FAM is committed to building an equitable and inclusive Miami community. We believe that working together we are better equipped to fight bias, discrimination, and structural racism. The history of labor unions in the United States is complicated, and as tools of their members, labor unions have not always escaped the racism that has been part of American history. We acknowledge this but we aim to emulate the history of unions as a tool to end all forms of injustice, learning from the examples of A. Phillip Randolph, Dolores Huerta, and Emma Tenayuca.
As a new union, FAM has an opportunity to build an organization committed to antiracism, social justice and feminism from the ground up. To that end, FAM is reaching out to various affinity groups on Miami’s campus and inviting BIPOC, APIDA, Latinx, international faculty, women of color, LGBTQ+ faculty, faculty with disabilities, and other groups and formations to shape and co-create FAM governance, policies and practices.
FAM is inspired by models among other faculty unions that have undergone an intentional transformation and commitment to antiracism and social justice. We have collected examples of practices and policies from other unions that could be incorporated into FAM governance and structures. We invite the FAM community, starting with faculty who are BIPOC, Latinx, international, and/or LGBTQ+ or are living with disabilities, and inclusive of faculty from precarious categories, to engage in a process of adapting and adding to these ideas in order to generate antiracist, inclusive and democratic policies and structures tailored to the Miami setting. The resulting document will be the foundation of FAM governance.
Pay Inequities
Although faculty unions have successfully pushed for minimum faculty salaries, one of their other core functions has been to provide transparency in salaries. This is often through a process of codifying how merit pay is awarded and expanding the definitions of what is deemed merit worthy. Beyond this faculty unions have pushed for other specific policies to reduce pay inequities.
For example, faculty at Rutgers have been successful at eliminating pay inequities through the implementation of a Faculty Equity Program. This program, codified in section 8 of the Rutgers AAUP contract, establishes a pathway for faculty that are being paid less than their peers to petition for salary increases. Faculty are given a chance to build a case, with the help of the Rutgers AAUP, for how pay inequities cannot be explained by their work and so should be closed. Rutgers AAUP is able to monitor how Rutgers responds to these cases and make sure they are living up to their goal of closing racial, gender, and campus pay inequities.
Unpaid Labor
Women and faculty of color are often expected to do substantially more service work. This service work is often unpaid, and creates barriers for advancement as these faculty members are unable to do other work. Several faculty unions have worked to eliminate these barriers and throw a light on this additional work.
Starting in their 2014 contract the California Faculty Association has bargained for “exceptional service awards.” These awards “provide assigned time to faculty employees who are engaged in exceptional levels of service that support the CSU’s priorities, but who are not otherwise receiving an adjustment in workload to reflect their effort.” In particular these are awarded to “faculty for mentoring, advising, and outreach, to support underserved, first-generation, and/or underrepresented students and other practices in support of such students, including those caused by cultural taxation.” In their 2022 contract negotiation CFA was able to make these awards permanent.
Another example comes from Oregon State University. As part of their first contract United Academics bargained for a letter of agreement with Oregon State University where all supervisors would go through a training program to recognize unpaid informal labor from faculty from underrepresented communities. This training would include strategies to accommodate and mitigate such labor including “allocations of effort to service, mentoring, or outreach in position descriptions; peer mentoring and observation; course releases; and travel funding.”
Biases in Teaching Evaluations
Although it is well established that student evaluations have biases against instructors of color and women (see a recent review of the literature here). Faculty unions have pushed back on the use of student teaching evaluations in many ways. Faculty union contracts often require that student evaluations cannot be the sole factor for evaluating teaching performance. For example, the contract for faculty at the University of Florida states: “The teaching evaluation must take into account any relevant materials submitted by the employee, including the results of peer evaluations of teaching, and may not be based solely on student evaluations when this additional information has been made available to the evaluator” (p 23). Others have approached this issue by requiring peer evaluations used as well as any teaching evaluations, For example, University of Oregon’s contract requires a recent peer evaluation to be used along with any student evaluations during the promotion process.
Other faculty unions have been able to negotiate stronger provisions around the use of student evaluations of teaching. AAUP at Wright State included a provision where faculty could petition to have the evaluations of specific courses removed from their record. The California Faculty Association contract has a broader provision where faculty can submit written “rebuttals to student course evaluations when it is believed that additional information is needed or in the case of student bias. Evaluators must review such written rebuttals when reviewing underlying student course evaluations” (p 71).
Strengthening and Preserving Anti-Discrimination Policies
Finally, faculty unions have been able to write into contracts rules that preserve anti-discimination policies no matter what happens to changes in law as well as broader definitions of protected statuses. For an example of the former, the faculty contracts at both Bowling Green and University of Akron require that if the Obergefell Supreme Court decision is overturned that the university will continue to provide benefits to same-sex domestic partners. In the case of the latter, the non-discrimination clauses within union contracts vary but are often more expansive than Miami’s. For example, CFA’s includes non-discriminiation on the basis of caste, medical condition or sex stereotype; and University of Oregon’s includes on the basis of marital status, partnership status, or familial status.
Structures within Unions
Faculty unions have also worked to ensure that minoritized faculty have a consistent voice within their union. Although all members will be part of any contract negotiations and will vote on the end agreement, it is still important to provide specific avenues for representation of groups that have been historically marginalized in higher education. Many faculty unions have created standing committees oriented around diversity, equity and inclusion. For example, the University of Akron AAUP constitution establishes a standing diversity committee charged with studying “matters relating to the professional and economic status of women, people of color, sexual minorities, members of minority ethnic groups, or people with disabilities who are faculty at the university” (p 8).
Other faculty unions have created specific positions within executive leadership to represent historically marginalized groups. The California Faculty Association has an Associate Vice President for Racial and Social Justice position on their board of directors. The board also includes two representations for CFA’s Council for Racial and Social Justice. United Academics at the University of Oregon has an elected Vice President of Diversity and Equity that serves on their executive board.
Continuing Conversations
We want this to be a start, not an end, of a conversation on how to build justice at Miami. We continue to have conversations with faculty and groups across campus, and are looking to use these conversations to generate other and new ideas of what a faculty union can fight for. A few of these ideas are listed below.
- Developing provisions within a contract for a hiring process that follow best guidelines for recruiting faculty from underrepresented backgrounds.
- Establishing in contracts that financial support for travel can be used for childcare.
- Strengthening mentorship programs for faculty from historically underrepresented groups by ensuring that this type of service is recognized in any contract.