So much happens during legislative sessions in the states each year that it is easy to miss important developments if you don't know where to look.  That is the case with the recent legislative session in the Old Line State.

Despite its "blue state" image, Maryland does not have what we would consider very progressive laws when it comes to collective bargaining rights for higher education faculty.  Community college faculty can gain the right to organize, but only through a complicated process in which Senators and Representatives of a  particular county can petition the full legislature for collective bargaining rights for community college faculty within their county or district.  And in the University system there is currently no legislation that enables collective bargaining for faculty.

But AFT Maryland has been working to change that and in this last legislative session they were able to get the legislature to take the first step in that direction on behalf of contingent faculty and graduate employees.

Deep inside the "Joint Chairmen's Report on the State Operating Budget and the State Capital Budget and Related Recommendations" on pages 167-8, you will see that the University of Maryland system has been charged with forming a working group including various stakeholders to study and report on "the status of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty in Maryland's state public higher education institutions."

"Examining the growth and use of contingent faculty and graduate employees in Maryland is long overdue" said Lorretta Johnson, AFT Executive Vice President and former president of AFT Maryland under whose watch this process was started.   "We know that these employees have been growing in number and doing more and more of the teaching in Maryland and yet their compensation and treatment is simply not commensurate with their professional responsibilities."

The working group is charged with examining, among other things:

• salary, benefits, internal grievance procedures for graduate assistants and adjunct faculty;
• efforts to improve and strengthen conditions for graduate assistants including salaries, benefits, policies and working conditions;
• the educational role played by the various categories of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty, including the degree to which graduate assistants and adjunct faculty contribute to the function of and educational experience at these institutions; and,
• comparisons of Maryland graduate employees and adjunct faculty to national trends.

"We believe that when the legislature gets this report they will come to the same conclusion we do.  These employees, like other public employees in Maryland, should have the right to negotiate their working conditions." reiterates Marietta English, recently elected president of AFT Maryland. 

The group is to report back to the legislature no later than November 1, 2009. The full Charimen's Report is here.