Dear colleagues,
Our twelfth bargaining session of this bargaining season was held on Wednesday, July 17. Here’s a brief update on where we are in the process.
Synopsis:
- We proffered our latest salary offer, but the BOT team did not respond, saying that they had offered as much money as they were authorized to spend. They said that they would need to talk to their higher-ups. We hope to hear something at our next session on Wednesday.
- We proposed a new Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on post-tenure review (PTR). We don’t want to put this in the contract for a variety of reasons, but particularly because a) we are appealing PERC’s terrible decision that curtails faculty bargaining rights; and b) PTR, as conceived by the BOG and BOT, violates provisions in other articles of our contract—articles that are not open for negotiation this year. Neither side should want language in the contract that is still being litigated and that creates internal inconsistencies in the contract.
- We offered to sign a version of Article 10 (Evaluations) that included everything we had negotiated (wins for both sides), except PTR.
- We presented a counteroffer MOA with provisions for mediation in lieu of arbitration. The BOT previously offered mediation only if the union paid for all the costs and only if it was used in very limited circumstances. We see no reason to limit the types of grievances that can be mediated, and we certainly don’t believe that one party should bear all the costs. They seemed surprised that we wanted to use mediation broadly, even though we pointed out that grievances rarely progress past step 2 (to our knowledge, it has happened fewer than three times over the past nine years). We hope to hear a formal response to our proposal next week.
Here’s the weekly salary chart. You can see that we really aren’t very far apart. If we can agree about putting PTR into an MOA for this year and if we can bring the performance (nearly across-the-board) increase closer to the cost-of-living increase and get more money for market equity, I think we can reach agreement on salaries quickly.
| Bargaining Salary History 2024 | BOT 9 (last week) | UFF 10 |
| Promotions | 12/15% | 12/15% |
| Sustained Performance Increase (SPI) for Specialized Faculty at the top rank (now every 5 years) | 3.0% | 3.0% |
| PTR (Associate Professors who are assigned Meets Expectations) | $4,000 bonus | $5,000 bonus |
| PTR (Associate Professors who are assigned Exceeds Expectations) | $6,000 bonus | $6,000 bonus |
| PTR (Professors who are assigned Meets Expectations) | 3.0% raise | 4.0% raise |
| PTR (Professors who are assigned Exceeds Expectations) | 5.0% raise | 5.0% raise |
| Performance Increase (for all faculty who received higher than Official Concern on most recent annual evaluation) | 2.0% | 3.0% |
| Departmental Merit (based on criteria developed by faculty) | 0.8% | 1.0% |
| Deans’ Merit | 0.20% | 0.20% |
| Market Equity | $500,000 | $700,000 |
| Administrative Discretionary Increases | 0.80% | 0.80% |
Please join us at bargaining this coming Wednesday (July 24) from 2–5 in the Training Center across from the stadium and make your voice heard by joining your faculty union.
In solidarity,
Michael Buchler, Professor of Music Theory, FSU College of Music
On behalf of your UFF-FSU Collective Bargaining Team