long, Fink became a federation representative—or shop steward—and now is working to correct a change in how the English department assigns credits to courses that has effectively reduced the number of courses part-timers can teach each term. “When the department agreed to convert three-credit courses to four credits, it was under the condition that ‘part-timers would not be negatively affected,’” she says, “but this has not been the case.” Working with the union, she has helped to put together a committee to address that.

“Part-timers can have a lot more influence than they think,” she observes.

Emulating wisdom

As a finalist for a math instructor position at Henry Ford Community College eight years ago, Jeff Morford, 38, called up the rep for the union, HFCC Federation of Teachers, to learn about the contract. When John McDonald, HFCCFT president, went through the provisions, Morford got so excited “I had to cover the phone.”

He was coming from a college where the union was in disarray, had accepted givebacks in past negotiations and had been unable to secure a new contract after nearly two years of bargaining. There, he says, “I don’t think the administration respected the faculty. The contracts lagged. They were losing a lot of people. Economically, the administration was being unwise in pushing the union so far.”

At the former union, Morford had just been elected secretary when he left. (He hastens to add that the person who now heads that union “has done wonders. She had to reinvent the union.”) But coming into a well-run union did not make him take for granted his obligation to participate.

Even before he got tenure, Morford served on the union negotiating team. “I was grousing about something and [McDonald] felt that whatever it was would come out more to my satisfaction if I were on the team.” A year ago, he became treasurer when a sudden vacancy occurred.

Now he’s mastering the requirements of that office. He’s observing a “wisdom at the top” of the union that comes from years of hammering out policies and agreements in everything from how grievances are handled to how political power is amassed. It’s a spirit that he identifies with, he says.

“I’ve seen what happens when people aren’t active in the union.”