8 Tentative Agreements reached today!
There was lots of movement at faculty negotiations today! FAM reached tentative agreement on eight (8) articles, including:
- Professional Development Leaves and Appointments (including, for the first time, TCPL faculty being eligible for Faculty Improvement Leaves!)
- Appointment, Renewal, and Promotion of TCPL Faculty
- Appointment and Promotion of Tenure-Track and Tenured Faculty
- Leaves
- Performance Counseling and Performance Improvement Plans
- Separability
- Labor Management Meetings
- Duration
Our combination of member pressure, media messaging, and packing the room is working! Last week, at Miami’s Bachelor Hall Open House ceremony and Homecoming Weekend, FAM showed up to celebrate the work of the faculty who earn Miami its national teaching ranking of 10 (third among public institutions). Trustees, students, alumni, and management saw our mobile billboard circulating the event with FAM’s priorities: serving students and the educational mission.
Faculty show off FAM buttons at the Bachelor Hall Open House as a mobile billboard circulated the campus with FAIR CONTRACT NOW! messages.
The educational mission is not the University’s priority, based on its refusal to agree to fair raises for faculty, its brand-new $30+ million offer to try to get a spot in a new athletic conference, and Finance VP David Creamer’s statement in the Oxford Free Press that athletics are more important to the university. Miami has “big money” according to the New York Times, but that money is not being shown to its faculty.
Our members need to see some of that big money. In today’s negotiating session, we did see management making movement on annual increases (up to 2.25% from 2.00% in 2028) and minimum salaries, and on retracting some of their language limiting our ability to enforce the contract. They also moved closer to our language in multiple outstanding articles.
We are now down to just 6 articles — and we’re very close on many of those, including Faculty Evaluations, Financial Exigency and Academic Reorganization, and Benefits. For our part, we are still demanding 3.75% annual increases for each of the three years, plus preservation of our rights to enforce essential parts of the contract.
We are close — but we’re not done until management starts paying some of its massive wealth to faculty. Help us to make even more progress next week by showing up at bargaining!: We bargain again next Monday, October 5th, next Friday, October 9th, and the following Wednesday, October 14th.
Questions? Reach out to us at info@famiami.org.