Little progress made at July 22 bargaining session

The Faculty and Administration bargaining teams met for about 3 hours on Thursday, July 22. Faculty team members said most of the discussion focused on workload issues, and there was little progress toward resolving concerns.

Faculty Chief Negotiator Greg Klein said, “The administration team continues to appear unwilling to acknowledge some serious concerns related to faculty workload, especially in the way that workload units for program chairs are calculated.”

“The Faculty Team made changes to our workload proposal to try to address objections raised by the administration at the past two bargaining sessions. We also presented supporting data that was obtained from Institutional Research and other reliable sources.”

“Unfortunately, the administration team doesn’t seem willing to say yes to anything except keeping things exactly as they are now,” Greg said.

“It’s disheartening that we don’t seem to be able to make any progress in this discussion,” said Marianne Niese, who has been a Faculty team member for program chair workload solutions ever since discussion of this topic started, in the FACT (Faculty/Administration Communication Team) in 2019.

“Some of the same administrators who are at the bargaining table told us in FACT meetings, before the pandemic, they agreed that we needed to find a different way to assign units for program chair responsibilities. Now, they’re claiming there are no problems,” Marianne said.

Greg said, “It’s also deeply disappointing that some of the administrators seem to think it’s OK to make statements at the bargaining table that suggest that faculty members are not trustworthy, hard-working contributors to the success of the College and our students.”

“Bargaining always has some tense moments, but the Faculty team tries hard to avoid saying things that sound like personal attacks on administrators. At the moment, we can’t always say the same about their team’s approach to talking about faculty.”

“We still haven’t discussed the compensation article, but the administration seems very reluctant to consider any Faculty proposals that might have costs that aren’t already built into the College’s budget for the next fiscal year,” Greg said.

“However, our Faculty proposals always take into account what is reasonable and affordable at this time, after all of us have experienced several years of College belt-tightening and cut-backs.”

In addition to the workload article, unresolved discussions include proposals concerning governance (Article 6), tenure (Article 14), professional enrichment (Article 15), and other important contract topics.

The teams have agreed to hold more bargaining sessions on July 28, 29, and 30.

“The Faculty Team brought up the possibility of calling in the mediator who was appointed last week by the State Employment Relations Board, to see if he can help us make progress,” Greg said.

“The administration told us they didn’t think a mediator was needed to reach an agreement.”

“We’ll see how it goes next week, and we remain hopeful that the two teams can get to an agreement—but there’s a lot of work still to be done,” Greg said.