Community Solidarity with PSU Adjunct Faculty

For over 75 years, Portland State University (PSU) has served its students, the city of Portland and the State of Oregon, by providing high quality education to all who enroll, including high numbers of non-traditional and minoritized students. In 2022, 80% of PSU’s students were Oregonians, 39.6% identified as BIPOC, and 47.4% were first-generation college attendees. To meet its stated mission of “creat(ing) an equitable and sustainable future through academic excellence, urban engagement, and expanding opportunity for all,” it is urgent that the PSU administration and Board of Trustees reverse the disinvestment in its adjunct faculty and provide livable wages and fair compensation for these essential educators.

Adjunct instructors account for approximately 47% of the instructional staff at PSU and teach almost 40% of student credit hours. Every student who attends PSU is taught by an adjunct at some point in their education. But adjunct faculty also do much more than teach classes. They mentor students, write letters of recommendation, develop courses, conduct research, write grants, and serve as important role models. Adjuncts are essential to shaping student experience, education, retention, and success. They are the public servants who serve the diverse populations that PSU was founded to educate and engage.

Adjunct working conditions are student learning conditions and PSU students—particularly our BIPOC and first-generation students—deserve faculty who are compensated with livable wages, benefits, and dignified working conditions. The over 1,000 adjunct faculty at PSU deserve pay which reaches parity with their full-time counterparts and keeps up with cost of living. Currently, PSU does not provide raises to adjuncts based on their length of service. This means that adjuncts working at the university for 10 and even 20 years still make the minimum rate. Adjuncts deserve raises which recognize their career excellence, their essential labor, and their service to students and the University.

For Portland State University to fulfill its mission to our city and state, increase its enrollment, retain—and truly serve—its diverse student body, it must start compensating adjuncts fairly.

We, the undersigned, request PSU to increase the budget and compensation for adjunct faculty:

Oregon State Senators

Wlnsvey Campos — State Senator, District 18

Kathleen Taylor — State Senator, District 21

Lew Frederick — State Senator, District 22

Michael Dembrow — State Senator, District 23

Chris S Gorsek — State Senator, District 25 / Adjunct Assistant Professor, Portland State University

Oregon State Representatives

Ben Bowman — State Representative, District 25

Dacia Grayber — State Representative, District 28

Maxine Dexter — State Representative, District 33

Farrah Chaichi — State Representative, District 35

Rob Nosse — State Representative, District 42

Travis Nelson — State Representative, District 44

Khanh Pham — State Representative, District 46

Zach Hudson — State Representative, District 49

Ricki Ruiz — State Representative, District 50

Community Members

Ashton Simpson — Metro Councilor, District 1 / Community Leader

Christine Lewis — Metro Councilor, District 2

Mary Nolan — Metro Councilor, District 5

Duncan Hwang — Metro Councilor, District 6

Jessica Vega Pederson — Multnomah County Chair

Susheela Jayapal — Multnomah County Commissioner, District 2

Carmen Rubio — Portland City Commissioner

PSU-AAUP Executive Council

Dr. José Padín — Former President, PSU-AAUP / Associate Professor, Portland State University

Sarah Kowaleski — Portland Jobs with Justice Coalition Organizer

Brittney Connelly — Head of the CORE Art Dept. at PSU

Daniel A. Brown — Convenor of PDX Faith Labor Committee

Cassia Gammill — CCAHE Professor

David Stylianou — AFT National Representative

Laura Hanks — Community Member

Nicole Jepeal — Graduate Student, Portland State University

Nikki Mandell — Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Judith Beck — Community Member

Eloise Bates — Community Member

Mark Leymon — Associate Professor, Portland State University

Alejandro Segura — President, SEIU Local 89

David Kinsella — Professor, Portland State University

Marie Wakefield — Community Member

Emily Gothard — Alumni, Portland State University

Joel Rosenblit — CWA Member

Tascha Babitch — Community Member

Stacey Vieyra-Braendle — AFT Member / Academic Fieldwork Coordinator & Former Adjunct Faculty

Ramin Farahmandpur — Vice President for Legislative & Political Action, PSU-AAUP / Professor, Portland State University

Aleksandar Jokic — Councilor, PSU-AAUP / Professor, Portland State University

Kristine Shmakov — PCCFFAP Member (AFT Local 2277) / Instructor & Department Head, Portland Community College

Grace Silvia — Community Member

Stephanie Yorba — Instructor, Portland Community College

Rachel Aponte — Instructor, Portland Community College

Julie Perini — PSU-AAUP Member / Associate Professor, Portland State University

Sylvia Hart-Landsberg — Community Member

Evan Selby — Reynolds Education Association Member / Teacher/Building Representative

Robyn Gottlieb — BerniePDX / Community Member

John Harris Knight — American Federation of Government Employees Member

Ezra Veenstra — Community Member

John Detweiler — Educator / Community Member

Myka Dubay — ILWU Local 5 Executive Board Member

Jamie Partridge — NALC Local 82 Member

Brian Denning — Portland DSA Steering Committee External Organizing Co-chair

John Herbert — Portland Central America Solidarity Committee (PCASC) Member

Demonstration for a FAIR CONTRACT NOW

On Friday, July 28th, PSU adjuncts, students, staff, full-time faculty, and community members demonstrated their support for a FAIR CONTRACT NOW for PSU adjuncts.

See pictures of this powerful demonstration of collective action below, and keep an eye on the PSUFA Blog for information on how to get involved in the future.

An open letter about adjunct labor at PSU

The goal of our bargaining team—your bargaining team—is simple and has been consistent: equal pay for equal work. That is not just a motto. For us it approaches doctrine.

Thus,

• if full-time faculty receive health and retirement benefits, then so should we (adjusted to our part-time employment status);

• if full-time faculty have a mechanism to receive salary increases, then so should we;

• if full-time faculty receive technology (laptops, say) to teach a class, then so should we;

• if full-time faculty receive a certain amount for teaching a course on a per credit basis, then so should we.

These are not radical proposals, though they have been described by the administration as such. These proposals follow cleanly from a basic commitment to equitable compensation for workers. It is a commentary on how far the goalposts have shifted since the 1980s that any of the above would be seen as controversial, let alone radical.

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This past Wednesday, July 19th, at the bargaining table, PSU Administration presented their proposals for pay increases and other changes to economic components of our current collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The administration’s proposals were wholly inadequate.

Under the current CBA, the adjunct faculty per credit minimum is $1,120. The administration’s proposal was to increase that per credit minimum to $1,219, beginning in Fall 2023. The problem here is that $1,219 is still below the inflation-adjusted per credit minimum we had in 2019, which was $1,235. So this “raise” only moves us closer to what we were already making four years ago. It is equivalent to the inflation-adjusted dollar amount we made three years ago, in 2020. This is not acceptable.

It is worth recalling that changes to the per credit minimum are, in effect, the only way that members of our unit can receive an increase to our salary. Unlike full-time faculty, adjunct faculty do not have a mechanism to advance to different ranks and to be compensated accordingly (i.e., a step system). This is in spite of the fact that we undergo evaluations. Remarkably, some members of the administration continue to deny that we undergo evaluations, despite this procedure being laid out explicitly in our CBA (Article 8, Section 4).

The narrative that the administration has pushed is that their budget problems make it impossible for them to meet (or even come close to meeting) our insistence on equal pay for equal work. These budget problems are attributable to declining student enrollment and poor retention. Continuing to underpay adjunct faculty is not a sensible solution to these problems; it is a recipe to exacerbate them. Adjunct working conditions are, after all, student learning conditions.

In total, the administration’s proposed increase to adjunct compensation amounts to $2.1 million in the first year (and $1.2 million in the second). That is around 0.2% of PSU’s budget (note the decimal point). They said any more money is not possible.

Incidentally, the total increase to our budget over two years ($3.3 million) is almost exactly equal to—a bit less than, actually—what the 15 highest-paid administrators at PSU made in 2022 alone. You’ll understand our bargaining team’s skepticism when some of these very same administrators tell us that PSU simply doesn’t have any more money to provide to adjunct faculty.

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We wanted to close with a few points about adjunct work in general and at PSU in particular.

Adjuncts at PSU teach about 40% of credit hours, and we make up about 3% of the University’s budget.

These statistics go a long way in helping to explain why the number of adjunct faculty has ballooned, both at PSU and elsewhere. At PSU, adjuncts don’t receive health insurance or retirement benefits. We are also paid less than full-time faculty on a per credit basis. We are cheap labor.

The Merriam-Webster definition of “adjunct” is also instructive. An “adjunct” is “something joined or added to another thing but not essentially a part of it.” This describes well the original reason that a university would employ adjunct faculty. Adjunct faculty would fulfill course needs that the university’s full-time faculty could not. For instance, a special education teacher at an elementary school might teach a course on teaching in a self-contained classroom.

This is no longer the primary function of adjunct faculty at many public universities, including PSU. We are now essentially a part of PSU, despite their retention of the misleading title Adjunct.

How did this happen? As the ratio of administrators at universities has increased, and as public funding for universities has decreased, university administrators have sought ways to save money. A popular strategy has been to curtail hiring full-time faculty and to hire adjunct faculty instead. It is cheaper to have three adjuncts who each teach two courses per quarter than it is to hire one full-time faculty member to do the same. What has further greased the wheels of this strategy has been the surplus of well-qualified PhDs who have been unable to find tenure-track jobs because of the poor academic job market, particularly since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08. 

To be sure, there are still adjunct faculty who have other full-time jobs but teach classes that fill specific needs PSU cannot meet with its full-time faculty—however, that is a small slice of reality. Consider the Anthropology Department, which lists 22 faculty members, 15 of which (68%!) are adjunct faculty. Our internal data indicate that 80% of the members of PSUFA would work at PSU full time if given the opportunity. What’s also telling is that adjunct faculty teach introductory and required courses, not the sort of niche courses that the University would plausibly have difficulty finding qualified full-time faculty to teach.

The logic behind PSU having so many adjunct faculty is the same logic that businesses like Uber or DoorDash employ when they classify their workers as “independent contractors” rather than employees. It is the same logic that Hollywood studios have adopted when they hire writers to work on just parts of a script, as is well understood.

The general facts we mention above are among the most basic facts about the trajectory of higher education in the 21st century. It is somewhat intellectually embarrassing to have to recite them. Anyone who is unfamiliar with these should not be in an administrative role at a university. The same is true of anyone who feigns unfamiliarity with them.

Our bargaining unit has been and continues to be interested in having a conversation—a tough and complicated conversation—about adjunct labor at PSU. But that debate needs to adhere to basic facts and norms of rational dialogue.

Bargaining Recap: June 29 & Bargaining Picnic: July 9!

PSUFA Members,

We are picking up some momentum in bargaining and the persistence of our membership and bargaining team is resulting in more serious proposals from management.

Most of PSU’s and PSUFA’s interests around bargaining topics this season have been outlined. We can expect that proposals will be exchanged from here on out in most of our future sessions. Even though our Thursday, June 29, was short, we covered a variety of topics. Here is a recap:

Topics Addressed:

• Independent Study

• Union Duties 

• Bargaining Release 

• COLA

• Minimum Rates 

• Length of Service Increases. 

We began with PSU presenting on what it believes to be a fair counter proposal to PSUFA’s proposal on Independent Study. PSU suggested an increase to the rate in which independent studies are paid. This marks a shift in PSU’s tone concerning independent study. As you may recall, PSU’s first interest statement outlined that they did not intend to increase any compensation for independent studies. What was heard around the table was that independent studies didn’t make for good economics for Portland State University. We gladly welcome this shift in approach, because we know that independent studies are one way in which PSU offers additional academic support to our student body.

Currently adjuncts are paid a dismal flat rate of $50.00 per credit for an independent study, PSU is proposing that adjuncts be paid $153.00 for a 1-credit independent study. In PSU’s proposal, if you teach more than 1 credit, your compensation for that independent study will incrementally raise at approximately $77.00 dollars per every additional credit taught.

The chart PSU provided with their proposal is below:

While a step in the right direction, this proposal leaves our unit with some important questions. 

PSU did note that they were factoring that 1 hr of independent study equates to 6 hrs of work for our faculty. PSUFA believes 6 hours is a gross underestimation of hours needed to serve our students participating in independent studies. Also, what happens when a faculty member takes on more than one student per an independent study? Do the hours accounted for go up? And in turn, shouldn’t our compensation? PSUFA is drafting a counter proposal to address these questions and concerns, so more information on this issue to come.

Moving forward, PSUFA brought to the table a first proposal on Union Duties. PSUFA’s argument centered around parity—we want to be valued and compensated the same as our full-time counterparts. It's a simple logic to follow, and it seems like a great place for the university to stand. In asking for pay parity, PSUFA asked that our union compensation be equal to that of a full-time faculty member.  In PSUFA’s proposal, the University and the Union would agree that a pool of up to $72,000 per fiscal year will be available for the purpose of union duties. We will check back in with the administration's response.

Next up, PSU countered PSUFA’s proposal concerning Bargaining Release. PSU came forward and offered a fair counter proposal on this issue, upping the current bargaining release time for contract negotiations from the current 2 credit hours of compensation to 4 hours. We are thrilled that PSU recognized the need here for more compensation, as bargaining takes months and months of prep and work and most of it as it stands now is severely underpaid.

The issue most pressing and the issue that most of our members are greatly affected by was left until the end of our session. Drumroll please… PSU presented an amended proposal on Cost of Living increases, and adjustments to the minimum pay rate. We also heard from PSU a conceptual framework in which they were considering length of service increases.

PSU’s initial proposal on COLA and minimum rates was unconscionable, and in no way addressed the pressing financial precarity that our workforce experiences. On Thursday, PSU’s tone was remarkably different. Thank you for showing up, the stories you all are sharing are impacting these bargaining sessions. PSU presented a 6% cost of living increase for Year 1, and a 2% pay raise to the minimum salary. Check out the chart below for a breakdown:

As it stands now we are witnessing movement from PSU’s team but not nearly enough. Looking at our data, these gains would only amount to a 0.2% increase overall for our members. PSU continues to argue that our work as educators equates to 83% percent of what a full-time faculty member does. Not only is this untrue, it shows a lack of knowledge on the part of the administration in knowing what work is actually being done at the ground level in our classrooms. We are currently being paid at a higher equivalent than what PSU is offering in this proposal. We will continue to inform the administration on what our jobs entail in terms of service to the university and argue for a more just equivalence in terms of minimum rate. In terms of COLA, we will accept no less than 10% raise to adjust for inflation.

During COVID, our bargaining unit opted for a 1% COLA in good faith. It is time for the university to pay it forward and give back to the people who lended an extra hand during difficult times. We don't just deserve this cost of living increase, it is absolutely vital for our workforce to thrive.

On our last note of the day, PSU proposed a conceptual framework for Length of Service increases for our people who have demonstrated a longstanding commitment to the university. PSU proposed 2 one-time payments to an adjunct faculty member who has committed at least 7 years of service to the university. A larger bonus would be implemented for those individuals who have worked over 12 years. The first payment would arrive in the winter term of 2023 and another would arrive the following year for those who qualify. The amounts are still to be determined, as the university did not hint at any particular figures. We are currently working out numbers and spending time looking into how these bonuses are to have the most impact on our people. Something to note: the university intends that these payments would inevitably be replaced by a more comprehensive length of service plan to be discussed at our full economic reopener in 2 years time. We have a lot of thoughts on how this “bridge” should work and we will be expressing those ideas in our upcoming session on July 7th from 12:00PM to 5:00PM. Please join in, it is important for the university to see who they are serving with these increases.

In solidarity,
Your PSUFA bargaining team, 2023

Reminder: Our next bargaining sessions are Friday, July 7; Friday, July 14; Wednesday, July 19 (Zoom only); and Friday, July 28. RSVP here and please come in person if you can! Packing the room is one of the best tools we have to bring us wins and improve faculty working conditions and student learning conditions.

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Bargaining Picnic — This Sunday (July 9th)!

Thank you, PSUFA members! Your agitation and engagement in the bargaining process is working and we are seeing small but significant successes at the bargaining table as described above.

Come celebrate our successes at the PSUFA picnic this Sunday, July 9th from 1:00 to 3:00PM in Irving Park (707 NE Fremont; gather in the SE side of the park near the baseball field).

Meet fellow adjuncts and build relationships with your co-workers. Deep and meaningful connections help us create transformative change at the bargaining table and beyond!

Light fare provided. And we’re planning on having a bargaining piñata made by our fierce bargaining team member, Brittney Connelly! Please bring a blanket or chair. Families/partners welcome. Please RSVP here so we have an accurate count for food: https://forms.gle/AkfiSJsh69pxhvv79

 

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.

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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.

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

March Membership Drive — Hop Aboard!

AAUP and PSUFA are joining forces to host a membership drive to help PSUFA build membership! The drive will take place March 1st through the 5th, and we’d love for you to join!

We’ve put together a phone banking plan to connect with potential members and have a conversation about the importance of becoming members. We know nothing replaces face-to-face conversations but we will continue to have conversations with folks over the phone. PSUFA and AAUP leaders have signed up to lead shifts throughout that week. 

Please consider signing up for a shift or two to help make some of these calls to fellow colleagues. AAUP will be providing raffled prizes such as gift certificates and gift cards to anyone who volunteers! 

All necessary materials will be provided beforehand, including a guide on how to set up a Google voice number so you don’t have to use your personal number and a reminder of the time slots you decide to sign up for. Building strength as a union is so tied to building membership. Your one shift could be the one that puts PSUFA over 50% membership, something vitally important for our union going forward.

Click here to sign up.

Signature Needed: Support Fair Pay for PSU Adjunct Faculty!

Between COVID, midterms, and the election, we know that this is a stressful time for many, and we hope that you are taking care of yourself.

While we hesitate to ask more of you at this time, as PSUFA enters the economic phase of bargaining we need your help to put pressure on our administration to make financial decisions guided by PSU’s values.

We have recently learned that PSU is considering not only offering us no pay raises, but taking away our cost of living adjustments and potentially limiting our access to our existing benefit funds, which many of you have accessed for healthcare, education, and professional advancement. It is unacceptable that our university, which claims to value equity and inclusion, would move towards even more exploitative working conditions for its most vulnerable employees.

We are asking all members to add your name to this open letter TODAY calling on President Percy & the Board of Trustees to reprioritize the core mission of the University in upcoming financial decisions.

Written jointly by members of PSUFA and PSU-AAUP (the full-time faculty union), the letter outlines the need for real and critical conversations about shifting budgetary priorities towards economic equity for the people who carry out the core mission of our University—educators, researchers, and academic professionals.

For a breakdown of the economics, check out AAUP’s writeup here (“What is the deal with PSU’s budget?”).

Please sign the letter now to show your support for fair pay and equitable working conditions. Also consider joining us if you can for economic bargaining Sunday, November 8, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Hits Keep On Coming

 

“What brought us to the Union?” is a question that we often ask ourselves in the Executive Council. As an adjunct, it’s easy to feel alienated and powerless in the place(s) that you work, even though we teach as many student credit hours as tenure track faculty and make up the largest proportion of faculty (47%) on campus. Many of us are Road Scholars, commuting from campus to campus, teaching one class here and one class there and another class way over there. We are the New Majority on most of the campuses that we teach. Yet, we have no representation in the faculty senate therefore no voice in the curriculum that WE teach. We have very little job security and are paid less per credit hour than our non-tenure track colleagues. And, offices—don’t get us started on that...but stay tuned for a spring campaign to address it!

We’re not the only ones on campus who are affected by the corporatization and underfunding of higher education. The Board of Trustees voted unanimously to raise tuition 9% in the fall for in-state students (this on top of a 4% increase from last year), bringing undergraduate tuition and fees to $9,030 a year and in-state graduate costs to $15,816 a year. This increase is hard to swallow, especially when a member of our Board has profited so much off the student loan business. Tuition increases alone won’t fix the deficit, so the university is also looking to make $9 million in cuts, which will likely include “targeted personnel reductions” of $2.85 million.

So, what brings us to the Union? Given our current political climate, locally and nationally, a unified voice for workers is more important than ever. By joining together, we can go on the offense and build broad based campaigns that demand common good solutions to win progressive revenue and advance community fights for debt-free education, pay equity, and 15 NOW!

This is your Union and we need your participation more than ever. There are a lot of ways to get involved. You can be regularly involved by joining a Committee, you can join us in the streets on MAY DAY, you can write a letter to the editor, you can come to the next Executive Council Meeting, or you can start a campaign (and we’ll support you). And you if haven’t filled out your membership form, we encourage you to do it now (remember there are no additional dues). Continue reading for more important news, events, and updates!
 

In Solidarity,

The Executive Council