Bargaining Diary Archives

This morning the OU-AAUP team met for several hours with the employer’s team for a productive day of negotiations. The entire session was devoted to continued conversations on most of the open language proposals. The two teams will meet next on July 3, 8 and 10. As we move into July, we hope to begin discussions of economic proposals.

Tentative Agreements 

 When two sides reach a tentative agreement on one or a number of items, each side’s representative signs the section/s of the contract in question as an indicator of a preliminary agreement.  This allows teams to set those matters aside for the time being and focus on other sections of the contract. It does not mean those matters cannot be returned to should a need arise later in negotiations but it is an indicator of forward progress.

• Tuition Benefit

  • The two teams reached a tentative agreement on one significant item, Article XVII (Tuition Benefit).  The only changes to this article involve small grammatical corrections.  Nothing else about the article, and therefore the benefit, has been changed in any way.  

• Miscellaneous items

  • Tentative agreements were also reached on a number of small items including Article XXIV (Grievance Procedure), Article XXXV (Party Representatives) and the removal of the LOA located in the Appendix (Formulary Structure).  

Ongoing Discussions

• Both sides essentially agree on the OU-AAUP’s proposal regarding the eligibility of Special Instructors for emeritus status.  Our team will propose other changes to this article (Article IV) later in negotiations so, while there is consensus, no official tentative agreement was signed on this matter today.

• Article VII (Faculty Employment, Re-Employment, and Tenure) is a dense, complicated article.  Our team acknowledges the existence of problems within the article as written but needs more time to fully address all changes proposed by Oakland at last week’s session.

• Our team restated its opposition to the employer’s proposal to Article IX (Discipline and Discharge).  Their proposal allows a faculty member’s teaching workload to be increased in cases of deficiencies in research or service without regard to their academic unit’s workload policy.  For a myriad of reasons, the OU-AAUP disagrees.  We are opposed to teaching being utilized as punishment; furthermore, an increase in teaching is unlikely to enable deficiencies in research or service to be corrected.  Finally, we affirm that workload policies belong to individual academic units.  

• Discussions of Article X (Professional Responsibility) were wide-ranging.  Our team remains firm in the conviction that no universal workload can be placed upon Special Instructors as this needs to be addressed within individual academic units’ workload policies.  The OU-AAUP did offer a counter proposal narrowly aimed at addressing the employer’s specific concern regarding faculty notification of outside teaching during the academic year (Fall/Winter); the conversation regarding Paragraph 72 is ongoing.

• After the employer expressed concern about intellectual property processes across the University, our team drafted and shared a proposal that would create an advisory committee to research intellectual property processes.  The aim of the committee would be to review applicable collective bargaining provisions as well as University policies and procedures.  The committee would have no power to enforce changes to the collective bargaining agreement.

• The teams spent some time discussing possible changes to the Article XXIX and Appendix I (University Calendar).  The topic is incredibly complex and the two sides continue to exchange ideas.  Discussions on this item will continue next week.

• The OU-AAUP team expressed an unwillingness to discuss Article XXXIV (Effective Date and Duration) at present.  This article will be raised again once the negotiations are further along.

• The employer has proposed several changes to Appendix A (Research and Full-Time Practitioner Faculty).  They propose to remove the cap on Research Professors, which now stands at 20, even though only two such faculty members are currently employed by the University.  More troubling  is the employer’s desire to eliminate promotions for these faculty and Full-Time Practitioner Faculty, thereby removing the associated promotional raises guaranteed by Paragraph 77.  Our team strongly believes our faculty’s service to the University warrants the existing promotions.   

We continue to be grateful for the emails, text messages, phone calls and social media posts.  These negotiations belong to our members and we are infinitely stronger at the table with a fully engaged and fully informed membership by our side.