Faculty members at Brooklyn and C.W. Post campuses of Long Island University walked off the job yesterday after failing to reach an agreement with the university over wages and benefits. LIU's proposals amounted to little more than take-backs and what amounts to a pay cut. The 5 year wage proposal gives no pay increase to faculty members in the first year, a 2% lump sum payment (NOT an increase in the salary) in the second and third year of the contract, and up to a 4% increase in years four and five if the college sees tuition revenue growth exceeding 8%. Meanwhile, the university is seeking to shift more of the burden for health insurance onto its employees by passing on premium increases to workers and reducing benefits.

The administration has responded by trying to pit faculty members against students, claiming that pay increases for faculty would have to come from funds set aside for students. The administration has also sent out misleading emails about the availability of health insurance and COBRA benefits for striking workers. In the face of all this, LIU faculty members are standing strong.

We hope that the administration and the unions are able to come to an amicable settlement soon that will allow the faculty to get back to the important work of providing their students with a quality education.

Updated September 9, 2011: The Long Island University Faculty Federation has a Facebook page where you can stay updated on the progress of their negotiations and demonstrate your solidarity. How about throwing them a like?

Elaine Bobrove, president of the United Adjunct Faculty of New Jersey, writes this for the Asbury Park Press:

When I switched on my car radio one morning recently, I heard the host of a talk radio station say, "It's not the teachers or the policemen or the firemen who are ruining America. It's the unions!"

This seems to be the same message we are getting from Gov. Chris Christie. He seems to believe that teachers are solely responsible for putting New Jersey into a financial hole. I'm hearing the message repeated by strangers when I'm in line at the supermarket and even had one of my offspring (definitely one who should know better) saying that teachers are both overpaid and unsuccessful in what we do.

There seems to be a universal perspective that maybe there was some validity to the work of unions back in the day of the sweatshops, but that things have gone too far in the other direction. The unions, this line of thinking goes, have betrayed the public trust by negotiating outrageous contracts.

I have also heard it said that the reason people cannot get jobs is that the unions have made it too expensive to hire American workers.

Let's look at the facts. When I started teaching as a community college adjunct in 1982, we earned $800 to teach a three-credit course. Before we voted to form a union in 1995, salaries had only risen to between $950 and $1,000 for a three-credit course. That would be $10,000 per year if we were allowed to teach a full academic load of 10 courses per year.

In 1995, when we began negotiating our own contracts, the poverty threshold for a four-person family was $15,568. Our most recent contract in 2010 started at $670 per credit hour -- the equivalent of $2,010 for a three-credit course. Are we abusing the system now?

If we were teaching a full-time schedule as an adjunct, the grand total would be $20,100 per year. For 2010, the U.S government said that $22,050 is the poverty threshold for a family of four. Have we made gains? Of course we have. Should we feel guilty that we are still trying to improve our conditions? Hardly.

Like far too many American workers, community college adjuncts still do not have health insurance through our employers. Furthermore, because we work part time, we are not eligible for insurance through the new federal health plan. In New Jersey, we do have a state pension, but it is based on a percentage of our salaries so it is hardly extravagant.

Many of us work far beyond traditional retirement age because our pensions and Social Security, also based on our earnings, do not give those of us who have dedicated our working lives to teaching as adjuncts enough to sustain ourselves.

In case you think we all have wealthy spouses, or are teaching on cushy pensions, one-third of adjuncts say that adjuncting is their only source of income.

Then there is the perception that teachers who teach three or more courses per semester are not only overpaid, but that we get too much money for teaching 45 hours of class over 15 weeks.

An effective teacher does not go in and teach and then go home to leisure. A good teacher works constantly through the semester; that includes evenings, weekends and most of the so-called "free" time that we supposedly have.

It is not my intention here to write a "woe is me" story. I chose to teach at the community college and I have never regretted the decision. Most of us who adjunct know that much of what we gain cannot be measured in terms of dollars. It is the knowledge that we have opened doors for our students and on some wonderful occasions we have changed lives.

Some will claim it is very difficult to deal with a struggling economy and at the same time respect workers' rights. In a democracy, all interests must be heard. We are adding our voices to the democratic process. "Union" is not a dirty word. We are not a part of the problem as many suggest; we are a part of the solution.

In unsurprising news, the far-right Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan has inserted itself into a campaign for union recognition for graduate research assistants at the University of Michigan. The center and a graduate research employee have filed a complaint with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) in an effort to stop the recognition election.

The Mackinac Center is part of a nation-wide network of conservative think tanks, funded by the Koch brothers and other right-wing philanthropists, that have been pushing to dismantle the public sector in order to privatize public resources. They have advocated privatizing the University of Michigan and have harassed labor studies professors at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University by invoking the Michigan version of the Freedom of Information Act for email fishing expeditions. Given their anti-union and anti-public sector biases, it's hardly news that they'd try to wedge themselves into the research assistant unionization campaign in Ann Arbor.

What is significant is the exceedingly thin fig-leaf which the Mackinac Center hides their anti-worker proclivities behind: claiming that almost 30 years ago, MERC made a decision that research assistants are not employees, and the only thing that has changed in those 30 years is the Board of Regents. The claim is absurd on its face - universities are relying more and more upon the work of graduate assistants to provide the core work of teaching and research, work that oftentimes is only tangentially related to the academic interests of the graduate student. In addition, the Mackinac Center falls back on the lame anti-union talking point that we see wherever graduate employees organize - the "union will come between the graduate employee and their academic adviser/mentor," a claim which is easily refuted by talking to the tens of thousands of graduate teaching and research assistants who have been unionized going back forty years.

Firmly rejecting the notion that tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty are too different to bargain together, an administrative law judge ruled Tuesday that United Faculty can legally represent both, and recommended certifying the union as the exclusive bargaining agent.
The victory for the UIC United Faculty, a joint effort of the AFT the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, must be defended.

"Previous case law clearly shows that we have every legal right to be recognized as one union," says Lennard Davis, distinguished professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC. "We call on the administration to end this attack on faculty and work with us to strengthen our university."

United Faculty was formed when a majority of all faculty signed hundreds of union authorization cards in April. When the university challenged, the case was brought to Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board administrative law judge Ellen Maureen Strizak. She struck down the university's argument that state labor law only speaks to tenured and tenure-track faculty, and that contingent faculty would have to bargain separately.  Strizak also found multiple commonalities between tenured and non-tenured professors, refuting the university's claim that they don't have enough in common to reasonably bargain together. Among her points: these faculty teach the same courses, hold office hours, serve together on committees, and even substitute for one another during absences.

"We applaud the Administrative Law Judge's finding that tenured, tenure track and non tenure-track faculty should be in the same bargaining unit," says Victoria Persky, a UIC professor of epidemiology. "Indeed, we are virtually indistinguishable in the courses we teach, the committees and service we provide and the research we do."

UIC United Faculty members and supporters are expected to flood UI president Michael J. Hogan's office with letters and emails urging him to recognize the new collective bargaining unit, embrace a unified faculty and abandon an expensive legal battle against the union. Members and supporters are urged to support that position with emails to Hogan. Hogan has seven days to appeal.

Today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) chaired a historic hearing on the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the DREAM Act.  As Sen. Durbin stated when he announced this hearing, the intention of the hearing was "to discuss how the DREAM Act will make our country stronger by giving undocumented students a chance to earn legal status if they came here as children, are long-term U.S. residents, have good moral character, and complete two years of college or military service in good standing." (For more about the DREAM Act, go here.)

The hearing included important and supportive testimony from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, DREAM Student, Ola Kaso and others, but it was Senator Durbin, who has led this effort in the Senate, that set the tone with his passion and commitment to this issue and the students the DREAM Act would seek to help.

Addressing the many students who would benefit from this legislation, or "DREAMers," who filled the room along with supporters of the legislation, Sen. Durbin expressed disappointment that his colleagues in the Senate had not yet passed this legislation which has the support of the majority of the Senate, but has been stopped by Republican-led filibusters.  Sen. Durbin told the DREAMers that he and most of his colleagues believe in the potential of these students and he hopes that they believe in this country and to not give up on this fight.  "Sometimes we take a long time to make the right decision for fairness and justice, but eventually we finally do," said Durbin.

In addition to the witnesses at the hearing, Senator Durbin placed into the record over 100 statements of organizations that support the DREAM Act including a statement by AFT President Randi Weingarten.  In her statement, President Weingarten stated that "the DREAM Act is the right thing to do for our country and for immigrant youth who have shown, through their hard work and commitment, an irrepressible desire to achieve their dreams.

Read the AFT Resolution in support of the DREAM Act.