As the sun began to set over campus late Friday afternoon, PSU’s administration attempted to use the cover of darkness to conceal what may be their most cruel and tone-deaf proposal yet. The University seized the final hour of the most recent bargaining session as an opportunity to call for the decimation of the benefits funds that you and your fellow adjuncts have fought so hard to protect. In the face of adverse legal and financial consequences, intense media scrutiny, and principled backlash, PSU foolishly chose to double down on its anti-adjunct agenda, continuing on the destructive path that has eroded the trust that once existed between the University and its faculty, staff, and students.
Before Admin presented the latest plank in their harmful platform, your PSUFA bargaining team began the session with another good-faith effort to negotiate a fair contract that would give adjunct faculty members the support they need to uplift PSU’s mission. The negotiations began with your team’s counterproposal on Article 3 (Union Privileges), once again encouraging the University to meet your needs on issues like protections against the pressure to scab and reasonable timelines for union information requests from the administration. PSUFA also posed questions about Article 7 (Member Benefits) of your contract, continuing to push the University to embrace protections for a wider range of identity classes and activities, to solidify its commitment to the sanctuary campus status, and to build safeguards against AI exploitation of faculty work.
Before the meeting’s close, PSU shocked your bargaining team and the observers in the session with the offensive package of proposals calling for the elimination of the only safety net that this University provides to its adjunct faculty—the Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund (AFAF), also known as the “economic hardship fund.” Shamelessly ignoring the harm already done by their earlier attempts to hold the benefits funds hostage, the Administration and its lawyers once again took aim at the limited resources available to adjuncts. PSU used shell-game economics to shuffle monies between Article 12 (Salaries and Payroll), Article 13 (Faculty Education Fund and Professional Development), and Article 15 (Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund). Offering the pretense of a cost-of-living increase, the University proposed massive cuts to the education and professional development funds, an end to the technology fund, and the complete obliteration of the AFAF hardship fund.
To justify this parsimonious rearrangement of resources, the Admin team scapegoated those adjuncts who have most frequently had to turn to AFAF benefits, refusing to acknowledge the precarious working conditions that leave many adjunct faculty members in a state of perpetual hardship. PSU also cast doubt on the Union's stewardship of the funds, suggesting that these emergency dollars ought to be subject to additional oversight in order to ensure that adjuncts don't take advantage of them. Unsurprisingly, Admin’s insinuations failed to take account of the class dynamics that shape the way that these types of resources are used. Those who are already starting from a place of economic hardship when they enter into adjunct teaching jobs will, of course, continue to face ongoing hardship if this is their primary work. Admin’s intimation that some adjuncts were exploiting the funds by applying too often is equivalent to the discredited “welfare queen” arguments used in the 1990s to demonize and eliminate popular and effective social welfare programming. PSU’s administration employed these faulty arguments to rationalize a change to your contract that would do disproportionate harm to those adjuncts most in need of support, exacerbating the inequitable conditions for the University’s most vulnerable faculty members.
Facing down the exploitative logic of Admin’s proposals and the insulting rhetoric used to defend them, your PSUFA bargaining team has remained vigilant in our fight for a fair contract, recognizing that our success in this endeavor is indelibly tied to the University’s fate at this uncertain moment in its history. Portland State University cannot thrive as an institution as long as the administration continues its unlawful and unrepentant campaign against the people who most directly serve its student population, whether full-time faculty, adjuncts, staff, or student workers. Your Union’s actions at the negotiation table, though, are only as effective as the collective force we can wield beyond it. Now more than ever, it is clear that we must demonstrate a credible strike threat to the University in order to protect the hard-won gains of past agreements, to achieve new provisions for adjunct faculty success, and, most importantly, to ensure that PSU lives up to its promise as the kind of institution that its faculty, staff, students, and community deserve.
Follow PSUFA bargaining progress with the Bargaining Tracker sheet here!