By Martin Goldstein

    Last month the Faculty Association and the administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), adjusting the specifics of the Associate Faculty contract language to fit the current economic and political realities  An MOU has the power to supercede the terms of the contract, and this one does, but for the academic year 2003-04 only. Before it expires, however, we will be in negotiation for the next contract, so this MOU should be seen as both a temporary solution to the current problems, and a beginning of negotiation on these issues for the next contract.

    Given the overall importance of this MOU, then, we are printing it verbatim in this issue, along with this analysis of it. The complete contract is also available on the FA website, and any and all comments and questions are welcome; this is new territory for all of us.

    Basically, the issue instigating the MOU is the fact that those who have just achieved AF status are guaranteed both a two-semester contract and a certain load for the next academic year; essentially the load they had the year they achieved AF status. Those who have achieved it in prior years, if they are rehired at all this coming fall, are also contractually promised a set load. But what if, in either case, there are simply not enough classes available to fill that load? Do the newer AF get dibs ahead of the older ones?

Does it mean that an AF member cannot be offered any classes if they cannot be offered a full load?  Is it all or nothing? According to the current contract, it is.

    This simply wasn’t an issue when we negotiated this clause in the contract a year and a half ago, when we had (can you remember?) a multi-million dollar budget surplus. But times change (and so do budgets, apparently.) Before, with 1000 part-timers and no more than a few hundred of them AF, getting a full load if hired at all was something we wanted to guarantee, to increase the predictability of our AF members earnings. It was never envisioned as something that it would deprive them of employment during a time of job retrenchment.

   

    So it had to be adjusted, and it was. This MOU, besides restating the past and current hiring practices (i.e. the Department Chair recommends, the VP decides) adjusts them to this time of job reduction, with both gains and losses so far as we PTers are concerned. The most significant gain is that all those who have achieved AF status as of fall, 2003, will be offered classes first. The previous language gives that right only to those who achieve it for their first year; after that, if they are hired, then they get a full load. Now there’s no longer an “if”.  You have AF status, you get first dibs on the available PT slots, no matter if  you had it before or just got it this year. If you got it every year you’d have the level of job security that would really mean something, but we’re not there yet, though, as mentioned, before this current MOU is up, we’ll be negotiating a successor contract, with this issue very much on the table because of this MOU.

    In the meantime, this MOU is a negotiation, and that means a give-and-take, and what we gave up is the obligation to hire an AF member at full load, which is a significant concession. We bargained long and hard to get that load guarantee into this contract, but a load guarantee that works against our members is not something we envisioned when we negotiated it.

    Now we have a good faith guarantee to try to get as full a load to as many AF member as possible during this next year, and to be a fair as possible in spreading the available jobs around to AF members first, and given the enormous uncertainties that surround the budget for that year, this is the best we felt we could do.

    Further, given that we don’t know how things are going to look when we begin the next round of negotiations, it seems both wise and proper to limit this MOU to this coming year only. It weakens the guarantee of full load for AF member (under conditions where a full load is not possible anyway) -- but it sets a precedent for routine first-dibs rehiring for AF part-times that could turn into a significant step towards greater job security for AF members in the future. All in all we feel it’s as good a solution to the problem as there is at this point, and we commend all those involved on both sides for their efforts to work this out.

 

 

 

FA Signs MOU on AF Status