Bargaining Session Report
The two sides met for bargaining on Wednesday August 25. We were not able to reach a resolution so the faculty agreement has been extended to midnight August 31. We started the session introducing counter proposals on a package of language items and on the economic package.
Special Lecturers. Since the beginning of summer, we have been seeking to protect special lecturers from losing their status if they are assigned three-credit instead of 4-credit classes. A special lecturer is defined as a part-time faculty member who teaches at least 16 credits per year. In a program with four credit courses, that is, of course, four courses. In recent years, some programs, at the urging of administration, have changed a large number of their courses to 3 credits in order to reduce the total number of credits in their major and thus control costs to students. However, an unintended consequence is that special lecturers may lose their designation because they now teach fewer credits. Therefore, one of our earliest proposals was language that, for purposes of defining the special lecturer title, 3-credit courses would count as 4-credit courses. Throughout negotiations Oakland has opposed this. Most recently, we presented it as a trade with an item they wanted. They would not have it. We even proposed to just change the number of credits needed to define special lecturers to 15 instead of 16, thus allowing someone to hold the title of special lecturer if they taught five 3-credit courses (instead of the six needed with 3-credit courses), but Oakland would not have it. We also proposed language that would give qualified special lecturers priority in assignment of sections over new part-time hires, but Oakland also would not have it. They have rejected each and every attempt to increase the protections for these valuable faculty who make a major contribution to our university’s teaching mission and generate substantial tuition revenue for Oakland.
Economics. The two sides continue to negotiate by offering competing economic packages. Since their opening offer, Oakland has sought to severely reduce employer contributions to benefits, while also offering insignificant tiny salary increases, thus creating a net cut in total compensation. One area of movement is that Oakland is offering to keep current full-time faculty at their current percentage of retirement contributions in exchange for a lower retirement contribution rate for all future hires. However they are still insisting on severely reducing the employer contribution to health insurance. In Wednesday’s session, made an attempt to make progress by offering a drop in employer contribution to health insurance in the last year of the agreement in exchange for an increase in raises in the same year. Their counter kept their same larger drop in employer contribution while giving a miniscule increase to salary raise in the third year.
After this meeting we made plans to meet again. Members of our team were not available Thursday morning and Oakland indicated that they were unavailable to negotiate Thursday afternoon through Monday; therefore, the two sides will meet on Tuesday August 31 two days prior to the start of Fall semester classes.