Support Pours in from AAUP Members on First Day of US-AAUP Rolling Strikes
Mark Criley. Mike DeCesare. David Langkamp. Anita Levy. These are our colleagues in the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance (DAFTG) who led the way walking off the job yesterday as we held the first of our one-day rolling unfair labor practice (ULP) strikes. At a virtual picket streamed live, the DAFTG staffers powerfully presented the case for why it’s necessary for US-AAUP members to start striking after more than a year of working without a contract.
“I was fortunate enough to serve in a number of member leader positions at the local, state, and national levels of the AAUP, including as a member of the Council and the Council’s Executive Committee. And it’s with all of these experiences in mind, both as a current staff member and a former member leader, that I’m striking today,” said Mike DeCesare, a senior program officer in DAFTG who was on strike yesterday.
“I’d rather be at work than on strike, but I’m striking today because I’ve had enough of laboring without a contract for nearly 400 days, enough of inequitable working conditions among my staff colleagues, enough of regressive bargaining by management’s bargaining team, and enough of alarmingly high staff turnover due to working conditions at the Association.”
“I’d rather be at work than on strike, but I’m striking today to remind the AAUP’s management and elected leaders that my and my colleagues’ work is valuable to the Association and its members, to the profession, and to the labor movement.”
Watch the full video of the virtual picket below.
The striking staff were joined by Saranna Thornton, past chair and current member of the AAUP’s Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession and the president of the Hampden-Sydney College AAUP chapter; Abel Bult-Ito, the statewide secretary of the United Academics University of Alaska; and Oskar Harmon, secretary of the University of Connecticut collective bargaining chapter and a member of the AAUP’s Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession. All of these AAUP members spoke powerfully in support of the staff.
“I’m supporting this union movement. I’m thinking about future actions to support them at my local EC,” said Harmon. “And I encourage you all to think of our brothers and sisters as being extremely brave and putting their jobs really on the line and in many ways their future at the AAUP. For standing up and being so brave. And we personally know as faculty what that is because we’ve had to do this at our own universities and we’ve relied on the union to help us through these difficult times. So these staff members do that for us. And I think that we need to do that for them, and I feel obligated to cause lots of good trouble at my university to support them.”
More support poured in from chapters, members, and leaders as the US-AAUP prepared for the strike.
“We write with a sense of urgency and puzzlement, to ask you to bargain in good faith and quickly settle the contract with the AAUP staff union,” wrote the Wesleyan University AAUP Executive Committee in a letter to the AAUP’s Council, continuing, “We note how damaging the AAUP’s refusal to bargain in good faith has been to the reputation of the national- and chapter-level AAUP. On our campus, faculty antagonistic to the work of the chapter have publicly denounced the AAUP as an organization that treats its own staff in a way that it would oppose were it staged as a conflict between university administrators and faculty. The AAUP’s refusal to act in good faith is corrosive to our collective work. In the same spirit in which we work for the interests of all faculty and academic staff at our and all institutions of higher education, we urge you to apply AAUP principles to your own labor situation. Settle the contract.”
The Macalester All-Campus Chapter of the AAUP wrote a powerful post on their website supporting the US-AAUP. “We call upon the AAUP leadership team to instruct their bargainers to immediately return to the bargaining table in good faith, to return to their previous, more generous bargaining position, and to quickly resolve this dispute to support members of the staff union who do so much to advance our collective work.”
We are indebted to the many AAUP members who have stood with us through this long and difficult process. Thank you.
Finally, we would like to respond briefly to the “Staff Negotiations Update” posted yesterday on the AAUP’s website. This management statement contains factual inaccuracies and misrepresents the state of bargaining. We have been in negotiations for a year and a half, not “over two years” as the AAUP states, although clearly it is past time to settle a contract. The AAUP’s management seems puzzled by our decision to strike, but they fail to mention the reason for our strike: we are striking because of their unwillingness to bargain in good faith, and specifically their decision to remove retroactive pay from all offers made since June. We are on a ULP strike, and we notified management of our strike authorization vote, of our intention to file ULP charges, and, most recently, of our intention to begin job actions, all in the hopes of moving them toward settlement and avoiding a strike. There is nothing “inexplicable” about it. Management says they are offering the staff a generous compensation package, but as a result of the AAUP’s regressive position on compensation, the actual total annual salary increase in the first year of the contract would amount to barely 1 percent if the contract were ratified now. Management cites “rich benefits” offered to the staff, but they fail to note that they have focused almost exclusively during bargaining on reducing benefits—or that we have already offered major concessions on sick leave and study leave in an effort to settle the contract. What is truly inexplicable is how the leaders of the AAUP could fail to understand that the tactics they have used against their own staff contradict the AAUP’s professed values as a labor organization, are alienating AAUP members, and are damaging the AAUP.