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adjunct activism

Share Testimony for the 2023 Oregon Legislative Session

Dear PSUFA, 

Labor union coalitions are working with legislators NOW to make positive changes through the 2023 Oregon legislative session. These motions are made stronger with testimony from you, the workers. 

Now is your chance to submit testimony—your stories from working as contingent academic workers—to make change that matters. 

Below you’ll find:

  • Instructions on writing testimony

  • Current bills, testimony needed, and deadlines

Adjunct faculty bills are at the top. Please note: 

  1. The “Adjunct Pay Parity” bill is happening tomorrow, Thursday at 3pm. ***This is our priority for messaging. Please send in your written testimony as soon as possible.***

  2. Another priority bill is the Public University Governance Reforms (SB 273), which is happening a week from now—March 30 at 3pm. Please submit any testimony by 11am on Thursday, March 30.

How to Write Testimony

  • Write your own testimony, in your own words, and in your own voice.

  • The messaging and testimony template included below are examples only. Feel free to use as much or as little of them in your own testimony as you would like.

  • If you would like someone to review your testimony before you submit it, please send it to andreah [at] aft-oregon.org or taylor [at] mahoniapublicaffairs.com 

  • Remember that any testimony you submit—whether it is written and submitted online or verbal on the day of the hearing—will be publicly available in perpetuity on the Oregon Legislature’s website. This includes your name, what you write, and any personally identifiable information that you include in your testimony.

  • The maximum number of characters allowed in the text box is 4,000. The maximum PDF upload size is 15 MB.

  • Upload all completed testimonies to this Google Folder OR email to Andrea Haverkamp.

Testimony Messaging and Templates

Below are links to the bills in  Oregon Legislative Information System (OLIS), short summaries of the bills, important deadlines, and testimony templates to download or make a copy of in Google Docs. View or download all templates here.

Adjunct Faculty Issues

Adjunct Pay Parity (SB 416)

  • Link to Bill and Testimony Submission:  SB416 2023 Regular Session - Oregon Legislative Information System 

  • Summary: Requires public universities and community colleges to pay part-time faculty at the same rate, on a per-hour basis, as public university or community college pays full-time faculty to prepare for and teach courses.

  • Deadlines: Public Hearing THIS THURSDAY, March 23 at 3pm. Written and/or verbal testimony is needed as soon as possible! Let us know if you are available. Note: You can continue to submit testimony 48 hours after the bill (until Saturday), but it is more impactful beforehand.

  • Testimony Template

Adjunct Faculty Healthcare Vision, Dental, Funding Allocation (HB 2611)

  • Link to Bill and Testimony Submission:  HB2611 2023 Regular Session - Oregon Legislative Information System 

  • Summary: Requires that dental and vision are included in health benefits available to part-time faculty members. Requires public institutions of higher education to notify potentially eligible part-time faculty members of eligibility requirements and details of health care benefits available to part-time faculty no later than 30 days before application deadline. Reduces the amount of time part-time faculty must work to qualify for health care benefits from 50 percent of full-time equivalent employees to 30 percent of full-time equivalent employees. Requires institutions to include non instructional work when making eligibility determination.

  • Deadlines: Ongoing. We are collecting testimony in anticipation of forward movement.

  • Testimony Template

General Higher Education Issues

Public University Governance Reforms (SB 273)

  • Link to Bill and Testimony Submission:  SB273 2023 Regular Session - Oregon Legislative Information System 

  • Summary: The full text of the bill is still being workshopped and will be introduced before next Thursday. It is expected to include expanded representation for faculty, students, and staff with voting rights, and require two-way communication and availability of email addresses.

  • Deadlines: Public Hearing NEXT THURSDAY, March 30 at 3pm. Written and/or verbal testimony is needed as soon as possible! Please do not submit testimony yet - we’ll need a strong group to ensure consistent messaging. Let us know if you are available to participate!

  • Testimony Template

Campus Safety Survey and Survivor Services (HB 3456)

  • Link to Bill and Testimony Submission:  HB3456 2023 Regular Session - Oregon Legislative Information System 

  • Summary: Requires college campuses to provide certified survivor services including free medical, legal, and counseling services. Requires biannual campus climate survey data collected at each institution and aggregated by the State of Oregon. Ensures amnesty protection for reporting parties. 

  • Deadlines: Work Session scheduled today, we are collecting testimony in anticipation of forward movement.

  • Testimony Template - Use talking points from This Document

Graduate Employee Hours-worked Eligibility for SNAP Benefits (SB 609)

Classified Staff Issues

Equal Access to UI Benefits for K-12 Classified Staff (SB 489)

Classified Staff Recognition Week (HB 2708)

There are more Classified Staff bills in the hopper. Contact Andrea if you’d like to work on the full range of bills being considered.

“Fair Shot for All” Coalition / Common Good 

Public Banking Bill (HB 2763)

  • Link to Bill and Testimony Submission:  HB2763 2023 Regular Session - Oregon Legislative Information System 

  • Summary: Establishes State Public Bank Task Force. Directs task force to study and make recommendations regarding establishment of state public bank. Requires task force to submit report to committee of Legislative Assembly by January 31, 2024.

  • Deadlines: Already passed with amendments! We can collect testimony ahead of forward movement in the Senate.

  • Testimony Template 

Reproductive and Gender Healthcare Access Bill (HB 2002)

  • Link to Bill and Testimony Submission:  HB2002 2023 Regular Session - Oregon Legislative Information System 

  • Summary: This bill protects reproductive healthcare providers from criminal charges relating to other states, funds a pilot ‘mobile reproductive healthcare’ service for underserved regions, removes limitations within commercial insurance on gender affirming healthcare, increases reproductive healthcare access on community college and public university campuses. More info here. 

  • Deadlines: Passed.

  • Testimony Template - courtesy of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon

Stable Homes for Oregon Families (SB 611)

Rally With SEIU 503 on November 17

PSUFA invites you to rally with SIEU on November 17th as they fight for respect, living wages, and gender pay equity. We’ll be meeting at noon at the Urban Plaza (the outdoor gathering space and transit hub between PSU’s College of Urban and Public Affairs and the Campus Rec building).

Oregon’s legislature invested every dollar the universities asked for —$900 million in higher education—so now is the time for PSU to do the right thing and invest in the classified staff who support students and keep our campus running.

The statewide bargaining teams will be at PSU to make their economic proposals. Let’s show we are united for good working and learning conditions!

If you can’t make it, we invite you to take a selfie wearing PURPLE that day and post it to social media and let everyone know to RESPECT, PROTECT & PAY our SEIU colleagues who keep our campus running! You can print out the sign below and hold it up! (Download as PDF here.)

 We hope to see you there!

Report from the 2021 Higher Ed Labor Summit

Last week, representatives from PSUFA attended the 2021 virtual Higher Ed Labor Summit. We joined 300+ higher education organizers from over 75 unions and organizations that represented over 300,000 academic workers across the United States.

Scroll down to read the final Vision Platform the organizers put together that envisions a bold, unified vision for higher education that prioritizes people and the common good over profit and prestige! You can also read it as a PDF here.

At the end of the summit, organizers held a briefing for legislators and the media, which you can watch below.

Higher Ed Labor Summit: Building a Movement to Transform U.S. Higher Education Vision Platform 

We envision a future in which higher education is treated and funded as a social good and universal right. We envision a U.S. higher education system that works for and is led by workers, students, and the communities it serves. We envision a system that secures our nation’s democratic future and serves as a vehicle for addressing inequities. 

We envision public and nonprofit private institutions of higher education that prioritize people and the common good over profit and prestige. We envision institutions that redress systemic oppression and pursue equity along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration status for students and higher ed workers across all job categories. We envision institutions that honor the right of all workers to organize a union and collectively bargain, and commit to the fair working conditions crucial to achieving our educational mission. 

We envision a higher education labor movement that connects workers across job categories, ranks, systems, states, and sectors. We envision a movement that forms coalitions of and builds democratic power for all workers. 

The Challenges We Face 

For decades, our state systems and their institutions, working conditions, and learning environments have been compromised by public disinvestment, financialization, corporatization, and a transition to debt financing. Higher education has been underfunded, and management has prioritized generating revenue and allocating funds to divisions that yield the highest return on investment and to upper-administrator compensation. 

Workers and students have borne the burden of these structural shifts. All categories of faculty, professional and service staff, and student jobs have been cut, narrowed, outsourced, and remade into contingent, at-will positions. At the same time, upper-administrator positions have grown. The majority of faculty (at least 70%) are in adjunct or contingent appointments. This precarity presents a threat to job stability, educational engagement with students, long-term student outcomes, and academic freedom. Expanding faculty and staff contingency disproportionately impacts women and LGBTQIA+ workers, and workers of color. Tenure-track and full-time employment have declined while workers and students pay the price with lower wages, little to no benefits like health insurance and retirement, and rising tuition and fees. This results in workers and students experiencing the same precarity, leading to increased attrition, faculty turnover, and withdrawals. Higher education institutions have increasingly turned to private lenders, forcing them to prioritize Wall Street and corporate-donor demands over public interests. Students have been transformed into debtors–carrying more than $1.7 trillion in debt today. 

Without renewed investments and changes in governance, these crises will worsen. 

The Opportunity to Transform Higher Education 

Even as we face generational challenges to the integrity and future of our not-for-profit education system in the United States, these colleges and universities function as educational, economic, social, and cultural anchors in communities. So we also see enormous opportunities to reinvest in and restructure the system—which employs more than 6 million people and educates many millions more—along more just and equal lines. To transform U.S. higher education as we envision will take a movement of workers, students, and communities united across union and geographic lines. 

Therefore, as local and statewide higher education unions and ally organizations, we make the following commitments to organize for and win a just, equitable system that serves the core public educational mission for which we all strive. 

Commitment 1: Nationwide Action for Federal Government Intervention 

In order to address these national crises, we call for coordinated nationwide action to move the federal government to: 

1. Establish the right to a quality, debtless, universally accessible, and secure higher education for students, workers, and communities, with intentional mandates to increase access and retention for people historically or presently excluded on the basis of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration status. 

2. Enact legislation and rules to regularize and stabilize higher education employment on a national scale, and to ensure fair terms and safe work conditions, living wages and steady careers for all faculty, staff, and undergraduate and graduate student workers. 

3. Enact legislation to guarantee the right for all higher education workers to organize a union and bargain collectively in every state. 

4. Invest in rebuilding higher education across the country and its territories while linking expanded federal funds to consistent and higher labor standards. This funding includes physical, research, healthcare, and human infrastructure that serves our public service mission, and formation of a public finance system to free higher education from depending on private banks for debt financing. 

Commitment 2:  Nationwide Action to Realign Our Campuses 

In order to address our campuses within these national crises, we call for coordinated nationwide action to move our upper administrators and boards to: 

1. Engage in collaborative shared governance in which all categories of faculty and staff, student groups, and unions participate at all levels and have decision-making power and key leadership roles, and surrounding communities have avenues to participate in balanced collaborations and partnerships. 

2. Align campus and state budgets with educational priorities, and focus on fulfilling the declared education al mission while meeting the direct needs of the faculty, staff, and students who are central to it. 

3. Reduce the average ratio of upper-administrator compensation to faculty and staff compensation to an equitable standard. 

4. Implement financial transparency by making available to unions and other university stakeholders all relevant financial documents used in the budgeting processes. 

5. Categorize student workers as campus employees for pay, healthcare benefits, and collective bargaining rights. 

6. Improve the immediate working conditions for all contingent faculty and staff via employment standards that include job security, pay equity, healthcare and retirement benefits, caps on course loads and section sizes, caps on case management and student services loads, safe and harassment-free work environments, collective bargaining rights, and shared governance. 

7. End precarious contingent employment and create justly compensated work for all campus workers (full time or part-time): 

a. Increase full-time staff density by redefining most current contingent and outsourced staff and service positions as benefitted full-time campus positions; prioritize moving current contingent workers at scale into those positions. 

b. Increase tenure density and establish a broad tenure standard for all faculty that recognizes the op tions of teaching tenure, service tenure, and research tenure for current instructors and faculty as well as future hires; prioritize moving current contingent instructors and faculty at scale into these positions; establish job security with stable employment, pay equity, pro-rated benefits, and research access for instructors and faculty who remain non-tenure track. 

8. Establish academic freedom for all workers and students as central to the educational mission, which has been undermined by the casualization of labor.

Commitment 3: Action Steps Toward Commitments 1 and 2 

We propose nationwide coordination and planning to: 

1. Organize to win the College for All Act, including provisions for a pipeline to tenure-track and full-time jobs for current contingent faculty and staff. 

2. Organize to win related legislation that increases federal and state funding for higher education, with the goal of eliminating the student cost of attending college while requiring institutions that receive these funds: 

a. Provide job security and promotion pipelines for non-instructional staff. 

b. Move rapidly and at scale to a supermajority tenure-track teaching and full-time instructional workforce, while guaranteeing job security and seniority for instructors who choose not to participate in tenure. 

c. Categorize undergraduate and graduate student workers as campus employees. 

d. Provide pay equity and regular raises for all campus workers. 

3. Organize to win federal legislation to attach labor provisions to existing mechanisms of federal funding (e.g. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Pell grants, etc.) to ensure that institutions honor workers’ right to organize a union and bargain collectively in good faith. 

4. Pursue federal rule-making with the Departments of Labor and Education regarding categorizations and labor standards for contingent and contract workers, employee status, and job definitions; tie these rules to accreditor recognition criteria and procedures. 

5. Organize to win the cancellation of student debt to repair the harm of higher education disinvestment, which has disproportionately impacted black, brown, indigenous, and working-class people. 

6. Develop and organize to win federal legislation, campus policies, and where possible state legislation and rules that acknowledge and dismantle the colonization and theft of Indigenous lands; create and fully fund indigenous-led programs to recruit, retain and support Indigenous students and faculty; establish institutional shared governance systems that formally incorporate into decision-making the indigenous peoples upon whose land these campuses sit and benefit from. 

7. Organize to win federal legislation, campus policies, and where possible state legislation and rules that address reparations for historical and ongoing systemic oppression and inequities, including fundamental changes to campus policing, as part of a commitment to building civil rights unionism and solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. 

8. Organize to win federal legislation, campus policies, and where possible state legislation and rules that require our institutions to divest from fossil fuels and invest in green construction, renewable energy, and the end of single-use plastics. 

Commitment 4:  A Unified National Movement 

We commit to work and build solidarity together to fight in our communities and across the country and its territories as a true coordinated higher education labor movement to transform our systems and our lives.

If you’d like to get involved in organizing to build the movement, please fill out this form.

Testify to Oregon Legislators About Access to Healthcare

February 10 Update: The hearing has been moved to the week of February 15. Your testimony can be submitted up until 5 p.m. on Tuesday, February 16.

Is access to affordable healthcare important to you?

Our legislators are considering three bills that would provide healthcare for many part-time faculty at public colleges and universities, and there is a hearing to consider them this week.

We have a real chance at getting this legislation passed—for the first time ever, the governor allotted funds for it in her recommended budget—but it is still going to take a lot of work in this challenging financial climate to get it passed. To do so, we have to let our legislators know how important healthcare is to us, and how terrible it is to not have appropriate healthcare—especially now.

If you have testimony, please email it to Taylor Sarman, one of our advocates at the state capitol: taylor [at] columbiapublicaffairs.com.

Let's win this one!