Professors at Pennsylvania’s 14 state-run universities have given their union leaders the authority to call for a strike, but if history is any guide, the stalled negotiations will be resolved before professors walk out of classrooms.
Since 1985, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties has taken strike-authorization votes three other times. And each time a deal was reached without a strike.
This time 90 percent of the 5,500 faculty members voted, and 95 percent of them supported the strike, according to the union. No strike date has been set, and negotiations over the contract, which expired in June, have resumed.
Kevin Kodish, a union spokesman, says the vote demonstrates strong unity. “This vote reflects the faculty’s anger at what some state-system officials are trying to do to public higher education in Pennsylvania,” he says.
Facing a $40-million deficit, the administration has proposed freezing faculty members’ salaries and requiring professors to pay part of their health-care premiums for the first time. (That new cost could be $900 a year for family coverage.) Union leaders are willing to go along with a “general wage freeze” in the first year of the four-year contract, but they are pushing for higher raises in the later years.
Administrators have also proposed scrapping a contract provision that limits the number of part-time professors. The system, which includes such institutions as Kutztown, Lock Haven, and West Chester Universities, has more than 100,000 students.
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Professors at Metropolitan State College of Denver have begun an organizing campaign, hoping to become the first faculty to unionize at a Colorado public college in decades.
Faculty members, spurred on by new policies they say have threatened tenure at the college, have teamed up with the Colorado affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. Mark Belkin, a union organizer for the affiliate, says faculty members are most concerned about the newly appointed board of trustees. “They’ve only been in existence for 12 months,” he says of the board. “And we think they’ve created a lot of chaos.”
Metro State, an open-enrollment college founded in 1965, has about 19,000 students. According to Mr. Belkin, the nascent union campaign has already enlisted more than 100 of the college’s 280 full-time professors. Once the union membership tops 50 percent of the faculty, organizers will ask the college to recognize the union voluntarily. Unlike some states, Colorado does not have legislation that would force the college to negotiate.
The college’s interim president, Ray Kieft, has said the faculty members can organize if they wish, but he says the policy changes have been exaggerated.
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At Yale University, another lengthy battle between the administration and the blue- and white-collar unions ended in September when the sides struck a deal on an eight-year contract. But supporters of a graduate-student union, which has been fighting for recognition for more than a decade, are keeping the pressure on.
Last month a panel of labor experts -- including Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, and Fred Feinstein, former National Labor Relations Board general counsel -- listened to student complaints about intimidation from professors during a nonbinding union election in April.
The Graduate Employees and Students Organization lost the election 694 to 651. The union says some professors, especially those in the life sciences, have been hostile to students who support the union, have kicked students out of laboratories if they talked about the unions, and have told students that union organizing would hurt their academic work. One student says that during a one-week strike in March, a professor met him on a picket line and said, “Good luck with your career, buddy.”
A Yale spokeswoman says the charges made by the union are filled with mischaracterizations and have no merit. She also emphasized that the “highly partisan” panel hearing the complaints was not neutral.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 8, Page A12