PSUFA’s team is preparing for more collective bargaining!
Members of our negotiating team will meet with PSU’s Administration next Thursday, April 26, and Saturday, April 28, pressing hard on key issues that remain unresolved -- pay equity and benefits.At the last bargaining sessions our team was thrilled with the amazing support they had from fellow adjuncts and members of other unions, including ASPSU.We’d love your support this time too. If you would like to be an observer at our upcoming sessions please fill out this form.
Here is where we will begin negotiations next week:The issue of the benefit funds is close to being resolved, though of course we never get as much as we know most adjuncts need. The key concerns are how to provide support for our member’s healthcare needs. Since PSU admin can no longer fund the Health Insurance Stipend due to legal issues they have agreed to work with PSUFA to research the possibility of providing our members access to PSU’s group healthcare plans. We are also planning to create a new fund to cover a broad range of financial challenges that might arise for members, similar to the recent Interim Relief Fund. Although the bargaining team is pushing for long-term solutions, we are also hoping to establish this immediate short-term support for financially strapped adjuncts. This new fund is intended to help offset any sort of income shortfalls adjuncts experience, including those that arise in the absence of support for healthcare.
More complicated is the union’s demand for pay equity. In the previous sessions, our bargaining team compared the per credit pay of adjuncts with the base rate for non-tenure track full-time faculty (NTTF) and showed that adjuncts are currently being paid 19% less to teach the same courses as their lowest paid full-time colleagues. We have made headway with getting the administration to agree to a cost of living adjustment (COLA); given that we already make significantly less than NTTF, the pay disparity will only grow between our wages and theirs if both groups get the same COLA without an increase first in adjunct base salary. We are going into this second round of negotiations with a firm commitment to finding a pathway to parity that levels up our wages with those of our colleagues, but we are being realistic that we need to make a pathway gradual enough for PSU to be able to stomach it. PSU needs to find a way to achieve this pay parity in order to make their stated commitment to equity a reality.
These are the issues still in play as our team steps up to negotiate with Admin. We hope you can join us as witness and don’t forget to stay tuned to updates on our blog: http://psufa.org/psufa-blog/. If you have questions, contact Sue at csuebrower@gmail.com.
In solidarity,
The PSUFA Executive Council