Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Poshard, Herrin, and the strike

Glenn Poshard's press conference has provided, if indirectly, the best explanation I've yet come to as to why there was a strike at SIUC last fall. The most important comment comes at the very end.

About midway through his statement, Poshard claimed that deposed board chair Roger Herrin was, as part of a pattern of errant behavior, communicating with the FA through some sort of private channel, and attempting to negotiate with us himself. Poshard waved a sheet of paper which he said Herrin had given him, a sheet which outlined the union's demands. What Herrin told Poshard I don't know, but I do know this: Herrin had no communications whatsoever with the FA leadership. I know this from my personal role on that leadership in the lead up to the strike and during the strike, and because the absence of any communication has been confirmed to me by others on the leadership, as it will be confirmed by Randy Hughes to the press (presumably in a story for the Southern tomorrow, assuming he and the Southern's university reporter, Codell Rodriguez, managed to get in touch before deadline). This isn't to say that Poshard was lying; what he said in his press conference is entirely consistent with him receiving a misleading impression from comments made by Herrin about his source for the document with FA demands.  Herrin's comments were, even in Poshard's telling, rather cryptic. My guess is that either Herrin deliberately played up his FA contacts as some sort of power play, or Poshard jumped to conclusions, or a little of both.

Of course readers may not take my word for this, or Randy Hughes' word. There's a more substantive argument to support my position--though it won't convince the most cynical, it will lead me to a rather more important claim about our recent history. Herrin was wrong about what the union wanted, because he wasn't in contact with the union. But Poshard believed that Herrin was right. At the very end of his press conference, Poshard speculated that the union might have held out for salary gains because it thought Herrin could somehow deliver them. That's false: we had no such belief. We weren't in contact with Herrin, and we didn't hold out for salary gains. But that's what Poshard thought we were doing, so he thought that no agreement was possible, and this mistaken thinking, buttressed by Herrin's claims, may have played a large role in precipitating the strike.

Chief among the demands on Herrin's document, according to Poshard, was a litany of salary demands, demands Poshard said SIU simply could not afford. This is in keeping with administrative rhetoric in the lead up to the strike. As readers will remember, in the weeks before the strike the administration consistently said that our interest was primarily financial, that we were making unreasonable monetary demands. We for our part vehemently denied this. At the time we believed that the administration knew that it was spinning, knew well enough that our primary interests were in preserving tenure, defending our collective bargaining rights (primarily by demanding that the administration negotiate things like furloughs rather than impose them), and protecting academic freedom (especially regarding distance learning). Our financial stance was that any raises should be tied to rises in SIUC's revenues, an eminently fair proposal, but one we didn't hold out much chance of getting (at least after the other unions settled for 1%). We had, we thought, attempted to seize the high moral ground by not fighting for raises--which also meant that we feared, before and even after the strike, that we'd abandoned the financial issue by insisting on other things as higher priorities. But that was a choice we were willing to live with, in part because despite all our efforts to argue that SIUC was shifting money from academics to administration, most people, including many faculty, believed the administrative line that SIUC was flat broke. Of course our primary issues had financial consequences, as most university decisions do, but they were mainly about power, about whether the administration would have the power to insist that we do distance learning, to cut our salaries without negotiations, and to fire even tenured faculty, if it deemed such things necessary. The administration for its part argued that while it wanted the flexibility to do whatever it deemed necessary to deal with any future crisis, it had no intention of doing any of these things. 

We were left with the bizarre situation of a strike breaking out over things the administration claimed it wanted only in the abstract and had no intention of actually implementing in the real world. As it turns out, the administration was willing to budge on most of these issues. Though the FA didn't get everything it wanted even on its central priorities (especially on the furlough issue), it got enough to declare victory. And we didn't exactly break the bank in doing so: it is very hard to see how concessions the administration made have substantially impacted the administration's ability to manage the budget. They can still shift money away from academics by simply leaving faculty lines vacant--at least until they come up against the contractual student-faculty ratio, something we may well hit next year (more on that, perhaps, in a subsequent post). Firing tenured faculty, at least in my view, must always have been a most unlikely proposition. Provoking a strike to preserve the right to fire faculty in a dire crisis, to force them to teach distance ed, and to cut their salaries without transparency, to do things you don't want to do and see no imminent likelihood that you'll have to do--it just doesn't make much sense.

The usual speculation was that there was a power game going on, that Poshard, or Cheng, or both, were determined to break the union--or at least thought it was worth a try. That could be part of what went on. But the tale of Herrin and Poshard suggests a somewhat more charitable explanation. Perhaps Herrin's intervention led Poshard and Cheng to believe that the FA was really set on salary hikes, and that there was no sense trying to negotiate with us given our unreasonable demands. Or at least it helped convince them of something they were all too ready to believe in any event. That, and the natural instinct of spinners to believe their spin, led to a fundamental misunderstanding, with the administration believing that the division between the two sides was financial, while our true interests were in precisely what we said they were--transparency and accountability. This led the administration to conclude that a strike was inevitable, as we were demanding things SIUC could not afford, and so they didn't bother to make the rather reasonable and moderate concessions on tenure, academic freedom, etc., that we needed to settle until too late--perhaps thinking that concessions on matters they regarded as peripheral would only embolden us to hold out for our true, secret goals.

This is not to absolve the administration of blame. If this hypothesis is correct--and it can only be a partial explanation of why the strike took place--Poshard and Cheng made a major misjudgement of the FA's intentions. If they took Herrin's bizarre document at face value, then they may have believed that we had some secret agenda, and that all our fine talk about tenure and the like was actually a smoke screen. If this hypothesis is correct--and I'm fully aware of how speculative this all is--they made a profoundly cynical mistake.  Of course we did not tell the administration what our bottom line was at any point in the negotiations, any more than they told us. No negotiating team can fully reveal its bottom line, or its exact priorities, without fundamentally compromising its negotiating position. But a bargaining team representing a democratic body like the FA cannot have secret priorities that aren't even among the list of proposals it stresses as it enters the final stretch of negotiations. If any such secret priorities had emerged during negotiations, we would have lynched our bargaining team: you can't tell people to strike for tenure if what you're really bargaining for is money.

If I am right, then, at the end of his strange press conference Glenn Poshard, in speculating about why the union held out for a strike, actually explained why his administration mistakenly provoked one. He thought we wanted money SIU didn't have, and that there was no way of getting an agreement with us save by forcing us to drop our financial demands; the only way to do this, he came to believe, was by showing that his administration could endure a strike. We had no financial demands of this sort. The strike was an unnecessary result of a mistaken judgement by the SIU administration.

My speculation here is offered in more of a historical spirit than a partisan one, I think it is fair to say, though of course every history is partisan to some extent (and I, with my background in ancient historiography, don't believe that historians should withhold praise and blame). But I do recognize that my sources are one-sided (unlike Thucydides, I haven't been exiled from one side and thus enabled to improve my sources on the other). I would be very curious as to whether those with access to administrative circles agree with any of this analysis. We all, after all, have an interest in understanding why the strike took place, the better to avoid one in the future.

25 comments:

  1. Granted, you are speculating in the details, Dave, but the broad strokes based on Poshard's comments seem all too revelatory. The challenge of the strike (for me...for many, I think) was a feeling that it was avoidable. The FA's "demands" never seemed that unreasonable (adjusting, of course, for the willingness to drop some points or compromise). The Administration's unwillingness to negotiate or move at all on any of the central points of contention was a mystery, made stranger by their attempt to isolate the FA in the eleventh hour. The only logical conclusion at the time was that the FA had been targeted for union busting.

    Poshard's comments don't deflect that possibility, but they offer a more mundane and therefore more apparently plausible reason. Through whatever convolutions of leadership and authority, the upper admin as a whole convinced itself that the FA had a secret, unreasonable agenda and that a strike was inevitable. They were not negotiating with us, but with some spectre they conjured of us.

    Our critics will, of course, blame the FA for these conditions. They will repeat the claims at the time that ours were not significant enough issues to strike over. But it is clear that, having constructed this spectre, the Admin. was interested only in union busting (or, by extending the analogy, ghost busting). And why not? They had cast us as underhanded and unreasonable. Given their own salaries, one doesn't have to be a psychiatrist to see the power of projection in their fears. It is not so surprising that they couldn't conceive that salary was not our first priority. If you want to understand a culture, look to its popular fantasies, its monsters. The FA is greedy, irresponsible, shortsighted, and parasitic? Return of the repressed, much?

    The current social drama is asking us to see a new monster, the megalomaniac Herrin. Or is it the equally incompetent and power hungry Poshard? Choose your side. Or see, finally, the real stress cracks in our leadership. One hears rumbles in Anthony Hall that suggest the demand for a cone of silence there around leadership ("you are either on board on you are not") is similarly showing stress fractures. But then, this whole kerfuffle should really be a lesson about the problem with bubbles. When your leadership isn't open, transparent, and accountable, you start to believe your own fantasies, your own spin. The bubble depends on imagining that those outside it are less than you, are a threat. But the truth is the real threat is inside the bubble where the acrobatics of groupthink eventually cause those inside to turn on each other, haunted by the scary stories they've told themselves.

    And then, well, who ya gonna call?

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  2. Whatever the motivations, Poshard clearly lied about the reasons for the faculty strike. He knew full well that it was not about money and four months after he has enough information to know better. That was made very plain during the negotiations. His petulant outburst makes one thing clear: Cheng alson was not to blame for the strike. He was as deeply involved as she was. As a blue dog Democrats attempting to copy the tactics of Scott Walker, his aims are all too obvious.

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  3. If you think Poshard was trying to bust the union, well, I want some of whatever it is you're smoking.

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  4. Dave Johnson's posting is rather confused. As usual he sits on the fence--this and that and that and this--all these meaningless speculations. What is he hoping to gain from this fence sitting? The point is that the strike happened and the administration (Poshard and others) let it happen because they used that as a last resort to divide the faculty and break the union.

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    1. I disagree. The analysis presents a complicated hypothesis but one that I didn't have any trouble following. Sounds like you see things only in black and white.

      Of course, the hypothesis, while seemingly consistent with events observed in the open, would be hard to support with evidence (at least, without identifying Herrin's source or polygraphing Poshard).

      I would point out that (assuming Poshard's story about Herrin's note is true) it is unlikely that Herrin made up the note's contents out of whole cloth--so he must have had what he thought was a reliable source from *somewhere*. Just because it wasn't from an FA officer, doesn't mean it wasn't from an "adjacent" faculty member who he thought was in the know. A person can say what they want about either the administration or the FA, but I bet it is harder for the FA to keep secrets! Indeed, is it really so hard to imagine that a person (say) on the periphery of the FA leadership (perhaps a person who thought that they knew what was going on, perhaps with a touch of self-importance) might seize on the opportunity to inject themselves into the middle of a charged situation to help "solve" the contract problem by acting as an informer to Herrin? Human nature being what it is?

      Still, it would be nice to know if the story is true, as it could be a helpful lesson that spycraft and contract negotiations are poor bedfellows.

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    2. Most of the supposed union demands in Herrin's document (as reported by Poshard) were public knowledge. Even the salary demands may have been extrapolated from early proposals which did include more on salary, including things like suggestions for longevity pay, equity pay, minimum pay, etc. We'd have to study Herrin's actual document and compare public information at the time it was drafted to make sure. That stuff was--and is--available on the FA webpage. But Poshard thought Herrin had some sort of authoritative, inside information, which he didn't have. Could he have spoken to someone in the FA at some point, as beezer wonders--sure, I can't rule that out. But he didn't have some back channel to the bargaining team or FA leadership, as Poshard took him to be claiming he did.

      As beezer notes, it is hard for the FA to keep secrets--for both practical and principled reasons. So anyone claiming to have access to FA secrets should be scrutinized rather closely: there usually aren't any secrets to keep.

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  5. It is pretty obvious there have been problems with Poshard's leadership. But the idea that Quinn would appoint a major campaign contributor to the BOT is an outrage. This state is corrupt from top to bottom. Poshard will likely be ousted next year and then things will get even worse. Is there any means to convince the Governor to appoint people to our BOT based on reasonable criteria instead of political loyalties and connections? Maybe some FA, NTTFA and FS leaders could meet with Simons and see. Of course she got her job through her connections and name. It is hard to be optimistic about this place.

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  6. So Poshard gets ousted in January. What does an ex-politican/university president do with all that time on his hands?

    Well, he could run for governor. He's won the nomination before and came soooo close to the moving into the governor's mansion...and in a three way Democratic primary between Poshard, Lisa Madigan and Quinn...well, guess who loses? Here's a hint: it wouldn't be Poshard or Lisa. Quinn better separate himself from this mess in a hurry.

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  7. "...and in a three way Democratic primary between Poshard, Lisa Madigan and Quinn...well, guess who loses? Here's a hint: it wouldn't be Poshard or Lisa."

    So ... Poshard and Lisa both win and become co-governors?

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    1. I didn't pick a winner...only a loser. You're free to speculate about the other two. Geez...I thought that would be obvious. It may well be that Poshard places third in that three-way race. But it doesn't matter. Quinn would not come out on top, thus we get a new governor. Quinn takes out Poshard, Poshard takes out the governor.

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  8. The notion that the FA was being secretive about its true agenda sounds like projection on Poshard's part. The whole point of the strike was transparency, but apparently they couldn't believe that.

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    1. Really? lets hear the FA's leadership announce that they did not have contact with ANY member of the BOT before or during the strike.

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    2. The FA obviously contacted with some BOT members to seek support during the strike. There is no credibility from the FA leadership.

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    3. FA member's logic: every bad thing at SIU is Poshard's fault since he got more pay.

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    4. Anon. (5:59 AM):
      Would an announcement from Randy convince you?
      Would you believe it or just take it as evidence that the FA leadership is a bunch of liars with no credibility?
      Even if you believed it, there's always the possibility, as Beezer puts it, for a "leadership-adjacent" FA member to talk with a member of the BOT. The FA has over 200 members who could have talked to Herrin.

      Anon (7:07 AM):
      Leading up to and during the strike, the FA was in heavy contact with the media. Back channels weren't necessary for the FA to make its case to BOT members. All the Board members had to do to know what the FA wanted was read the newspaper or look outside the windows of their executive session meeting.

      What evidence do you have that the FA "obviously" contacted board members? The only thing that I'm aware of is that one board member, who had been a long-time union member, asked for an FA escort across the picket line. For all I know, she told Poshard to "stick it to the FA" once she got across the line and behind closed doors.

      To both of you, how exactly would the FA leaders PROVE that they didn't talk with members of the Board? Shades of Iraqi WMDs go through my mind.

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  9. Dave,

    Did Randy get interviewed? Did it appear somewhere? Will there be a statement on the FA website about this?

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    1. FA's characteristic: if you have different opinion from FA, then they hate you, and try to attack you from the back.

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    2. I missed FSN.

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  10. Poshard's supporters are so desperate that they have to resort to "WMDs" to cover up their shame at their leader's rant earlier this week.

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    1. According to latest poll in thesoutern.com, 61% people agree with Poshard.

      FA mafia, please respect the fact. You don't like someone, it doesn't mean he/she is wrong at everything.

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    2. Anon. 7:47 and Anon. 6:56:

      Different versions of what you are saying -- resorting to WMDs (proving the nonexistence of something) and that someone you don't like isn't wrong about everything -- could also be said for the opposite side.

      The most serious allegations from Poshard and Herrin have been about what was said in private meetings and phone conversations.

      Almost every opinion that takes a side in this mess justifies the opinion by how much the person likes/dislikes Herrin or Poshard or by how deep the person thinks Herrin or Poshard is in the corruption of Illinois government.

      Can you understand why your opponent would dismiss this "evidence" as flimsy?

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  11. Randy gets paraphrased in the Southern this (Saturday) morning, and says that there was no meeting with Herrin. Here's the link.
    The story quotes Herrin (via Poshard) as saying that the FA was demanding 3.5% over four years but that fair share was only a bargaining chip. Our salary position was tied to SIUC finances, not a hard number, for a long time before the strike. I obviously don't know what Herrin said or didn't say--perhaps Poshard will release the document he waved at his presser, or Herrin will comment to the press. But neither salary nor fair share were things the FA emphasized privately or publicly in the lead up to the strike or during the strike itself. 3.5% is in fact what the BOT offered us--and all the other locals. It was thus if anything their proposal, not ours. Fair share remained on the table till the end, but the FA has never made it its #1 priority. I would not call it "just a bargaining chip", either. Other locals made progress on fair share during negotiations, and we would have been happy to do so as well. Lots of progress on a lower priority can offset lesser progress on higher priorities: there aren't going to be any items, at least in a late stage of negotiations, that are simply bargaining chips in the popular sense of worthless items one hopes to fool someone into accepting as real concessions.

    Anyone interested in the question of what Herrin knew and when he knew it would need to start by asking him (or having him talk to others), and getting a take on just what he claimed to know, and when. Without that information all we can go on is Poshard--who himself described Herrin's sourcing of his info in rather vague terms in his press conference--and Randy's comment, which is absolutely in keeping with what I know, that there were no high level contacts between Herrin and the FA.

    One unquestioned premise here is just what would constitute unwarranted "interference" by a board member. Keep in mind that negotiations are conducted by the admin on behalf of the board. The BOT thus has every right to supervise those negotiations. Let's say that Herrin did his own research by looking over the FA website and talking to any faculty members he happened to know. Then he comes to Poshard with some questions. That would strike me as responsible action, not renegade action. At least according to Herrin and Lowery, Poshard would regard such independent questions as undue interference.

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  12. ``Faculty Association President Randy Hughes said the union did not have meetings with Herrin during or outside of negotiations. Hughes said he has no idea where Herrin would have come up with the list, but that if it did happen, it could have been from anywhere, including media reports. He said the union’s bargaining positions were relatively easy to acquire.


    Poshard said Friday that Herrin had also told him and Hinrichs the fair-share dues demands were just a bargaining chip and could be ignored in favor of the rest of the demands.''

    But one of the FA leaders told me before the strike that they were very serious about the fair-share. Now I were told this is just a bargaining chip?

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    1. Did you catch my comment above? The FA was and is serious about fair share. But the FA can't be equally "serious" about everything--precisely because we didn't view negotiating as a matter of presenting a series of unalterable demands. Only in such a world can one easily divide bargaining proposals into two groups, absolute demands and bargaining chips. If one lives in such a world--or is simply speaking in short hand, I suppose--one could call fair share a "bargaining chip" inasmuch much as it wasn't going to be the phrase on the signs we would go to the picket line with (i.e., it wasn't the sort of priority capable of generating a strike all by itself). You recall any "I Demand Fair Share" signs? But neither were there any "3.5% or Fight" signs.

      If Poshard correctly characterized Herrin's account of the FA's "demands", Herrin was pretty off base. Salary wasn't a high priority, especially salary as a fixed figure. Nor was fair share among our highest priorities. It was on the table, though, which means that if the administration had given ground on fair share, we might well have given ground on another issue. But we wouldn't have traded it straight up for an item higher on our list (like, say, tenure). That's how bargaining works, at least on my understanding of it.

      In broad terms I think the FA's broad priorities will always be clear to any careful observer of our public remarks--especially once one includes those made to the bargaining unit, which, not being sworn to secrecy, pretty much amounts to the same thing. This doesn't mean that our negotiators will have no wiggle room, or that they will reveal our bottom line on day one of negotiations, only that in a democratic union organization one cannot expect members to support the union without knowing what doing so entails. That means informing them about our priorities, and giving them some guidance as to which of them are our highest priorities.

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