Bargaining Recap 5/23/25 Session

Bargaining Recap 5/23/25 Session

PSUFA and PSU bargaining teams met to exchange proposals on Friday May 23. Much of the session was devoted to your PSUFA bargaining team presenting a robust economic proposal that centered on equal pay for equal work and included a slew of creative initiatives such as a shared sick leave program, opportunities for paid adjunct sabbaticals, additional compensation for adjuncts who support marginalized or minoritized students, and raises for length of service! Read on for more about what we mean when we say, “We are worth more!”

Students, members, and community allies came to watch, share reflections and snacks during caucus, and hold signs. You show us what the power of solidarity looks like! Your presence made the anemic attendance on management’s side of the table and their lack of meaningful engagement with PSUFA’s proposals even more pronounced.

The day began quietly, with multiple members of the management team absent for various reasons. PSUFA started with a counter proposal on Article 3 on union rights. Your union’s bargaining team continues to hold fast that the no strike clause in this article is so broad and expansive as to infringe on adjuncts’ constitutional rights to protest. In response, the team has proposed significantly pared down—and less draconian—language. Your bargaining team also continues to hold fast that PSU must make data necessary for grievances and bargaining available to your union within 30 days. PSU has taken advantage of the vague language currently in our contact and has not fulfilled information requests dating back to December 2024 and January 2025, thereby denying PSUFA valuable information for its proposals. Finally, PSUFA agreed to PSU’s proposal to furnish one bulletin board to the union, which would replace our bulletin board in Smith (MIA since 2020–let us know if you see the PSUFA bulletin board!). Your team proposed FMH as the new home for a new PSUFA bulletin board. 

Next, PSU’s Director of Labor Relations briefly presented counterproposals on Article 9 (personnel files) and Article 4 (orientation and onboarding). Your team was pleased to see that management had thought through and agreed to some of PSUFA’s ideas, like the importance of hosting orientation events each term rather than once a year for a workforce as contingent as ours. This is an important win for adjuncts! The teams also discussed and defined the nature of future collaboration on materials and programs for adjunct faculty onboarding. The PSUFA team spoke again to how vital the voices of adjuncts are in the planning of these events and procedures. There will have to be more discussion of this topic to get to a resolution that will result in a new-hire program that will actually serve adjuncts. PSU, for the first time, agreed to compensate faculty for orientation (another big win for adjuncts!), but it will take more creative problem-solving to find a way to do so while also giving faculty a chance to receive the information they need before the term is already well underway.

Finally, PSUFA’s bargaining team presented proposals on salaries and the PSUFA benefits funds (Articles 12, 14 & 15) [link to articles]. With these proposals, your bargaining team continues to fight for equal pay for equal work and to fight against PSU’s two-tiered system in which part-time faculty members get compensated significantly less for the same instructional work as their full-time counterparts. Getting adjuncts pay parity would be an important step in ending this two-tier system and ensuring a better quality education for your students! To arrive at the proposed pay rates that would actually constitute equal pay for equal work, your bargaining team used the minimum salary of a full-time Senior Instructor at PSU as the basis for their calculations. The team also proposed increasing course cancellation and late appointment fees, increasing the hourly pay for curriculum development, mentoring, and special projects, and introduced a system for adjuncts to receive regular pay increases. Currently, PSU remains one of the only public institutions of higher education in the state of Oregon that doesn’t have any mechanism for its adjuncts to advance in pay. This means that the vast majority of adjuncts are paid at the minimum rate–even if they have been teaching for decades. This is deeply unfair!

In addition to salary increases, the team worked hard to expand the benefits available to adjuncts through proposals for sharing sick leave, bereavement leave (which adjuncts do not currently have through PSU whereas full-time employees do), employer pick-up of the 1% Oregon Paid Leave tax, and a smaller premium for PERS eligible adjuncts who obtain their health insurance through PSU. 

Your team also presented proposals for free PSU classes for adjuncts, more money for the professional development fund, the technology fund and the adjunct faculty assistance fund, and a new benefits fund that would compensate adjuncts for work they do to enhance PSU’s mission as a minority-serving institution. Your team believes that PSU has a responsibility to invest in and support their adjunct faculty through these funds. This is the only way to provide equitable access to a quality education for your students! 

PSU administration remained mostly quiet during the PSUFA team’s presentation of the article proposals on salaries and benefits and asked no substantive questions. This is very surprising given that PSUFA’s proposals would radically change adjunct faculty working conditions and student learning conditions. One of the few questions they asked your bargaining team was whether the team had costed out their proposal. This felt like a tactical inquiry intended to cast your team as unserious and a continued obfuscation of what really matters: fair pay for adjuncts as the essential condition for a quality education for students. Adjuncts make learning happen, and if PSU needs to adjust its budget to be more in line with its mission, then that is the administration's responsibility.

PSU seems to be employing a common management tactic at the table, which is to blame worker demands for fair pay for bankrupting the university. We want to remind PSU and our fellow adjuncts: Adjunct faculty salaries and benefits made up less than 3% of PSU’s operational budget (while teaching over a third of student credit hours) in AY 2018 through AY 2021 (we are waiting on more current budgetary data and will share that as soon as it is available). And despite PSU’s budget deficit narrative, administrators have never forgone raises. Whatever total price tag our economic proposals may have in the end, we remain the university’s cheapest source of labor and we have a resounding message for admin: WE ARE WORTH MORE!