The last days of fall quarter offered PSU’s community a chance to take stock of the accomplishments of another successful term. Despite the unpopular and self-destructive agenda of President Ann Cudd—who was recently “awarded” Portland Jobs with Justice’s annual “Scrooge of the Year” designation—you, your colleagues, and your students continue to do work that testifies to the self-evident value of the learning that happens on this campus.
Your PSUFA bargaining team returned to the negotiation table at the end of finals week prepared to harness that spirit, fighting back against an administration dead set on using adjuncts as expendable line-items to relieve the budgetary pain caused by years of mismanagement. In a previous session, the Admin team had employed a shell-game logic to justify minimal increases to your cost-of-living allowance without raises while cutting or totally eliminating hard-won financial and professional gains. Your union showed up to the finals-week meeting with a positive vision for adjunct faculty at PSU, gathering critical information to secure your digital privacy and advancing a set of economic proposals that would meaningfully improve your wages while safeguarding your access to benefits like the Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund (AFAF).
Data, Privacy and Technology
The session began with an hour-long conversation about data security with subject matter experts from the Office of Academic Innovation. Your bargaining team had requested this specialist testimony after frustratingly opaque exchanges with the Administration and its lawyers in previous meetings. The OAI experts were able to outline the legal relationship between the University and vendors like Instructure, the parent company that administers Canvas, explaining the policies that govern the use of your and your students’ data. The experts also shared their insights into the impact that these digital tools and platforms have on instructor and student behavior, showing how adjunct faculty working conditions have been shaped by PSU’s adoption of different learning tools. Using the knowledge gained from this conversation, your team will be able to refine the digital privacy safeguards in our proposals for Article 7 (Member Benefits) of your contract, striving to protect your intellectual labor from unwarranted administrative surveillance and unethical AI exploitation.
Fair Pay
After the expert testimony, your bargaining team devoted most of the session to our economic agenda, beginning with wages and benefits. While Admin has offered no meaningful justification for underpaying adjunct faculty members, your team has backed up the principle of “equal pay for equal work” with a clear rationale that ties adjunct compensation to the wage structure offered to non-tenure track instructional faculty (NTTFs). Holding fast to this philosophy, PSUFA has nonetheless offered to engage in good-faith negotiation with the University on the percentage of pay added to adjunct wages as recompense for the value of the NTTF benefits packages denied to you and your adjunct colleagues. This time, your team proposed a version of Article 12 (Salaries and Payroll) that would raise the per credit minimum for adjuncts to $1,611 with an additional 2.1% cost-of-living allowance. For research assistants, the raise would take the form of a $38.68 hourly minimum plus the 2.1% COLA. In addition to these wage increases, PSUFA continued to insist on provisions of the article that would add extra instructional compensation for labor like course development, and your Union reiterated the need to continue and expand the adjunct inclusion monies granted to units to enrich the experience and impact of adjunct faculty members across campus. Your team also made another appeal for the shared sick-leave program proposal. Having addressed Admin’s concerns about the staffing resources to operationalize it, ensuring that the budgetary cost for the program would not rise, PSUFA pushed for the University to adopt this common-ground reform that would make sick-leave more usable for the members who need it most.
Benefits Funds & Equity
The rest of your team’s presentation time was devoted to defending the benefits funds that the Administration and its lawyers have been targeting since they unlawfully refused to disburse those dollars over the summer. Unrepentant for their illegal actions, the Admin team has continued to attack the funds, making proposals that would undermine or completely eliminate your access to resources critical to the professional success and material well-being of adjunct faculty. Addressing Article 13 (Education Fund and Professional Development), your Union resisted Admin’s push for cuts to the professional development fund, preserving the benefit and proposing that these monies be made more accessible in the form of small stipends to secure time for research and creative projects. In response to PSU’s call for the elimination of the technology fund, your team reiterated that it would not agree to removing this resource unless the university presents a viable alternative method for ensuring that adjuncts have the necessary tools to succeed in their work. The one area where your bargaining team saw room for shared consensus was on the education fund, which provides support for adjuncts to take courses at the University. Since current usage of the benefit falls short of the budgeted amount, your Union agreed to a $10,000 decrease while still retaining excess roll-over funds for future years. PSUFA also offered to meet the University’s request that the education fund be restructured to follow the fee programs afforded to our faculty and staff colleagues in other bargaining units. While this would involve an increase to the cost of taking courses, your Union has advocated for a graduated implementation over time to make the transition easier for adjuncts who use the fund.
Your bargaining team also emphasized the critical importance of the benefits funds as an instrument of equity at the University, reiterating the need for a minority-serving institution fund and giving a comprehensive defense of the AFAF economic hardship fund. Once again, your team argued for a new provision to Article 13 that would compensate those adjunct faculty members who perform necessary but unrecognized labor in support of students from historically marginalized groups, advancing PSU’s mission as an urban, minority-serving institution. Your Union also reasserted its proposal for Article 15 (Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund), which calls for an increase to the AFAF benefit, refusing to compromise in the face of the bad faith bullying tactics employed by the administration and its lawyers. Your bargaining team presented a robust argument for the AFAF benefit as a pillar of adjunct working conditions at this University. While Admin had attempted to trivialize the fund with tenuous and deceptive claims about the proportion of our membership who tend to use it, your team countered with research documenting the broad structural inequities that adjunct faculty members face, showing how adjuncts who are supported with structures for professional and material stability are able to improve outcomes for the kinds of students that PSU aims to serve, especially first-generation undergraduates and students from other underrepresented backgrounds. PSUFA articulated an unwavering commitment to the AFAF benefit, explaining that the economic hardship fund represents a sacred trust between the University and its adjunct faculty.
Asking the Administration to step back from its harmful course of action, your Union invited PSU to begin the process of rebuilding the trust that has been broken. The first steps in that process would require Admin to take responsibility for its illegal and damaging actions and to embrace the vision of fairness and equity that your bargaining team has articulated again and again in its proposals over the last year. There has been no sign, though, that the University will relent without the external pressure of solidarity and collective action from you and your fellow adjuncts. To ensure that President Ann Cudd’s administration will concede to a free and fair contract in the new year, join your colleagues and sign up to attend an upcoming strike school and make the pledge to strike if the University fails to meet our demands for fair pay, uncompromised benefits funds, job security, and academic freedom.