Collective Bargaining
Faculty voted overwhelmingly in favor of the changes and supplements to our Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in last month’s ratification vote. A special thanks to those of you who voted!
I hope everyone has completed the reading assignments that I announced at last month’s Senate (see the February Senate Minutes). They will be helpful in appreciating some of the issues under discussion at the bargaining table. Read More →
Ratification voting is underway. If you are in the faculty bargaining unit and did not vote already, please do so on your way out today.
Aside from ratification, I would like to talk about reading assignments today. I will try to be brief and give you more time for your reading.
One document I urge you to read is the summary of what we are voting about. This summarizes everything we were able to resolve during roughly the past year of bargaining. There were many other things that we discussed, some very important to the Senate. Our bargaining co-chairs, Dr. Scott Hannahs of the Mag Lab and Dr. Irene Padavic of Sociology, prepared an excellent summary of the past year’s negotiations, including many of the issues that we are continuing to negotiate. It is only two pages, and it is excellent reading on some critical issues. Both documents are available at our web site and will pop up if you search there for “ratification.”
One key issue is the reclassification of specialized (non-tenure track) faculty. As recognized in the 2006 Faculty Senate report on specialized faculty, this issue necessarily ties into FSU’s commitment to tenure. Sec. 8.3 of our contract states “Commitment to developing and maintaining a tenured faculty. The Board agrees that it is in the best interests of the University, the faculty, and the students to maximize the ratio of tenured and tenure-accruing E&G appointments to the number of non-tenure-accruing E&G appointments among those appointments including significant teaching responsibilities. As Drs. Padavic and Hannahs report, however, “The chief … sticking point is the BOT team’s disinterest in any contract language that would follow through on the commitment of the FSU Constitution, the Faculty Senate, and the Collective Bargaining Agreement to preserve a tenured faculty.”
The teams closed the 2011-2012 contract negotiations with agreements that can be found here. Later this month you will be asked to ratify the agreement.
Even though we formally re-opened negotiations for the 2012-13 year in late January, we have been steadily bargaining since May of 2011 on several issues, mainly: nontenure-track (specialized) faculty reclassification project, Performance Evaluations, the Salary Plan for Professors, Promotion & Tenure, Academic Freedom, and Domestic-Partner Benefits. The teams also renegotiated minor changes resulting in MOAs on Voluntary Separation Program, Winter Holidays, and our contract’s Amendment and Duration (Article 31). Details are below the fold.
Read More →
On Friday February 24th, the UFF and BOT bargaining teams will meet from 2:00 to 4:45 at the FSU Training Center. Topics to be discussed are Salary Plan for Professors (SPP), Evaluations, Promotion and Tenure provisions in the Collective Bargaining agreement. The meeting is open to all faculty members.
UFF President Tom Auxter provides an update on legislative developments affecting Florida higher education in a document available at:
https://uff-fsu.org/art/WhatWeFaceNow18January2012.pdf
Collective bargaining continues today at 2pm at the FSU Training Center.
This week’s “University Welfare” report to the FSU Faculty Senate, focused on Senate-related NTTF issues, is available at:
https://uff-fsu.org/art/fs20120118.pdf
Email Migration Alert!
FSU IT folks have alerted us that as a result of the upcoming Jan. 25th final stage of the email migration process, certain FSU email addresses, possibly including the address by which you are subscribed to UFF-FSU lists, will no longer work. If in the next few weeks you begin to sense that you have not heard from the UFF-FSU Chapter lately, please email to me with the current address you would like to use for your subscription.
Best regards,
Jack Fiorito ([email protected]), President
UFF-FSU Chapter
