UFF-USF

A complete list of West Central Florida Federation of Labor endorsements cover all of the counties in the Tampa Bay region and dozens of races. The top of the ticket is the presidential race, and all of our affiliates have endorsed Barack Obama, the Democratic Party nominee.

Early voting starts Monday, October 20. To find out your nearest early-voting locations, there is a simple form at the Vote for Change website. There is still time to request a mail-in ballot, and you do NOT need to trust the U.S. mails. You can personally deliver your mail-in ballot to your county’s Supervisor of Elections office. (You cannot bring mail-in ballots to voting places.)

Below is the list of recommendations from the West Central Florida Federation of Labor. In addition, UFF supports Amendment 8.
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Like many other members of the Florida Education Association, I just received the following from FEA Treasurer Clara Cook:

The news this week regarding our nation’s financial system has no doubt caused great concern for you and our members. While the news has been terrible, it appears so far that the Florida Retirement System (FRS) remains relatively stable and well diversified. While not immune from the losses occurring across the financial markets, Florida seems better positioned than almost every other state when it comes to the overall funding and performance of our retirement system. Our state’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Alex Sink, issued a statement this week and I’ll provide you the following quotes from her statement as guidance on the current state of the FRS portfolio:

On Lehman Brothers-

“The Florida Treasury held $139.5 million par value in Lehman Brothers Holding, Inc., bonds as of Friday, September 12, 2008. Of this amount, $104.1 million was senior debt and $35.4 million was subordinated debt. The total exposure represents less than 0.6 percent of Treasury investments, which total $24 billion. The Treasury is proceeding with an orderly liquidation of the subordinated debt this month.”

On the FRS portfolio-

“As Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, my highest priority during the last 20 months has been working to increase safeguards over Floridians’ tax dollars. Under my direction, the Treasury has tightened its investment decisions and limited exposure to any one individual corporation. While our nation is experiencing significant financial disorder, investment firms can and do fail from time to time, and investors must position portfolios to weather financial storms. We have positioned Florida’s Treasury to meet the cash needs of investors and balance the obligations of the state.”

While there are no guarantees… I believe the CFO has accurately outlined the challenges presented in the markets and has been proactive in managing the risks associated with investing.

Clara Cook, Secretary/Treasurer
Florida Education Association
NEA/AFT/AFL-CIO
Imagine the Future

The UFF-USF Bargaining Team sent the following to the bargaining unit as USF on Wednesday, September 10:

A message from the UFF-USF Bargaining Team

Last Thursday, the Trustees’ bargaining team made what appeared to us from the remarks of the Trustees’ representatives as its best salary offer. Since we represent you at the bargaining table, we think you should know about this offer.
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the provost’s presentation to the Florida Board of Governors earlier this month, retention has been on my brain (or maybe my brain drain). The UFF-USF bargaining team has wanted to change and improve the sabbatical program at USF and has put several proposals on the table. I have usually thought of sabbatical programs as a way to boost research programs. Sabbaticals are not crucial to disciplines where large grants are accessible and in years when the hit rate is above "miniscule" — those who can earn grants from NIH, NSF, or other agencies can reduce their teaching through the grants, when well-written grants are likely to be funded.

But not all well-written grants are funded, especially in years when federal research funding is cut (as it has been recently), and there are many disciplines outside the main federal funding routes (or at least those that can reduce teaching). USF faculty are beginning to win those types of awards, which is always good news: Anthropologist Kevin Yelvington recently won a Guggenheim, and Riccardo Marchi won a fellowship from the Getty last year.

But those awards are and always will be rare. Sabbatical programs are crucial for the disciplines outside large funding opportunities: faculty in English, history, linguistics, sociology, fine arts, and other fields need sabbatical opportunities to push their research forward. For decades, USF has languished with an anemic sabbatical program. With a tenured and tenure-track faculty group of around 1000, the UFF-USF bargaining unit usually has around 15 full-pay, one-semester sabbatical slots each year. That’s shameful, if we pretend to be a Carnegie Research-Extensive university.

It is also a missed opportunity. The structure of the sabbatical program makes it a retention program as well: if you take a sabbatical, you must stay at USF for the following year (or repay the entire salary for the sabbatical). It’s one of those programs that not only is a real benefit for faculty, but one that boosts the morale of anyone receiving a sabbatical. After all, faculty members who are on sabbatical have a period of time in which they are released from all other duties to focus on the scholarship they love. I have <em>never</em> heard a colleague coming back from sabbatical say, "Gee, I never should have taken this. I felt worse at the end than at the beginning."

In essence, a one-term, full-pay sabbatical is a 25% bonus that requires the recipient to stay at USF for two years (the year of the sabbatical and the following year). And a full-year, half-pay sabbatical in essence costs nothing to either USF or departments. If I were an administrator worried about retention, I’d want to give out sabbaticals like candy to productive faculty. Well, not like candy: you can’t give a sabbatical to everyone in a department in a single year. But sabbaticals are still the least expensive option for retention.

Federal district court judge Patricia Seitz has struck down the state’s “Travel Act” from last year that interfered with faculty who used non-state money to travel to Cuba and several other countries. This was a federal lawsuit sponsored by the ACLU and where several UFF members were plaintiffs. There is a separate state lawsuit that UFF filed that is working its way through the process as well, and I am hopeful from this decision that at least one of those lawsuits will settle in the issue in favor of academic freedom.

United Faculty of Florida is representing several faculty members who filed individual grievances July 11 in response to the reorganization of Academic Affairs. The grievants are from the colleges of Arts and Sciences and Business Administration.

On June 12, the provost announced that he was moving entire units between colleges and creating a new college out of FMHI and several departments from Arts and Sciences. The grievances assert that the reorganization occurred without either notice to the grievants or an opportunity for the grievants to provide input. The grievances assert that a unilateral reorganization of colleges in this manner violates Section 5.4 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (on-line as a PDF), which reads: “On the part of the Administration, Academic Responsibility implies a commitment actively to foster within the University a climate favorable to responsible exercise of freedom, by adherence to principles of shared governance, which require that in the development of academic policies and processes, the professional judgments of employees are of primary importance.”

A resolution approved at a chapter meeting this spring opposed unilateral reorganizations that went beyond what was necessary for budget cuts, and the chapter notified both the administration and the Board of Trustees that reorganizations required more discussion and consultation and that the process of reorganization should be separated from the timeline for budget cuts. A letter to the provost this spring from the majority of chairs in Arts and Sciences expressed parallel concerns and made a similar request for more measured deliberations about reorganization.

Instead of responding to the concerns of CAS chairs and the chapter, the provost announced reorganization as a fait accompli June 12, without giving the entire faculty in affected colleges an opportunity to provide input on either the specifics or the general shape of the reorganization.

“Only a minority of faculty in the affected colleges thinks that both the process and the results of reorganization were appropriate,” chapter president Sherman Dorn said. “At least a substantial plurality of faculty thinks that either the process or the results are inappropriate.

“At a great university, faculty are at the heart of crucial decisions about the future. An administrator who acts as if he or she believes in benevolent despotism only increases the cynicism and erodes the morale of the faculty. In a time of severe budget cuts, the University of South Florida cannot afford either.”

While more UFF members in the affected colleges might want to participate, the collective bargaining agreement requires that grievances be filed within 30 days of a contractual violation. July 11 represented the “safe date” deadline after the reorganization’s announcement on June 12, and grievances were filed though many who might want to join were out of town.

Provost Wilcox has just released a letter on realignment of several colleges: Arts & Sciences, VPA, School of Architecture, and FMHI. Nothing about this was said at the Board of Trustees meeting this morning.

Bill McClelland, president of AFSMCE Local 3342, spoke with WMNF last week (MP3) about the budget cuts and staff layoffs. In the interview, he discusses the grievances that AFSCME has filed over staff layoff procedures.

Twenty years ago, Frank Borkowski became USF’s fourth president, promising to raise the institution’s research activities and national profile. Per-pupil state funding of Florida’s universities peaked halfway through his tenure with a downward trend since, and yet USF’s profile today is one of a major research university. That says much about the work of hundreds of faculty, but there have been costs to the institution. As state funding falls yet again and all of Florida’s universities face unstable and unpredictable funding, we need to see what that 20-year trajectory has done to faculty work: it has encouraged administrators to created a de facto differentiated staffing model, without a clear set of rewards for anyone. While President Genshaft has talked about rewarding academic superstars (her choice of words from the fall 2007 state of the university address), and while the provost puts together a task force without asking the faculty union to participate on the steering committee, we all need to understand that we already have a differentiated staffing model, and it’s one that is demoralizing or demeaning to many employees.

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