UFF/USF Chapter Meeting
April 20, 2007
In attendance: J. Martin, A. Shapiro, S. Permuth, M. Klisch, B. Welker, J. Noonan, S. Dorn, M. Karlins, S. Ramírez Wohlmuth, S. Greenbaum, S. Ariew, J. Langford-Johnson, G. Milton, C. Green, C. Ruiz, K. Mukherjee, H. Vanden, B. Ingalls, S. Fogel, N. Guenther Discenza, H. Blymiller, F. Ottanelli, G. Benadusi, S. Ickes, H. R. Kaplan
The chapter’s April 19 e-mail newsletter is available online. Topics include the UFF Senate Meeting report. (The UFF Senate is the official policy-making body of the United Faculty of Florida.)
I know the logical questions that people have when there’s a change of leadership and the prior person was known by some as intransigent: Will the new person be as stubborn? Will the new person be more conciliatory? Will the new leader be a firebrand, just like the old guy, or will the new leader be accommodating?
But enough about Charlie Crist.
In truth, the stubborn/accommodating dichotomy is just that, a false division that stems from the confusion of judging people with judging issues and policies. If I have an ideal in dealing with conflict, it’s the old notion that we should be soft on people but hard on problems. Through the collective-bargaining relationship, the United Faculty of Florida and the USF administration are partners and adversaries, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle the two sides of that relationship. I’ll divide it as follows: In my role as chapter president, I do not see how it would be productive to attack individuals. I will always describe what is working well in the relationship and what is not working well. But unless someone has a very good reason to move me otherwise, those will be phrased as policy and practice issues, not people issues.
UFF-USF Chapter Meeting
April 20, 2007
12 pm, EDU 258 (Tampa campus)
The USF and UFF bargaining teams signed an agreement on the 2006-07 reopener Friday, April 13, 2007, as well as a brief memorandum of agreement on a study of parental leave. The reopener text is available online.
As I told the faculty union team in the past few days, I admire their fortitude through the year, and I consider this agreement an intermediary step towards addressing many of the issues raised in bargaining. The team during 2006-07 has included the following members:
UFF-USF - USF Board of Trustees Collective Bargaining Agreement 2006-2007
Vote on Your 2006-2007 Collective Bargaining Agreement at the union meeting on Friday, April 20, 2007, between noon and 1 pm, at Tampa campus in EDU 258 during the regular chapter meeting.
The United Faculty of Florida at USF and the USF Board of Trustees negotiators reached “tentative agreement” on the Salary Article and the Benefits Article of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) on Friday, April 13, 2007. Additionally, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed that establishes a process to explore the development of a Paid Parental Leave program. See the text online at http://uff.ourusf.org/connections/REOPENER.doc.
All faculty and professional employees in the bargaining unit are eligible to vote to accept or reject the new CBA. If you vote “yes” to ratify, the new Agreement provisions will take effect immediately. Promotion Increases will be retroactive to 8/7/06, Merit Increases will be retroactive to 10/1/06, and Market Adjustment Increases will be retroactive to 1/2/07. Competitive Pay Increases have already been distributed.
If the unit votes “no” to ratify, negotiators must return to the bargaining table to renegotiate an agreement which is satisfactory to you. The UFF bargaining team and executive officers urge you to vote “yes” on this new CBA. A large faculty vote will convey to the Board of Trustees that we, the faculty, are seriously interested in our professional futures.
Due to the protracted process of bargaining this contract, timeliness in ratification is important if employees are to receive the salary increases before the end of this spring 2007 semester. For this reason, all voting will take place at the next meeting of the UFF-USF Chapter, from noon to 1 p.m. on Friday, April 20, 2007 at Tampa campus EDU 258.
Much of our past Agreement has remained in place, and the complete text of the proposed changes to the Agreement is available online.
The proposed Agreement affects the terms and conditions of employment for Faculty, Librarians, and Other Bargaining Unit Members, and the Highlights are as follows:
UFF/USF Chapter Meeting
April 6, 2007
In attendance: J. Martin, A. Shapiro, S. Permuth, G. McColm, M. Klisch, B. Welker, J. Noonan, S. Dorn, E. Mitchell, M. Kaplan, S. Ramírez Wohlmuth, C. Dee
The chapter’s latest biweekly newsletter edited by Greg McColm is now available. Linked to it are two documents related to the e-mail issue:
The next collective bargaining session between the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees is Friday, April 6th, 2007, 2:30-5:30 pm, in EDU 413 and 416.
Through a combination of technical snafus and some idiotic decisionmaking by a few administrators, the University of South Florida selectively purged e-mails from faculty accounts in late February after the university released a statement about collective bargaining that included all of the draft editing, including language that directly attacked the integrity of the faculty’s chief negotiator. After some scrambling to find out what was happening, the United Faculty of Florida issued a press release the next day, which including the following:
The Collective Bargaining Agreement protects the academic freedom of faculty to participate in university governance, and the deletion of e-mails about university events and decision making violates that right. In a consultation with the United Faculty of Florida, the USF administration had previously agreed to intrude on individual faculty e-mail accounts only when there was a specific finding at the Vice Presidential level that an individual employee’s actions warranted investigation, and the wholesale deletion of e-mail from multiple faculty e-mail accounts violates that understanding.
More broadly, the administration’s attempt to purge embarrassing e-mails is inappropriate for any public agency that receives taxpayer funding and operates under the Florida Sunshine rules. Purging e-mails also threatens confidence in the university e-mail system: faculty and other university employees rely on the integrity of e-mails to do their work.
The university restored the forwarded e-mails, ending the immediate sense of crisis, but there are still significant issues to be dealt with. While it appears that the purging of faculty-sent and -forwarded e-mails on the topic happened only in one college, the university attempted to “recall” the original e-mails that had been sent everywhere. I hope no administrator had fantasies that faculty hadn’t read them or forwarded them off-campus!