The chapter’s resolution and my e-mail to the bargaining unit yesterday prompted several e-mails to me in the evening and overnight, and a few have asked why the union chapter isn’t officially recognizing a possibility of budget problems and at least looking at a worst-case scenario. So here is my individual (not chapter) analysis:
This week I spent several days at the Florida Education Association’s summer leadership institute, generally a set of meetings and workshops for elected officials of the union’s locals across the state (along with other professional development, which this year included instructional strategies, behavior management, and investigating mold problems in buildings). The vast majority of those at the workshops are from K-12 unions, which represent teachers, school counselors, school psychologists, and a few other professional certified groups. In many counties, FEA also represents support professionals, those whom most students would recognize as teachers’ aides, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, maintenance crew, and others who in Florida are generally known as education support professionals, or ESPs.
Among the various things I learned is that in one regard, the UFF-USF chapter has more in common with the support professional bargaining units than with the certified units in terms of representing employees in disparate jobs and very different interests and perspectives. The challenges range from contact (if you want to talk with a maintenance staff person, you first have to find out where they work, and it’s usually not at a shed in one district office) to the various interests and needs that can diverge. University faculty and professional employees differ in many ways from school bus drivers,* but I quickly recognized the stretch in representing such a diverse bargaining unit, since it’s the challenge we face at USF. We represent approximately 1800 faculty and professional employees, from visiting faculty and student advisors to Distinguished University Professors, from non-tenure-track faculty who spend 125% of their time teaching to full-time researchers, from those who identify themselves primarily as serving a community through a regional state university to those who identify themselves primarily as members of their national disciplinary organizations.
Unlike the support professionals in K-12 unions, we can’t split representation by job group, because the interests and identities aren’t so easily classified. But talking with some of the ESP leaders (mostly teachers’ aides, including a wonderful woman who works in the room next to my wife), I’m realizing that the same internal organizing issues exist at both levels, and we can learn a thing or two from the ESPs. If they can successfully represent everyone’s interests, we must, too.
* Two friends of mine who are married are a university faculty member and a school bus driver, so they’re obviously not that different!
On Monday, the Florida legislative leaders finalized the budget, where it now sits during a mandatory 72-hour cooling-off period before the legislature approves it tomorrow. Unfortunately, the legislature did not approve the governor’s recommendation for a 2.44% increase to the base budget for state and university employees but instead approved a one-time $1000 bonus to all state and university employees who have satisfactory performance and are employed for the several months before the bonus on November 1 this year.
This bonus may benefit a few categories of employees—those who leave state or university employment in the few months after November 1 as well as those whose salaries are well under $40,000 (whose percentage increase would have been far less than $1000) and who expect to resign or retire within a year or so. But a bonus doesn’t go into base pay, so long-term employees will be hurt. If the governor vetoes other measures that would improve university funding in the next year, the situation is not going to be pretty, and that’s true on several levels.
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.
A faculty union in the U.S. is different from most other unions in a variety of ways. First, except for a very few situations, faculty unions represent faculty at public colleges and universities, not private. In that regard, faculty unions are like K-12 teachers unions (with whom a number of faculty unions are fellow affiliates of state and national entities) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
But faculty unions also operate at institutions that have a commitment to academic values in widely varying and changing circumstances. Yes, K-12 schools operate in a variety of circumstances, but higher education is even more varied than K-12 in resources, mission, and the attitude of institutional officers. Yet we all lay claim to some core academic principles about the freedom to inquire and write, the integrity of our work, and the opportunities we provide students. The job of a faculty union in the U.S. has typically involved both “bread and butter” issues and also issues unique to higher education. I think of them in three groups: