BARGAINING UPDATE
January 25, 2024
Faculty have already benefited from having a union; We’ll need to work together to win fair pay
Takeaways:
Dear colleagues,
Faculty have already benefited from forming a union. Last year we negotiated annual raises for part-time faculty across Pitt for the first time in Pitt’s history. This year we protected our health insurance from major premium increases and plan changes. We have worked one-on-one with dozens of faculty dealing with investigations, discipline, and other workplace challenges to ensure fair and consistent applications of Pitt’s existing policies and practices, including using our new legal rights to enforce the “status quo.” (Learn about your “Weingarten rights” here.)
We have negotiated tentative agreements (meaning completely finalized and signed by both sides) for our first contract that will create historic new protections against nonrenewals for full- and part-time faculty, increasing contract lengths for non-tenure stream faculty, strong academic freedom protections for all faculty (the first time in its history that Pitt will have a written academic freedom policy), firm caps on teaching loads, workload policies that will be based on real metrics that will put an end to invisible work, evaluations that require real evidence of unsatisfactory performance, industry-leading limits on using student surveys in teaching evaluations, strengthened tenure protections, fair procedures for discipline that require evidence and proportionality, and a grievance procedure that replaces the administration’s unilateral decisions with independent and binding arbitration for resolving serious disputes, along with many more improvements that are too numerous to list. These will all go into effect the moment our members vote to ratify our contract.
We met with the administration on Tuesday and exchanged proposals on Compensation, Benefits, Layoffs, and No Strike/No Lockout. We made significant progress toward a TA on Layoffs, and we see a path to an agreement on Benefits and No Strike/No Lockout. We are very close to a complete contract, but we are still in the last big fight over salaries and other economic issues. The administration’s Compensation counterproposal was seriously insufficient: they continue to demand that we agree to work for pay that lags behind inflation and our peers. While they made modest improvements to cost-of-living increases and minimum salaries for some faculty, their proposal was not a serious effort to come to an agreement. They still want to exclude many people from the $60,000 salary floor, they do not come close to covering the actual cost increases we have all experienced in recent years, and they are still demanding that part-time faculty agree to work for lower wages than the lowest-paid workers in any industry.
We are holding firm in expecting that all full-time faculty at Pitt should earn at least $60,000 a year—and part-time faculty should similarly have a professional salary floor. We are confident we can win transformative pay increases, especially for the lowest-paid faculty, but to do so we need to stand together. If you haven’t done so yet, reach out to the Communication and Action Team to sign a membership card and get involved!
While pay remains a big fight, bargaining is moving forward, and it’s common for the most difficult issues (like pay) to be the last to reach an agreement.
In solidarity,
Your bargaining committee
Tyler Bickford (chair), Professor, English, Oakland
Pete Bell, Teaching Assistant Professor, Chemistry, 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
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!
- Pitt faculty have already benefited from having a union and we will all gain more protections and improvements once we ratify our first contract
- The administration’s compensation demands are still woefully inadequate, and it is clear that pay will be a big fight
- We continue to make progress in other key articles, resolving areas of disagreement and moving toward a final contract
Dear colleagues,
Faculty have already benefited from forming a union. Last year we negotiated annual raises for part-time faculty across Pitt for the first time in Pitt’s history. This year we protected our health insurance from major premium increases and plan changes. We have worked one-on-one with dozens of faculty dealing with investigations, discipline, and other workplace challenges to ensure fair and consistent applications of Pitt’s existing policies and practices, including using our new legal rights to enforce the “status quo.” (Learn about your “Weingarten rights” here.)
We have negotiated tentative agreements (meaning completely finalized and signed by both sides) for our first contract that will create historic new protections against nonrenewals for full- and part-time faculty, increasing contract lengths for non-tenure stream faculty, strong academic freedom protections for all faculty (the first time in its history that Pitt will have a written academic freedom policy), firm caps on teaching loads, workload policies that will be based on real metrics that will put an end to invisible work, evaluations that require real evidence of unsatisfactory performance, industry-leading limits on using student surveys in teaching evaluations, strengthened tenure protections, fair procedures for discipline that require evidence and proportionality, and a grievance procedure that replaces the administration’s unilateral decisions with independent and binding arbitration for resolving serious disputes, along with many more improvements that are too numerous to list. These will all go into effect the moment our members vote to ratify our contract.
We met with the administration on Tuesday and exchanged proposals on Compensation, Benefits, Layoffs, and No Strike/No Lockout. We made significant progress toward a TA on Layoffs, and we see a path to an agreement on Benefits and No Strike/No Lockout. We are very close to a complete contract, but we are still in the last big fight over salaries and other economic issues. The administration’s Compensation counterproposal was seriously insufficient: they continue to demand that we agree to work for pay that lags behind inflation and our peers. While they made modest improvements to cost-of-living increases and minimum salaries for some faculty, their proposal was not a serious effort to come to an agreement. They still want to exclude many people from the $60,000 salary floor, they do not come close to covering the actual cost increases we have all experienced in recent years, and they are still demanding that part-time faculty agree to work for lower wages than the lowest-paid workers in any industry.
We are holding firm in expecting that all full-time faculty at Pitt should earn at least $60,000 a year—and part-time faculty should similarly have a professional salary floor. We are confident we can win transformative pay increases, especially for the lowest-paid faculty, but to do so we need to stand together. If you haven’t done so yet, reach out to the Communication and Action Team to sign a membership card and get involved!
While pay remains a big fight, bargaining is moving forward, and it’s common for the most difficult issues (like pay) to be the last to reach an agreement.
In solidarity,
Your bargaining committee
Tyler Bickford (chair), Professor, English, Oakland
Pete Bell, Teaching Assistant Professor, Chemistry, 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
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!
- If someone forwarded this to you, sign up to receive these emails
- Find previous bargaining updates here
- Status of bargaining
- Get in touch with your Council rep
- Get involved with the Communication and Action Team
- Request a digital membership card
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