I know what you are saying out there—we promised blogging from the AFT Higher Education conference and didn’t come through on that promise. You are right. Many AFT FACE bloggers were there, but we were all just a bit too busy putting on and attending the many sessions that we just didn’t get in front of the old computer in time. But don’t fret, we will soon have up lots of materials from the conference over at the mother site for you to check out and download.

In the meantime, we must note that over 200 representatives and 40 senators sponsored the introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act this week! Time to get on the ball and call and write to your legislators to make sure they know you support its passage.

And now, we resume with regular blogging.

Here is hoping that you are one of the 400-plus union leaders and activists who are getting ready to head down to sunny Miami, Florida for the AFT Higher Education National Issues Conference. This year’s conference, entitled Generating Power: Mobilizing the Union to Revitalize Higher Education, will include a major focus on academic staffing issues including panels on:

• building bargaining campaigns around academic staffing;
• trends in instructional expenditures and instructional staffing;
• seniority, security and priority consideration for contingent faculty;
• the state of graduate education;
• strategies for building solidarity within the union; and
• structuring effective local unions for contingent faculty.

And, of course, there will be the open discussion in the Contingent Faculty Forum.

We are going to do our best to keep the blogging going through the conference, so if you can’t join us in person, we hope you will join us virtually.

Marisa Johnson, student at Portland Community College Cascade Campus; Kelly Cowan, Portland State University Faculty Association and David Rives, PCC Faculty Federation and Academic Professionals testify before the Oregon House Education Committee. (Photo by Jillian Smith, AFT-Oregon Assistant Director Communications)

Now is the time to reverse the trend that's shrinking the number of full-time faculty jobs in Oregon colleges and universities and creating unfair working conditions for contingent faculty.  That was the message witnesses told the Oregon House Education Committee, February 20, 2009. Over a dozen faculty, students and higher education advocates testified in support of House Bill (HB) 2557, the Faculty and College Excellence Act.

"There needs to be a system that is consistent and fair for defining the relationship between part-time and full-time faculty," Cowan told the committee, which was chaired by Rep. Sara Gelser, and included Rep. Michael Dembrow, Local 2277 (PCCFFAP) as a vice-chair. "Most of the provisions in HB 2557 call for fair treatment of teachers and would have little or no financial impact," said Cowan.

Witnesses explained that their research shows that a majority of subjects at Oregon's community colleges are taught by part-time faculty, and OUS is also moving in this direction. These instructors, who hold the same credentials as their counterparts and provide excellent service, work at lower salary rates with little or no benefits. Many piece together full-time loads at two or more institutions. This means less available time for instructors to spend with students outside of class, and creates faculty recruitment and retention issues for colleges and universities.

  FINALLY!

I am not quite sure where to begin with the upcoming article in the Chronicle of Higher Education dealing with the Employee Free Choice Act. Clearly the author is trying to find the “higher education hook,” but in doing so completely confuses the issue. Here are a few observations and, hopefully, clarifications:

As is so often the case, the Employee Free Choice Act is described as allowing workers to join a union if the majority sign a card or petition as opposed to current law in which “the employer must hold a secret-ballot election.” Only partially accurate. Currently, employees could present the employer with cards or a petition and the employer could voluntarily recognize the employees for the purpose of collective bargaining. The key is that it is the employer’s choice. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, the employees get to decide if they want to form a union by getting a majority of their fellow workers to sign cards or they can file cards saying that they want to have a secret ballot election. The key change is that it is the employees’ choice—and gosh, shouldn’t it be?

Are you an academic who supports the Employee Free Choice Act?  Then head on over to the Political Economy Research Institute and sign their petition that says just that.  Corporations are spending millions of dollars and spreading misinformation in opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.

So go sign that petition and tell your colleagues to as well.  Congress needs to know that while big business might want to maintain their control over who joins a union and who doesn't, you think that workers ought to make that choice.

And if you are unfamiliar with the Employee Free Choice Act and why it is important for higher education, we offer up this earlier installment.

Trust me that we have heard the acronym "FACE" used in just about every possible double entendre you can think of, but one (only semi-joking) question we have received multiple times since starting the FACE campaign is: "Are you on Facebook?" Get it? FACE? Facebook? Okay, we get it. No, really, we do. We are now officially on Facebook, and if you are too, then come on over and join the group. We are going to do our best to keep information from the FACE site and related info posted there, and of course, we can all chat it up on the wall.

Call it a masterstroke of planning or just plain coincidence, but AFT targeted tomorrow, February 10^th, for Unity Day as part of our Fight For America's Future Campaign.  In simplest terms, we are asking everyone wear blue tomorrow to signify their support for a strong stimulus bill that includes funding for education including higher education.  Sending that message is even more important now since the Senate appears poised to vote on their version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and they decided to save some money by cutting aid to higher education.

Now to be fair, the Senate did add in a little bit of program money that was not in the House version of the Act, but in very specific areas like "rural distance education."  The main impact of the Senate bill is to take away billions of dollars for higher education infrastructure and tens of billions of dollars to help states cover their education budgets, including higher education.  All of which is to say that the Senate bill will provide substantially less money for higher education at the state level, put more pressure on institutions to cut spending, and have all the usual negative consequences for higher education that we are used to seeing in times of fiscal crisis:  contingent faculty losing classes or whole assignments, larger class sizes, full-time lines going unfilled, staff layoffs, and on and on.

So, do the little thing tomorrow, wear blue.  And once you are properly attired, head on over to our campaign site and join us in telling Congress to pass a stimulus bill that supports higher education so we can all get down to the business of helping students and workers get the education and training they need to get back out in the workforce.

On the heels of Washington State's recent legislative hearing on academic staffing, AFT Oregon has worked with legislators in the Oregon House to file a wide-ranging piece of legislation pursuing the goals set forth in our FACE Campaign. House Bill 2557 directs institutions to establish plans for improving their ratios of full-time to part-time faculty at the institutional level and makes those plans mandatory subjects of collective bargaining (currently administrations can, and do, simply decline to bargain staffing levels with the union). Under this bill, institutions are also directed to create a mechanism to achieve pro-rata pay for part-time faculty, provide access to benefits for part-time faculty teaching a 50 percent load or more, and create a system of seniority and preferential consideration for part-time faculty.

Leading the charge is former AFT member, Representative Michael Dembrow, who is now Vice Chair of the Oregon House Education Committee. AFT Oregon has also been working closely with the Oregon Education Association on the bill and will be working to bring leaders and members from both organizations to a committee hearing in the coming weeks.

For seven years, I was a full-time, tenure-track faculty member (after a year of teaching part-time). This meant that I had a contract to teach roughly from September until May, and I could either be paid over those 9 months or chose to spread my, cough, incredible salary over 12 months. What I couldn’t do by law was get paid for 9 months by my college and then draw unemployment insurance during the summer when I wasn’t teaching. Why?  Because there is a clause in U.S. Code known as “reasonable assurance.” Simply put, since I had reasonable assurance that I would be working again in the fall semester, I was not eligible for unemployment insurance.

Now, let’s say that you were a part-time faculty member hired term-by-term (and in many cases weren’t even given a contract until the semester had started and the college was sure your class was going to carry). And let’s say that sometimes you taught two classes, sometimes three, but usually a varying amount at more than one college depending on what was offered. One would think that it would be logical to argue that you don’t have reasonable assurance of employment—in fact, you don’t have any assurance until the next term starts! Furthermore, you might suspect that a part-time faculty member in this instance would easily qualify for unemployment insurance during the summer when there is considerably less work.

That is where you would be wrong.