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UFF Biweekly
United Faculty of Florida -- USF System Chapter
18 September 2014
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Chapter Meeting Tomorrow Noon at CDB Restaurant

The Friday UFF USF Chapter meetings are moving to CDB Restaurant, just east of USF Tampa at the intersection of Fowler Avenue and 51st Street. We will meet there tomorrow Friday at 12 noon, and we will continue to meet there for the rest of the semester except for October 3 (when we will meet at USF Sarasota / Manatee in a room TBA) and October 17 (when we will meet at USF St. Petersburg in a room TBA).

We will have one special item on our agenda tomorrow: draft language to revise the Chapter's Constitution to enable filling vacancies. Both the Constitution (and bylaws) and the draft language are posted online.

All employees of the UFF USF Bargaining Unit are invited. There will be pizza and salad and drinks. Check us out. Join the movement. Bring a colleague.

Join UFF Today!

Download, fill in, and mail the membership form. Benefits of membership include the right to run and vote in UFF chapter and statewide elections; representation in grievances (UFF cannot represent a non-member in a grievance or litigation); special deals in insurance, travel, legal advice, and other packages provided by our affiliates; free insurance coverage for job-related liability; and the knowledge you are supporting education in Florida. Come and join the movement.

Grievances

If you have been the victim of a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, you have thirty days from the time you knew or should have known of the violation to file a grievance. If you are, and at the time of the violation were, a dues-paying member of the United Faculty of Florida, you have the right to union representation. To contact the UFF USF Grievance Committee, go to the online contact form. For more information, see our web-page on grievances.

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Visit the United Faculty of Florida at USF Facebook page. This page is a place where UFF members can exchange thoughts and ideas. The page is "public", but only dues-paying UFF members are eligible to post items on the page. If you are a UFF member, ask to join on the page, or contact the Communications Committee. The Committee will invite every UFF member that asks to join. So check us out. UFF members are welcome to join, and non-members are welcome to look.

IN THIS ISSUE

Report on the UFF Senate Meeting

The primary policy-making body of the statewide United Faculty of Florida is the UFF Senate, which meets twice a year in central Florida. Last weekend, 96 UFF senators met in Tampa to look forward to the coming year. Tallahassee was the dominant subject. Whoever wins the gubernatorial election will start next year with a mandate, which means that the legislative session next spring will be a busy one.

  • The 2014 and 2015 Legislative Sessions. UFF USF (statewide) President Tom Auxter's report focused on the legislative session last spring. Unfortunately, the good news consisted of bad bills defeated – bills on retirement, health insurance, and restrictions on what textbooks faculty could assign. Meanwhile, the state is moving towards a new funding model for higher education which threatens to undermine our mission. For more, see below or click here.
From FSU's soap-operatic presidential search to the American Legislative Exchange Council's campaign against public education, there were many issues on the floor. Two striking ones were:
  • Tenure. Tenure was more of a recurrent issue at this Senate meeting than a dominant one. For more, see below or click here.
  • Degrees not Debt. The UFF Senate resolved to join a campaign to find and press for solutions to the student debt crisis. For more, see below or click here.
Meanwhile, two announcements.
  • Watch the mail for your copy of the contract. UFF is mailing copies of the 2014 – 2017 Collective Bargaining Agreement to all employees in the UFF USF Bargaining Unit. This is a hardcopy for you to keep. Remember, this is the contract that governs the terms and conditions of your employment, so keep it handy. And there is a searchable PDF file of the contract posted online.
  • Tenure and Promotion workshop on October 17. UFF will conduct a Tenure and Promotion Workshop on USF St. Petersburg after the Chapter Meeting on October 17. This will cover the old process (which apply to many faculty here) and the new one. A more detailed announcement will come later, so pencil it in.

The 2014 and 2015 Legislative Sessions

Just after the 2004 election, President George Bush told reporters, "I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." This is common practice. If a politician has an agenda, the time to push that agenda is right after a successful election when allies are invigorated and opponents are intimidated.

That's what happened in Florida during the 2011 legislative session. We had a new governor, a legislative leadership with large majorities, and an agenda. Hence a lot of destructive legislation. While the Florida Education Association (FEA) did score a number of victories (like defeating the attempt to abolish tenure in state and community colleges), there were some defeats (like cutting the state contributions to our retirement program - and only partially making up the cuts by imposing a 3 % income tax on us).

On the other hand, the 2014 session was held in an election year, and with court battles over redistricting and the gubernatorial race too close to call, politicians were on unusually good behavior this year. Depending on how the election turns out, things will be different (one way or the other) next spring. UFF USF (statewide) President Tom Auxter reported that the proposed legislation last spring was less dire, and that the FEA had scored a number of successes against some of the worst of the lot.

The number one issue was retirement. Last spring, House Speaker Weatherford led an attempt to shift new hires out of the primary Florida Retirement System program, which would have undercut the financial stability of the program over time. During the session, the unions in Tallahassee collaborated to stop this legislation. FEA also helped defeat a bill to cap our health insurance benefits.

But next spring, with an electoral mandate behind him, whomever is elected governor will be in a stronger position to pursue his priorities. Our priorities this academic year are:

  • Recruiting and retaining faculty talent. Low and stagnant salaries along with cuts in pension funding has worsened Florida's brain drain.
  • Restoring the funding cuts and reducing student / faculty ratios. We've endured some of the state's steepest cuts and we need to keep up with demand and fund actual enrollment.
  • Empowering and protecting faculty rights. Grant state colleges and universities the authority to adopt policies that promote academic freedom, protect due process and preserve our ability to affect local institutional control.
A lot depends on this election, and we encourage everyone to vote this fall.

Tenure

It has become old news that most newly hired faculty are not tenure-track, the primary effect being that a growing fraction of the faculty do not have the freedom to teach in accordance with their conscience and expertise, and they do not have the freedom to participate in the governance of the institution to which they belong. Of course, a well-managed department will protect non-tenured faculty, but unfortunately there are poorly managed departments and there are even micromanaging or panicky administrators who may compel departments to jettison non-tenured faculty.

Tenure was more of a recurrent issue at this meeting than a major one. One place it turned up was in the report by the Contract Enforcement Committee, which oversees the last (third) step in the grievance process for the union. There were fewer grievances last year - perhaps because administrators behave better when the economy is improving - but a lot of them were tenure and promotion denials. In addition there some grievances on terminations.

In fact, the College Bargaining Committee (which oversees bargaining for state and community colleges) reported that there seemed to be a sort of "attack on tenure" going on. (Readers may recall that the 2011 bill to abolish tenure targeted the colleges.) And the union leadership reminded us again that when Governor Scott interviews prospective trustees, one of the issues discussed is tenure.

Degrees not Debt

Just as the erosion of tenure is old news, so is the $ 1 trillion in student debt, which for perhaps 35 million students and former students averages out at $ 29,000 each, many with many times that. UFF FAMU Chapter President Elizabeth Davenport said that she noticed a lack of candidates in FAMU's College of Education and became concerned about how a teacher with heavy student debt would ever pay it off while on a teacher's salary. So she moved, and the UFF Senate approved, the following motion:

Incidentally, it isn't just tuition. It's also fees, as representatives for Graduate Assistants United pointed out. While many institutions waive tuition for graduate students working as graduate assistants, few in Florida waive fees, which can amount to thousands of dollars a year - for a graduate student, a lot of money

LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, September 19, at 12 noon in CDB Restaurant at 5104 E. Fowler Ave. just east of USF Tampa.

There will be pizza, salad, and drinks. All UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. Come and join the movement.

Membership: Everyone in the UFF USF System Bargaining unit is eligible for UFF membership: to join, simply fill out and send in the membership form.

NOTE: The USF-UFF Chapter website is http://www.uff.ourusf.org, and our e-mail address is uff@ourusf.org.

About this broadcast: This Newsletter was broadcast from uff.ourusf.org, hosted at ICDsoft.com, and is intended for all members of the UFF USF Bargaining unit (USF faculty and professionals at most departments). A (usually identical) version will be broadcast to USF-News and USF-Talk from mccolm@usf.edu.

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