Bargaining

Our bargaining session on December 5 shifted the dynamic of our contract negotiations moving forward, as the administration’s team announced they intended to file for state mediation. The mediator has contacted us and proposed dates in late January/February. Though these will be closed sessions we will still be providing bargaining updates and ways to stay engaged.

Additional information on bargaining progress can be found on UA’s digital newsletter, The Duck & Cover.

All Proposals

Collective Bargaining Agreement Gains 

After years of negotiation with the administration, the membership of United Academics voted to ratify the newest Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). You can view the Collective Bargaining Agreement here. You can find a number of highlights below:

• • Strengthened unit-level governance processes and ensured faculty-approved policies are reviewed by the Provost
  • Established a $500,000 Childcare Community Partnership Investment Fund to address the local shortage of care providers
  • Created annual $150,000 Travel Support Fund to offset work-related caregiving costs
  • Won 10% raises over the three years of the contract and raised salary floors
  • Instituted post-promotion raises for Career faculty equal to those for tenured faculty (4% for meeting and 8% for exceeding expectations)
  • Ended “up or out” nature of promotion reviews for Library faculty
  • Defined funding-contingent status to prevent faculty from being misclassified
  • Created new Research Assistant types, allowing more nuanced definition between positions
  • Established a “reporting site” for all faculty and narrowed admin’s ability to relocate or assign faculty work that requires travel
  • Established reinstatement process for laid-off Career researchers and instructional faculty
  • Clarified eligibility, timing, and course loads for faculty on sabbatical
  • Created Teaching Professor category to highlight and reward the expertise of our Career instructors

The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) ratified in July 2022 left several key issues to an appendix of implementation agreements to be worked out over the following months and beyond, including caregiving supports; proposed changes to the Tenure Reduction Program (TRP); the role of service in our work; pay equity; and our units’ policies on merit, performance and promotion reviews, and professional responsibilities. Send us an email at [email protected] to express interest in joining us in this work. Feel free to reach out to ask any clarifying questions you might have.

Revision of Unit Policies

Implementation Agreement #2 of the CBA requires that unit merit policies be revised by June 2023—in advance of distributing merit raises (out of a 3% pool) in January 2024.

Similarly, unit policies on professional responsibilities (i.e., workload and assignment of work duties), performance reviews, and promotion and tenure reviews need to be revised by June 2024.

In consultation with deans, the administration is preparing policy templates for units to ensure that new unit policies will align with the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) language. The use of templates is fine—and helpful!—as long as everyone is clear that they are starting points rather than ends in themselves.

It may be tempting to speed through the process of revising policies, and there would be clear benefits to reducing ambiguity or uncertainty sooner rather than later. However, it’s even more important to review and revise unit policies to be thorough, transparent, and genuinely participatory.

This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of shared governance. As with local elections, we have the most power to influence the outcomes within our own units. If we want to transform the nature of our work, how our duties are assigned, or how our performance is measured and rewarded, this is our opportunity. Let us seize it.

Proposed Changes to TRP

At the close of our negotiations last June, the administration presented a new proposal to change the Tenure Reduction Program. Because we received this new proposal two days before the last planned bargaining session, our bargaining team felt strongly that we did not have enough input from our members to accept or reject the offer. We also did not have enough time to submit changes to the proposal. As a result, the administration and the union agreed to hold a separate vote on this proposal after the ratification of the Contract Bargaining Agreement (CBA).

According to the Implementation Agreement signed by UA and the administration, we are to either negotiate or simply vote on the administration’s proposal by early January 2023. If we negotiate on TRP, both parties would sign a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would outline the agreed-upon changes to TRP. This MOU would need to be signed by December 31, 2022.  In the absence of such an MOU, the administration’s proposal from June 15, 2022, would be put to a ratification vote of UAUO members during January 2023.

Caregiving

The brand-new Caregiving article (Article 34) in the CBA:

1. 1. underscores that caregiving responsibilities should be taken into account for scheduling, clock stoppage, and leaves
   2. commits UO to provide access to Care.com to faculty to help identify potential caregiving solutions
   3. creates an annual $150,000 Travel Support Fund to offset work-related caregiving costs

Furthermore, Implementation Agreement #5 of the CBA establishes a one-time $500,000 Childcare Community Partnership Investment Fund to address the local shortage of care providers.

Service

The burdens of service assignments are not generally distributed equitably among faculty along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, classification, category, or rank. Inequities in service burdens lead to professional advantages for those who avoid or neglect service obligations while creating professional obstacles for those who take on more service responsibilities or discharge them more diligently. Negative impacts may include foregone merit increases, delayed promotion, failed promotion, nonrenewal, or layoff.

Implementation Agreement #3 of the CBA calls for a joint committee to consider how to enhance the equitable distribution of service, informed by the ongoing work of the UO Senate Task Force on Service.

Pay Equity

Bargaining resulted in two parallel mechanisms for focusing on pay equity issues on campus:

1. 1. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on salaries ratified in December 2021 affirmed that the administration and United Academics will form a joint study group to discuss how inflation and equity impact faculty salaries generally.
   2. Implementation Agreement #6 of the CBA calls for a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) during Fall 2022 for an external consultant to review internal pay equity for Career instructional faculty “to determine if inequities exist that cannot be explained by legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons such as performance, years of experience, education, discipline, specialization, rank, and position expectations. The study’s parameters ultimately shall be decided by the University, with input from the Union.”

These two mechanisms are in addition to the ongoing work of UO’s Office of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance (OICRC) and the role of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor & Industries in enforcing the Oregon Equal Pay Act (OEPA). Individual cases of pay inequity can always be explored—and hopefully resolved—through these channels. Our goal with the pay equity studies is to tackle many potential cases in parallel in the interests of efficiency.