Bargaining report: workload

I promised a report on the progress of bargaining, as I've heard it at the FA general membership meeting on Thursday, 10/13 (and of course supplemented with what I now from other sources). I'm going to break this report up into a number of chunks (which may also help focus comments). 

I'll only briefly characterize the overall impression I have of the 64k question: How's it going? Since the strike authorization vote, there has been been a change in atmosphere and attitude but rather little substantial progress. Rather than simply saying that they had "no interest" in our proposals, the board team has now been interested in more clearly figuring out just where the two sides disagree. Meetings have also become much more frequent. Hours before the Chancellor's announcement a few weeks ago that her team was willing to meet 24/7 (and her false charge that the FA was responsible for the failure to meet over the summer--when meetings did in fact take place), the administration team did indeed offer many more times for meetings, and lengthy meetings are now occurring on most business days.  On Monday, the teams will meet twice, and the FA team expects new language from the board team on a number of different issues.

I have been impressed, though many of you will not consider me an impartial observer, with the flexibility and creativity of the FA team (in addition to their more obvious persistence). On several crucial issues we have offered a number of different approaches in an effort to meet our interests. This is how Interest Based Bargaining is supposed to work. The sides don't stake out conflicting proposals and bang heads until they meet some place in the middle. Rather, each side attempts to creatively come up with proposals that allow them to meet their interest without undermining essential interests of the other side. This sort of flexibility is particularly clear on the first issue I'll consider below the break, workload.

For a bit on how negotiations with GA United are going, check out their latest bargaining update.

I. Workload. 

A. Credit hour equivalence

[Background--fit to be skipped if you're familiar with the 12 hour rule. Our last contract classifies our workload as 12 credit hours per semester.  That is, if you are teaching four three-credit hour classes per semester, your teaching occupies 100% of your workload--there's nothing left for research or service. For most faculty (at least those in programs familiar to me) this works reasonably well; most of us teach rather less than 12 credit hours a semester, leaving time for service and research. There are of course inequities; I teach on average 16 credit hours per year, which ought to be 2/3 of my workload, but decisions about merit, tenure, and promotion are weighted much more heavily for research. For other faculty, though, particularly those with many contact hours outside of credit hours, credit hours are a very poor judge of teaching load.]

Many faculty, particularly in CASA, have complained that the absence of any contractual language has allowed the administration to vastly up their workload. The FA is therefore attempting to secure contractual language that provides some sort of equivalence between contact hours and credit hours. Here's what we've tried so far--none of which has been found acceptable by the administration. 

1.  Our initial position was that one contact hour ought to count as one credit hour toward one's load.

2. The administration not liking this figure, we suggested .75 contact hours count as one credit hour. 

3.  The administration declining this offer, and saying that different departments had different needs and cultures, we said fine: let workload be defined in departmental operating papers. But on one condition.  Currently operating paper amendments, despite being approved by faculty, often sit without action in a dean's office, suffering a sort of pocket veto.  There is no conflict resolution process when faculty disagree with administration. We suggested one, which would call for both sides to meet to resolve their differences, but would ultimately allow faculty to override an administrative veto of amendments if they twice voted by a 60% majority to do so.

4.  The administration not agreeing to this proposal, either, we suggested a two-fold approach.

a. For most operating paper revisions, the provost would indeed have the final say. He could, despite a faculty vote to the contrary, veto an amendment to an operating paper, though he would have to do so in a timely manner and provide some written explanation of why he was doing so. This is a significant concession: it would resolve the current ambiguity about who determines operating papers by giving this power to the provost. But it would at least result in a fairly quick and transparent process, rather than the current mess. And we could all see just how often the provost veto changes strongly backed by departmental faculty.

b. The one exception to this process/consession was on workload. Here we proposed a process similar to that used in the past, successfully, on the issue of intellectual property. This issue of workload would be resolved only after the resolution of the current contract, but would be put on a tight schedule, after which, should the two sides disagree, the issue would be put to binding arbitration.  

The administration has also rejected this proposal.

B.  Distance learning (DL)

Despite occasional statements by the Chancellor that she has no interest in forcing faculty to teach distance learning courses, the administration bargaining team continues to insist on this at the bargaining table. The FA regards this as a matter of academic freedom, and as a matter of respect (or rather the lack thereof) for an individual faculty member's expertise. Just as my chair cannot tell me how to teach my course on campus, my chair shouldn't be able to tell me that I must teach my course at a distance, via the web or video.  In the administration's view, requiring a faculty member to do DL is the same as requiring one to teach, say, and elementary course in one's field rather than an intermediate level course (an authority chair's already have). 

C. Overload

SIUC currently has no clear policy on overload teaching. With the movement of DL to the academic departments, the payment by the head offered through continuing education is no longer available. In order to ramp up DL--or even to maintain our current number of DL offerings--without cutting back on traditional courses, we need some such policy.

The FA proposed that overload teaching be compensated following the logic of the 12 hour rule. I normally teach 24 credit hour Adding three credit hours to my current 12 hour load ought to amount to a 20% raise for the given semester.  As I get paid 4.5 months per semester, and 25% of 4.5 is 1.125 months.  The FA therefore proposed that a faculty member be paid 1.125 months salary for a three-credit overload class.

The administration has instead proposed that faculty be compensated anywhere from from .5 to 1.0 month in salary. The FA's problems with that include the likelihood of a sort of race to the bottom via a faculty bidding war--your chair sees who she can get to teach a course most cheaply. If I get paid only half as much for this course as my other courses, should I put out half the effort? In other fields, overtime work generally gets time and a half--why should faculty get half time?

Overload teaching is of course voluntary, but this doesn't mean that faculty won't feel pressure to do it. If the only way to keep your program alive, or to give it a DL presence the administration is calling for, is to teach an overload, you may feel pressure to teach an overload. Sorry, we can't replace your colleague, so it looks like your specialization is going to have to be eliminated. Unless, that is, you are willing to teach an overload. The FA wants to protect faculty in such predicaments by ensuring they are paid decently for overload teaching.