BARGAINING UPDATE
August 23, 2023
Takeaways:
Dear colleagues,
We met with the administration on Monday. We presented counterproposals on Workloads, Visiting Faculty, and the Falk School. The administration accepted our counterproposal on Workloads, presented counterproposals on Part-time Appointment Stream Faculty, and Shared Governance, and rejected our last counterproposal (from April) on Academic Freedom.
Our tentative agreement on Workloads establishes important new protections. First, it requires every school, campus, and department to develop a workload policy establishing numerical expectations for all aspects of our jobs. Having enforceable policies based on clear metrics means that all of our work, including work that is often invisible, like mentoring, advising, and service, will be reasonably accounted for in our assignments. This TA also establishes caps on teaching loads, of 9 credits per term/18 credits per year for faculty at the Oakland campus and 12 credits per term/24 credits per year for faculty at the regional campuses. While these numbers reflect longstanding norms across Pitt, in recent years some faculty have been required to accept teaching loads above these reasonable limits. We are pleased that the administration has agreed to reestablish these norms as an enforceable limit, and to make changes and investments necessary to meet these expectations, particularly on the regional campuses. Our TA on Workloads also provides for limits on involuntary teaching overloads, while still allowing voluntary overloads.
With Workloads completed, we are making serious progress toward wrapping up bargaining over non-economic issues, and moving on to economics. As we wrote earlier this month, we are close to agreement on core job security articles covering all classes of faculty. And while there remain a few important issues outstanding, by far the most critical is the administration’s position refusing to allow these new policies to be fully enforced through the contract. Since we received their proposals on job security at the end of 2022, we have worked painstakingly over the last nine months to find agreement on language that will improve our jobs while allowing the administration the flexibility they want. When their bargaining team has expressed concerns about, for example, third-party arbitrators overturning their managerial judgments, we have offered language that would address those concerns, and we will continue to work toward resolving these issues. But overall the problem right now is not what those policies will be, but simply whether the administration will allow the policies they have already agreed to to be enforceable. Quite simply, this is what it means to have a contract, so we are going to continue to insist that the administration make its commitments meaningful.
The administration also responded to our counterproposals from April on Shared Governance and Academic Freedom. Their responses were minimal. On Shared Governance they made no changes other than tweaking the list of academic units and administrators they refer to. And on Academic Freedom they rejected our last counterproposal entirely. It is very disappointing that it would take them over four months to respond so minimally, especially when our proposals were seeking common ground. It is unacceptable for them to take so long to respond to our proposals over such important issues.
Our goals for shared governance are: (1) to ensure that existing shared governance practices will continue; (2) to ensure that all faculty have opportunities to participate in developing the policies that affect them; and (3) to protect our union’s fundamental legal rights to bargain over wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of our work. Our proposal waives some of our legal bargaining rights in order to facilitate ongoing shared governance. But the administration’s counterproposal, without explanation, continues to demand an almost complete waiver of our right to bargain over legally mandatory subjects. When questioned during bargaining they stated the opposite, that they intend to comply with legal requirements to bargain with our Union, but for some reason after four months they could not find a way to include that commitment in their written proposal. Our goals are reasonable, and we are happy to work with the administration to find language that works, but right now they are simply not engaging over these issues in a constructive manner.
On academic freedom, we did not think we were significantly apart last spring, but we were surprised that they rejected, without explanation, even small, reasonable adjustments we had proposed, such as using the phrase “during instruction” rather than “in the classroom” to define the scope of academic freedom related to teaching (since many kinds of teaching take place online or outside of a classroom setting). Since, unlike many of our peer institutions, Pitt has never had a formal academic freedom policy, it is essential for the administration to engage more seriously and more promptly over this topic.
In sum, as we approach the start of a new academic year, we have made major progress toward an overall agreement, but we are committed to fighting for the important issues that still remain. We will need your support to win. If you haven’t done so yet, please reach out to a member of our Communication and Action Team to sign a Union membership card.
In solidarity,
Your bargaining committee
Tyler Bickford (chair), Professor, English, Oakland
Nicholas Bircher, Part-time Professor, Nurse Anesthesia, Oakland
Chloe Dufour, Faculty Librarian, ULS, Oakland
Anthony Fabio, Associate Professor, Epidemiology (Public Health), Oakland
Lech Harris (secretary), Part-time Instructor, English, Oakland
James Hill (archivist), Visiting Assistant Professor, History, Oakland
Haitao Liu, Professor, Chemistry, Oakland
Megan O’Brien, Master Teacher, Falk Laboratory School, Oakland
Sabrina Robinson, Part-time Instructor, Slavic, Oakland
Evan Schneider, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, Oakland
Paul Scott, Assistant Professor, Health and Community Systems (Nursing), Oakland
Jeffrey Shook, Professor, Social Work, Oakland
Stacey Triplette, Associate Professor, Spanish, Greensburg
Abagael West, Teaching Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, Oakland
Links!
- We finalized a strong tentative agreement on Workloads that requires that all our work is accounted for, establishes limits on teaching loads, and provides protections against involuntary teaching overloads
- The administration presented minimal and long-delayed responses to our proposals from April on Shared Governance and Academic Freedom.
- Overall, we have made significant progress on an overall agreement on non-economic issues, but the administration continues to insist on weak enforceability of new job security protections
- We will need your support. If you haven’t done so yet, please reach out to a member of our Communication and Action Team to sign a Union membership card.
Dear colleagues,
We met with the administration on Monday. We presented counterproposals on Workloads, Visiting Faculty, and the Falk School. The administration accepted our counterproposal on Workloads, presented counterproposals on Part-time Appointment Stream Faculty, and Shared Governance, and rejected our last counterproposal (from April) on Academic Freedom.
Our tentative agreement on Workloads establishes important new protections. First, it requires every school, campus, and department to develop a workload policy establishing numerical expectations for all aspects of our jobs. Having enforceable policies based on clear metrics means that all of our work, including work that is often invisible, like mentoring, advising, and service, will be reasonably accounted for in our assignments. This TA also establishes caps on teaching loads, of 9 credits per term/18 credits per year for faculty at the Oakland campus and 12 credits per term/24 credits per year for faculty at the regional campuses. While these numbers reflect longstanding norms across Pitt, in recent years some faculty have been required to accept teaching loads above these reasonable limits. We are pleased that the administration has agreed to reestablish these norms as an enforceable limit, and to make changes and investments necessary to meet these expectations, particularly on the regional campuses. Our TA on Workloads also provides for limits on involuntary teaching overloads, while still allowing voluntary overloads.
With Workloads completed, we are making serious progress toward wrapping up bargaining over non-economic issues, and moving on to economics. As we wrote earlier this month, we are close to agreement on core job security articles covering all classes of faculty. And while there remain a few important issues outstanding, by far the most critical is the administration’s position refusing to allow these new policies to be fully enforced through the contract. Since we received their proposals on job security at the end of 2022, we have worked painstakingly over the last nine months to find agreement on language that will improve our jobs while allowing the administration the flexibility they want. When their bargaining team has expressed concerns about, for example, third-party arbitrators overturning their managerial judgments, we have offered language that would address those concerns, and we will continue to work toward resolving these issues. But overall the problem right now is not what those policies will be, but simply whether the administration will allow the policies they have already agreed to to be enforceable. Quite simply, this is what it means to have a contract, so we are going to continue to insist that the administration make its commitments meaningful.
The administration also responded to our counterproposals from April on Shared Governance and Academic Freedom. Their responses were minimal. On Shared Governance they made no changes other than tweaking the list of academic units and administrators they refer to. And on Academic Freedom they rejected our last counterproposal entirely. It is very disappointing that it would take them over four months to respond so minimally, especially when our proposals were seeking common ground. It is unacceptable for them to take so long to respond to our proposals over such important issues.
Our goals for shared governance are: (1) to ensure that existing shared governance practices will continue; (2) to ensure that all faculty have opportunities to participate in developing the policies that affect them; and (3) to protect our union’s fundamental legal rights to bargain over wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of our work. Our proposal waives some of our legal bargaining rights in order to facilitate ongoing shared governance. But the administration’s counterproposal, without explanation, continues to demand an almost complete waiver of our right to bargain over legally mandatory subjects. When questioned during bargaining they stated the opposite, that they intend to comply with legal requirements to bargain with our Union, but for some reason after four months they could not find a way to include that commitment in their written proposal. Our goals are reasonable, and we are happy to work with the administration to find language that works, but right now they are simply not engaging over these issues in a constructive manner.
On academic freedom, we did not think we were significantly apart last spring, but we were surprised that they rejected, without explanation, even small, reasonable adjustments we had proposed, such as using the phrase “during instruction” rather than “in the classroom” to define the scope of academic freedom related to teaching (since many kinds of teaching take place online or outside of a classroom setting). Since, unlike many of our peer institutions, Pitt has never had a formal academic freedom policy, it is essential for the administration to engage more seriously and more promptly over this topic.
In sum, as we approach the start of a new academic year, we have made major progress toward an overall agreement, but we are committed to fighting for the important issues that still remain. We will need your support to win. If you haven’t done so yet, please reach out to a member of our Communication and Action Team to sign a Union membership card.
In solidarity,
Your bargaining committee
Tyler Bickford (chair), Professor, English, Oakland
Nicholas Bircher, Part-time Professor, Nurse Anesthesia, Oakland
Chloe Dufour, Faculty Librarian, ULS, Oakland
Anthony Fabio, Associate Professor, Epidemiology (Public Health), Oakland
Lech Harris (secretary), Part-time Instructor, English, Oakland
James Hill (archivist), Visiting Assistant Professor, History, Oakland
Haitao Liu, Professor, Chemistry, Oakland
Megan O’Brien, Master Teacher, Falk Laboratory School, Oakland
Sabrina Robinson, Part-time Instructor, Slavic, Oakland
Evan Schneider, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, Oakland
Paul Scott, Assistant Professor, Health and Community Systems (Nursing), Oakland
Jeffrey Shook, Professor, Social Work, Oakland
Stacey Triplette, Associate Professor, Spanish, Greensburg
Abagael West, Teaching Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, Oakland
Links!
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- Get involved with the Communication and Action Team
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