FAM-T Bargaining, Day 8

Nearly 300 of your colleagues attended Faculty Assembly last week, putting the administration on notice that they need to work with us, not against us. Unfortunately, management’s bargaining team was not yet ready to do that this week. In time, they will understand how united you are in your commitment to successful negotiations.

The issues your FAM team faces at the bargaining table go to the very heart of your work and the future of the public good you provide through Miami’s teacher-scholar model. Is academic freedom essential to teaching, scholarship, and service? How do we ensure evaluations and promotions are fair? How does the faculty voice make for a better-run public institution? 

To get a contract that effectively answers those questions, you need to join us. Sitting on the sidelines guarantees a worse contract.

• Join the majority of your colleagues as a member of FAM. It increases our leverage by showing the administration these tactics are losing them the support of the faculty.  It’s easy: fill out this membership card, sign the bottom on both pages, and email it to info@famiami.org. 

• Join your colleagues on Zoom at three December bargaining sessions and four in January. It supports your FAM team and puts your deans on the spot.

• Join your fellow citizens in calling key representatives to stop SB 83 for a third time this year. We know that elected representatives are briefing boards of trustees across the state. Another legislative defeat sends a message to the ultimate management body.

Here’s what happened today

• Management proposed a regressive expansion of and revision to existing post-tenure review policies. To deal with a problem of an unspecified number of under-productive tenured faculty members—a problem they haven’t tried using existing processes to rectify—Management proposes to make you do more paperwork and more evaluations. Going well beyond adjudicating formal complaints and decreasing merit pay, the plan would reduce your due process protections and make them more complicated to enforce. Most troublingly, given the current legislative climate, their proposal raises concerns about outsiders weaponizing the process by potentially allowing outside reviews of tenured faculty by undefined parties.  [Update: See Sam Morris’s December 19 statement.]

• FAM proposed to improve your accessibility to University-wide meetings through a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would have ensured you could participate remotely in key governance and campus events. More access makes it easier for faculty to help Miami be better governed. Management rejected this MOU. Similarly, our Online Course Content proposal? Currently rejected. 

• Miami benefits when faculty and librarians have the right to evaluate administrators. FAM’s administrator evaluation proposal includes providing formative review for administrators and expanding the scope of who can be evaluated. Administration evaluates you and helps you to grow into better faculty and librarians; you should be empowered to reciprocate.

• You deserve the peace of mind enabled by equitable job protections should the worst ever come to pass in a financial crisis. Our team created a proposal that clearly lays out the procedures that Management must undertake before laying anyone off, known as financial exigency. This is something we hope will never happen, but including this policy in the contract will ensure that those who are wrongfully terminated in these situations have a path to grieve it.

• We introduced the TCPL Professional Development Plan (PDP) Template proposal to provide greater agency for our TCPL colleagues as they create and adjust their PDPs. We also made progress with management in our proposals to protect the recent gains in the renewal and promotions processes and practices for TCPLs. All promotable faculty and librarians should enjoy the fair, clear process for probationary and promotion periods outlined in our Promotion, Tenure, and Time counter-proposal. Suffering through a significant illness or caring for your loved ones shouldn’t result in the permanent derailment of your promotion. 

See you at the next bargaining session. Solidarity!