UFF-USF

Below are the types of comments expressed by some of the 110 individual respondents to the UFF survey this week on H1N1 and attendance policies. Please keep in mind that the participants in this survey are probably not a representative sample, and answers should be viewed as a sample of the options that faculty are considering.

Attendance requirements—what are faculty planning to do? Some of the choices faculty are making:

• No changes
• Case-by-case adjustments
• Raising the limit on unexplained/unexcused absences.
• Providing alternative assignments that enable students to make up attendance
• Waiving in-class assignment requirements
• Extending deadlines for assignments
• Turning in-class work into online (Blackboard) assignment
• Eliminating attendance requirements, with in-class exercises as extra credit

What documentation are faculty planning to require? Some of the choices faculty are making:

• Doctor’s note required
• Doctor’s note not required
• No doctor’s note but prior notice required (no “oops I overslept” post-hoc inventions of flu)
• Distinctions between regular classes and exams: flexibility for classes, doctor’s note required for exam absence

Other thoughts related to H1N1 and classes:

• Some faculty will insist that students who are sick should stay home, quoting from Dr. Egilda Terenzi’s statement in syllabus
• Some faculty are intending to place more material online
• Some faculty intend to record classes to place mp3s on line for absent students
• Some faculty intend to spend more time explaining attendance policies clearly at beginning of term and specifically how they might apply for H1N1
• Some faculty intend to use the H1N1 pandemic to remind students that they have the obligation to contact classmates to catch up on material
• Some faculty intend to explain the practical effect on grades of missing substantial amounts of the semester
• Some faculty will explain that they will be more supportive of petitions for dropping/withdrawing from class for medical reasons

Additional comments:

• There were some concerns about availability of medical care at Student Health Services
• Some faculty expressed concerns about staff and faculty health
• Some faculty expressed concerns about the work and security involved in creating make-up exams and suggested that USF create a testing center to provide security for make-up exams

As of this morning, 110 USF faculty have responded to the online survey UFF began on Monday to gauge whether faculty are making changes to class attendance policies in response to the H1N1 pandemic. Of those responding, 40% are not yet sure what they will do, and the others are approximately evenly split between faculty making changes and those not making changes.

Another entry sometime this weekend will summarize comments from individual respondents. One early note: Some of the “no” respondents explained that they thought their existing attendance policies would be sufficiently flexible to address student absences from H1N1.

Tuesday’s state Revenue Estimating Conference ended up predicting a small (1%) reduction in state general revenues from the March estimate that was the basis for the state’s budget this year (see executive summary for more). That will not require a special session to cut the current year’s budget, at least for now.

The forecast for 2010-11 is also less than the 2010-11 forecast in the March estimate, but the predicted general revenues for 2010-11 is still more than 6% higher than in the current fiscal year. The continuation of stimulus funding for education means that we’ll probably see something close to a flat budget for next year, plus hopefully a minor increase depending on politics. The closer we get to the next legislative session without additional free-fall in the state’s economy, the better the state’s general budget outlook is. There will still be a fight for revenues in the legislature, but the odds are looking better that we’re not going to have additional horrid cuts.

The United Faculty of Florida is now collecting information through a two-item survey from all teaching employees at USF on attendance-policy modifications that they are considering for the fall semester to accommodate student illnesses. The survey is at http://tinyurl.com/lp863u and results will be published by August 20, 2009.

Below is this morning’s memo from the USF director of Student Health Services about H1N1 flu.

August 10, 2009

Message from:    

Egilda Terenzi, Medical Director, Student Health Services

As faculty and staff members, you are important partners in our efforts to address the challenges of the H1N1 (swine) flu pandemic.

We have appreciated your cooperation throughout the summer, when the H1N1 flu affected many of our students and faculty and staff members. Most patients have experienced mild cases and recovered within seven days. However, a more severe form of the virus could emerge this fall.

We encourage faculty who see students who appear ill to advise them to:

·       Visit the campus health center.

·       Urge them not to attend class until well.

·       Physically distance themselves from others.

·       Remind students to wash their hands thoroughly several times a day.

Some students in higher-risk categories may experience very serious complications.  We understand class attendance is vital. However, we respectfully request that you consider relaxing your class attendance and make-up-work requirements for students affected by the H1N1 virus.

Those with H1N1 can infect others for seven days after the onset of symptoms. During that time, they would expose other students to the virus if they attended class.

Individuals with flu-like symptoms but without risk factors or complications may be instructed to stay home rather than go to a medical facility. Consequently, some students may not have official confirmation of the virus. 

We will continue to communicate regularly with our faculty and staff members about this public health challenge. We also encourage you to visit www.shs.usf.edu , where we will post updates and links to additional resources on the Web.

Thank you for your cooperation and dedication to our students’ health and well-being.  For answers to frequently asked questions about H1N1 flu, please follow this link: http://floridashealth.com/DEMO/php/SwineFlu/documents/swinefluqanda.doc

Egilda Terenzi, MD

Medical Director

University of South Florida

Division of Student Affairs

Student Health Services

4202 E. Fowler Ave, SHS100

Tampa, FL 33620-6750

Tel:   813.974.1815

Fax:  813.974.8391

An e-mail from the provost’s office intended to reach to all faculty today:

PLEASE DIRECT ANY COMMENTS OR INQUIRIES CONCERNING THIS MESSAGE TO JOY MORTON IN THE TRAVEL DEPARTMENT AT [e-mail address].Given the problems that were encountered this past academic year with travel reimbursements, the Provost’s Office has been communicating with the Travel Department on a frequent basis. It appears that much progress has been made and the backlog of unprocessed reimbursement requests has been reduced considerably. The Travel Department believes that the campus will experience a substantially reduced time from submission to payment during the coming academic year.

Following our last conversation, we’ve received the following request from the Travel Department, and ask that you respond to the person referenced if it applies to you:

In order to verify that no one’s request has fallen through the cracks, we are asking that any faculty members let Joy Morton know if they have unpaid Travel Expense Reports (reimbursement requests) that are older than 30 days from the date submitted to Travel. Please know that we are continuing to work to further improve the travel reimbursement process and very much appreciate the patience that you have shown thus far.

CHAIRS: Please share this request with any graduate students to whom the request applies.

A few things of note for this Friday:

•  HR will be readjusting employees’ leave balances to conform with the arbitration decision last week and the administration’s decision early this week to extend the same change to all employees who earn annual leave. After that is done, UFF will work with USF to address small numbers of in-unit faculty and professional employees who did not have leave to cover the affected days in December, who moved from 12- to 9-month contracts since December, or who have left USF.
• The chapter has received draft guidelines for an instructor promotion track and has just distributed the draft document to chapter members along with a link to a brief survey to provide feedback. Chapter VP Mark Klisch helped draft the guidelines. The chapter has the authority to delay T&P guidelines for a year, and the chapter’s officers need to know from members whether the chapter should agree to implement the guidelines so promotion opportunities are available in 2009-10 (with new ranks to go into effect in August 2010 for those promoted).
• There is an impasse hearing before the USF Board of Trustees next Thursday, July 16, 9-11 am, in the ROTC building’s auditorium on the Tampa campus. This is a result of impact bargaining over increased class sizes beginning Fall 2007, after an impasse between the bargaining teams and after both sides had concerns about the special magistrate’s recommendations.
• There is a regular chapter membership meeting Friday, July 17, at noon, in CDB’s on Fletcher Ave. in Tampa. Because of the collective bargaining session starting in SVC at 2, the chapter meeting will be abbreviated.
• There is a regular collective bargaining session next Friday, July 17, 2-4 pm, in SVC 2070.

Late today, USF sent staff and faculty the following memo from Provost Ralph Wilcox:

As you may recall, the University of South Florida implemented a mandatory Winter Break in 2008 during a time of fiscal uncertainty and following the loss of more than 500 vacant faculty and staff positions. Given the necessity to reduce financial obligations and balance the budget, the mandatory annual leave was considered a far better option for employees than the use of furloughs and/or layoffs imposed by other universities.

USF has decided to re-credit 3 days of annual leave that were taken during the Winter Break in 2008. Any faculty member or employee, who was charged those 3 days of annual leave during the university’s mandated closing, will have the days credited back to their current leave account. This is a fair and equitable action consistent with a recent arbitration decision between USF and the United Faculty of Florida. That decision applied to in-unit faculty under 12-month contracts. However, USF’s leadership has decided that the only fair action is to extend the restoration to ALL eligible employees.

The University has engaged in communications on such challenging matters in the past. Going forward, it will be important to maintain our communication since we will not have the flexibility that we have enjoyed in the past given the difficult budget realities of today. This decision will prompt us to explore alternative strategies to balance USF’s budget in the future.

The good news, however, bears repeating. Because of the many measures USF took in 2008 to reduce costs, our budget is relatively stable today as we enter the 2009-2010 fiscal year. Our actions last year, together with the infusion of federal budget stabilization funds, have made it possible for USF to enter the next academic year without the kind of programmatic and personnel cuts that others have endured. Let us all hope that this remains the case. Both the president and I will be writing shortly to describe the strategic planning and budgeting actions that will support USF’s continued and remarkable progress.

A few personal remarks, if I may. First, the university made the right choice today, to broaden the impact of the arbitration decision so that everyone benefits. As has happened often in the past, the faculty at USF can help set a floor for other employees, and that’s a good thing both for employees and for the university’s long-term interest.

Second, I am not surprised by how the administration’s language tries to paper over the fundamental mistake it made, to try to dismiss the bargaining authority of UFF and other employee unions. This is a continuing pattern at USF, and it is not in the university’s long-term interest for upper-level administrators or the trustees to try to circumvent bargaining. For the past decade, communication between the administration and all its employees (faculty and staff) has been a consistent weakness. As I told the Tribune’s reporter, Lindsay Peterson, President Genshaft could have picked up the phone and called me any time in the past two years to discuss the financial troubles of USF and the future, and she hasn’t.

On July 2, USF and UFF received the arbitrator’s decision in the grievances filed over the University’s taking three days of leave last December from all annual-leave-accruing employees. Here is the heart of the decision:

The University, under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, cannot require bargaining unit employees to use annual leave. The University, under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, does not have the contractual right or the statutory right to require bargaining unit employees to take accrued annual leave. The required use of annual leave resulted in the employees being required to waive benefits provided by the Agreement, and to suffer a loss or diminution of contractual rights for which they were otherwise eligible. Specifically, the employee’s contractual rights and benefits to accrue the days for their use in accordance with the provisions of the contract…. After full consideration of the circumstances, this arbitrator agrees that the remedy must be for the University to reinstate the three days of accrued annual leave to the members of the bargaining unit who were required to take them.

The arbitrator has ordered the university to return three days of leave to all in the UFF bargaining unit who lost them in December. This is the result of the grievance process at its final step: a binding arbitration, and in this case, the arbitrator ruled that the United Faculty of Florida was correct in its interpretation of the contract, that the university did not have the authority to take three days of leave without bargaining a change at the table. Members’ dues pay for contract enforcement, and it is in the grievance process that UFF can hold the university accountable when it violates the contract.

Chapter grievance chair Mark Klisch processed the grievances at the local level; UFF’s executive director, Ed Mitchell, was the chapter’s representative at the arbitration hearing, and chief negotiator Robert Welker helped with preparation for the arbitration hearing.

Arbitrator Cary Singletary decision text, July 2002

(more…)

A letter from Sherman Dorn, chapter president, to members of the USF chapter of UFF:

Dear friends and colleagues,

After news of layoff notices and threats at several other state universities in Florida, I wanted to write all of the chapter members to explain where USF is right now and why I do not expect faculty layoffs here. There are threats of layoffs (or have been layoff notices or layoffs) for those employees whom UFF represents at UF, UCF, FAU, FIU, FAMU, and FSU, but with one exception, there have been no instructional-faculty layoffs at USF, and I do not expect any wave of layoffs for at least the next year.

Two years ago, with the start of the state’s budget collapse, the chapter’s biweekly e-mail newsletter proclaimed that the sky is not falling, and the sky has NOT fallen. It may be a little closer to the ground, but it hasn’t fallen. We’ve come through the past few few years of crisis with a single layoff of an instructional faculty member; we filed (and resolved) a grievance related to that layoff, and the person was recalled into another position this spring. We settled a contract that gave us a 2.4% raise pool, USF has established a parental leave program, there have been no furloughs, and USF continues to give promotion raises.

WHY NO FACULTY LAYOFFS

There are several reasons why I do not expect faculty layoffs. Most importantly, DOZENS OF YOU contacted legislators to help make sure that next year’s budget is not catastrophic. Together with the efforts of other university faculty and other employees around the state, students, BOT and BOG members, administrators, business organizations, and newspapers, we succeeded in staving off what could have been an absolute disaster at USF. This is a victory in hard times, and you should take pride in it.

But there are other reasons, since the better-than-disastrous budget hasn’t stopped the threat of faculty layoffs at other universities. In the past year, the chapter has made clear that layoffs are not in the administration’s interest. Layoffs and other precipitous moves typically lead to contentious grievances, such as one the UFF won at UF or the grievance that we settled with the administration at USF. To its credit, the USF administration has recognized its interest in avoiding faculty layoffs. In addition, the provost declared last August that USF would be drawing on its reserve funds to protect programs — a move that UFF had called for since last spring, and one that is absolutely appropriate. It is in all of our interest that there be competent financial administrators at USF, and right now, USF appears to be in better shape than the other large public universities in Florida. Faculty Senate President Larry Branch sits on the university’s budget council, and I trust him to represent faculty interests on that council.

These facts do not mean that USF is in great financial shape, or that there won’t be the ordinary disagreements that a union will have with management. We will have to fight for higher-education budgets again next spring. We are waiting on arbitrator decisions in two grievances, including last December’s taking of three days of annual leave from 12-month employees. We still do not have a domestic partnership health insurance stipend, the wave of staff layoffs last summer upset many of us with how the university treated valuable staff members, and others of us have had fewer summer teaching opportunities or larger class sizes. But in comparison with the other large public universities in Florida, and in contrast to universities in many other states, we’re holding our own. We continue to grow in membership, we will hold the administration to its promises on establishing an instructor promotion track, and we will bargain a contract that continues to advance our interests and shared values.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

There are several steps each of us can take now and in the next year to reduce the chances of faculty layoffs ever at USF:

1) Contact your state legislators twice in the next year. If each of us writes a letter this summer explaining the work we do and the students and communities we help, legislators will be more likely to want to protect USF and higher education in the 2010-11 budget. We also should expect to have to contact legislators during the next legislative session in March and April. You can do this in less than 30 minutes in the next year.

2) Talk to colleagues regularly about UFF and either joining or becoming more active members — including contacting state legislators. The more success that we have in mobilizing faculty to contact legislators, the easier it will be to protect higher education in the 2010-11 budget. And my e-mail today may motivate you, but you’re going to do a better job of motivating the colleague whose office is next to yours. You can do this in less than two minutes each week.

3) Help make UFF more effective in the next year. The chapter has been working with two USF graduate assistants this spring to discover what we need to do to be more effective and more active as a union chapter. A vote of a chapter meeting in the spring asked their help in looking at perceptions of the union in two departments, to hold up a mirror to the chapter’s leadership, and I asked for a frank assessment of what we need to do better. If you are in one of those departments and participated in an interview, THANK YOU. I won’t ever know who was interviewed or who said specific comments, but the chapter’s membership today and in the future needed and appreciates your honesty. I expect the draft report of the graduate students in the next few weeks, I will circulate the final report to all of the chapter’s officers and elected senators, and then each of you will receive a copy by the beginning of the fall. I will probably ask EVERY member of the chapter for help in following up on the report, in ways that will take no more than 5 minutes of your time during the summer or early fall. Where appropriate, I will appoint small committees to tackle the recommendations in the report.

Finally, beyond the written parts of our job and taking some time for union activism, it’s important to help our neighbors and coworkers who are losing their jobs. The fact that there are no layoffs does not mean that everyone at USF is keeping their jobs. Every year at USF, there are staff and faculty who are not reappointed, do not earn tenure, or otherwise leave USF without another job to go to. Every year at USF, either the chapter’s grievance officer or chapter president hears from half or more of faculty who were denied tenure to see if grievances are warranted. This year and last year have been no different in that respect, but the economy is the worst it has been in more than 50 years. If you have received a letter of nonreappointment or have been denied tenure, I know that looking for other jobs is harder than at any other time since the Great Depression. The federal stimulus package is supposed to boost and extend unemployment benefits, and it will cover part of COBRA health-care extensions for several months, but that is cold comfort when you’re looking for a job. If you just need a friendly ear, even if it’s not about union stuff, e-mail me at any time and we can talk. If you know someone who is leaving USF without another job, please do not avoid the person down the hall who is leaving in two, six, or twelve months. Say hello, encourage them to keep looking for a job, and remind them to apply for unemployment benefits and ask the unemployment office about COBRA subsidies.

I hope that in a few years, the economy will be strong, and we can talk about a range of accomplishments through these hard times and into the future. But for now, you should be confident that we are not facing a massive wave of layoffs and I do not expect one in the next year.

Yours,

Sherman

Sherman Dorn
USF Chapter President
United Faculty of Florida

A letter to all UFF members from statewide UFF President Tom Auxter:

Dear Colleague:

It worked! The campaign to contact legislators, which started in February and ended today, delivered results in funding for higher education. We know that cuts in higher education are always the first knee-jerk reaction from politicians when there is a recession. But faculty were ready and already contacting legislators about the funding crisis we faced a month before the legislative session began. We sent emails and made phone calls to deliver the message from constituents. We built a coalition, held rallies, and joined forces with students to expand the base for legislative contacts.

At the beginning of the session higher education was threatened with a half-billion dollar budget cut by the House, which would have meant at least a 10% cut in budgets already strained to the limits. At that point we focused on the House members who could be pivotal in creating change, and we got the result we needed: the House matched the Senate budget providing roughly the same funding we have in this year’s budget, when the stimulus dollars are added.

Special thanks to the government relations staff at the Florida Education Association for the coaching that enabled us to do this. Our success in the House was also due in large measure to help from the UFF members we helped elect to the House — Bill Heller, Keith Fitzgerald, and Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda. They used every opportunity to make the case to other legislators that cuts would cause severe and irreversible damage to the economic engine of the state and to the future of students in Florida.

Next year we will face another funding challenge from the Legislature. But we have learned how to win against seemingly overwhelming odds, and we have managed to educate enough legislators about the value of what we do that we will have a head start in the process.

Thanks for your sustained support through the last three months. To nail down our victory for next year, ask a non-union member to join UFF. With the full support of every faculty member, we will prevail in the difficult times ahead.

Sincerely,

Tom Auxter
President
United Faculty of Florida