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UFF Biweekly
United Faculty of Florida -- USF System Chapter
24 October 2019
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IN THIS ISSUE

Grievances and Assignments

The primary legal duties of a union is to bargain and enforce a contract. By "enforce", we mean that we deal with contract violations.

  • Grievances. If you are a union member, and your contractual rights and privileges were violated, we can help. If you are not a union member, join before you get in trouble. For details, see below or click here.
One problem is the unreasonable assignment.
  • Assignments. An employee is supposed to be given a reasonable assignment appropriate for their position and for the best interests of the university. It doesn't always happen that way. For more on this phenomenon, and what to do about it, see below or click here.
The UFF USF Biweekly continues to run short accounts by recipients of travel scholarships.
  • Learning a Language Abroad. Amanda Huensch has been studying the effect on identity of study abroad and of learning a new language. For more, see below or click here.
Meanwhile, this Monday, the Florida Education Association started its statewide Fund Our Future bus tour. The bus had been parked outside the hotel during last weekend's annual FEA Delegate Assembly...

...and was the site of a press conference featuring FEA President Fed Ingram. During the next few weeks, the bus will make over fifty stops in over thirty counties to publicize the plight of Florida's public schools, and to promote an FEA proposal to boost public education funding by $ 22 billion over the next decade.

The tour is associated with two Twitter accounts, #4EveryStudent and #FundOurFutureFL. The bus will come to the Tampa Bay area, and events include:

For more information, see the Fund Our Future (Florida) web-page or contact the FEA.

Chapter Meeting Tomorrow on USF Tampa in EDU 261

The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at noon on USF Tampa campus in the Education Building, EDU 261. Lunch is on us. On the agenda: consolidation and organizing. Come and check us out.

This fall, we will meet on October 25, November 8 and December 6 on USF Tampa in EDU 261; we will also meet in USF Sarasota / Manatee on Nov. 22 in a room TBD. All meetings (and other events) are noted on the calendar on the UFF USF Website. Come and check us out.

$ 500 Travel Grants for UFF Members

The USF Chapter of the UFF will award six $ 500 Travel Scholarships for next spring and summer. This will be for travel for participation in a professional activity. All applications are due by December 4, and only UFF members are eligible. In addition, no recipient of the Fall or Spring cycles of travel grants is eligible to apply. The six recipients shall be selected by lot at the December 6 chapter meeting. For more information, see the Travel Scholarship Flyer.

This initiative is part of our membership campaign. If you would like to become active in the UFF USF Membership Drive, contact the Membership Chair, Debra Sinclair (click here).

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.

We are on Social Media

Yes, we are on social media.

Grievances

Once the USF Board of Trustees ratifies the proposed contract on Monday, we will have a new contract. But it's up to us to enforce it. The contract provides an enforcement mechanism (and the enforcement mechanism of the old 2016 - 2019 Collective Bargaining Agreement is identical to the one in the new contract). If an employee's contractual rights or privileges are violated, that employee may file a grievance, which is a formal complaint that the contract has been violated. The Administration must then address that grievance, and there is a process for doing that.

In addition, if there is a dispute over a job assignment, then there is a separate mechanism for addressing that; for more on assignment disputes, see below.

A grievance is a complaint that the contract has been violated. Stupidity and injustice are not in themselves contract violations; only a violation of the contract is grievable. For example, since raises, assignments, and other things depend on annual evaluations, one must take annual evaluations seriously. If an employee was not evaluated, that is a contract violation, for Section 10.1 of the 2016 - 2019 Collective Bargaining Agreement (page 20) reads: "The performance of employees, other than those who have received notice of nonreappointment under Article 12.2 or those not entitled to receive notice of nonreappointment under Article 12.2, shall be evaluated at least once annually." If the employee was not evaluated, that is a contract violation, but the grievant must complain that Section 10.1 was violated.

Grievances must be filed within thirty days of the time the employee knew or should have known of the contract violation: grievances have been dismissed for being filed late. For more on the grievance process, see the article in the 10 March 2016 Biweekly; notice that:

To contact the UFF USF Grievance Committee, one may contact the Grievance Committee or the Grievance Committee chair or send an email to UFF USF - which can be done by pressing "reply" to a Biweekly.

Assignments

In theory, the university hires an employee for a particular position, and then assigns that employee duties that could reasonably be done, and done in a fashion consistent with the short- and long-term interests of the university, which includes the university's relationship with that employee.

It doesn't always happen that way.

For example, if the university hires an assistant professor on tenure track, then the university has an interest in seeing what that employee can do to further the mission of the university along the lines of the university's expectations of that employee as an assistant professor. So if the university hires an assistant professor in space exploration with the hope that that the employee will do frontier research on space exploration, it is in the interest of the university that that employee have the time and resources to do research so she can show the university what she can do.

But there is a problem. Suppose that the employee's department would like the employee to do something else. Teach lots of classes, because of the demand for classes on space exploration. Do community engagement, because the community (which pays the university's bills) is interested in space exploration. Manage a space exploration program, because (believe it or not) extensive programs need managing. And so on. All worthy goals, but unless the Administration intends to evaluate teaching, community engagement, and management, these worthy goals are interfering with the employee's and the university's interest in the employee's opportunity to do research.

Article 9 of the contract (the current contract; the new contract has the same Article 9) says that one consideration in composing an assignment is the employee's "...opportunity to fulfill applicable criteria for tenure, promotion, successive fixed multi-year appointments, and merit salary increases." Section 9.3D goes into this in detail.

If an employee has a problem with her assignment, she may request a conference with the person who made the assignment; if that does not resolve the problem, she may ask for a conference with "an administrator at the next higher level." If that does not resolve the issue, there is an Assignment Dispute Resolution Procedure in the contract (Appendix F, starting on page 97). As always, union members may seek help from the UFF USF Grievance Committee, via the Grievance Committee Page or the Grievance Committee chair or by sending an email to UFF USF - which can be done by pressing "reply" to a Biweekly.

But as always, assignment disputes must be handled in a timely fashion: if an employee is coming up for tenure and had unreasonable assignments during his candidacy, it is too late to complain about it. Assignment dispute complaints must be filed when the assignments are made, not years afterward.

Learning a Language Abroad

Amanda Huensch is an associate professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of World Languages. She received a $500 travel scholarship to attend the 2019 meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. This is her account.

The UFF travel scholarship helped fund my trip to the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Atlanta, GA in March 2019. My colleagues Rosamond Mitchell (University of Southampton) and Nicole Tracy-Ventura (West Virginia University) and I had a paper presentation on The evolution of second language (L2) identity during and following study abroad: A long term study. The paper reported on a five-year longitudinal project investigating the linguistic and social outcomes of study abroad. The project began as the Languages and Social Networks Abroad Project (LANGSNAP), which followed 56 learners of French and Spanish, collecting data at six time points before, during, and after a year abroad in a French- or Spanish-speaking country. A new round of data was collected from 33 of the learners in 2016 as part of LANGSNAP 3.0.The focus of the paper presented at AAAL was on the longer term impact of study abroad on identity, particularly related to identity as a second language learner/user. Attending the conference was an excellent experience, and I appreciate the help of UFF to make that possible. Thank you UFF for your support of faculty scholarship!

LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, October 11, at noon, on USF Tampa campus, in EDU 261.

We will have lunch at the meeting. 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.

If you do not want to receive the UFF Biweekly, you can unsubscribe below or by e-mailing a message to gmccolm@tampabay.rr.com. If you do not receive the Biweekly, but want to, e-mail a message to gmccolm@tampabay.rr.com.