US-AAUP Continues to Push for True Racial Equity
Updates from Bargaining around Study Leave and Family Leave
In a session last month, we proposed a much-needed change to an important but inequitably applied benefit: the study leave. Study leave has long been a valuable driver of professional development and increased capacity for the AAUP, but only senior program officers are currently eligible to apply for the six months of study leave for which they are eligible every six years. The bargaining team proposed extending the study leave benefit to all staff members, affording everyone organization to engage in scholarly work, education, or other activities that promote professional growth and an increased capacity for service to the Association.
The current narrow application of an important benefit, though valuable to the professional growth of those who could access it, has perpetuated racial inequality at the association with far more white staff being eligible than staff members of color. By only allowing SPOs access to study leave, a false hierarchy of work has also been created, with the work and time of SPOs being valued differently than the equally important work of the associate and assistant staff.
During the vitally important racial equity trainings that staff participated in through 2022, members of staff and management raised concerns that the limited access to this benefit was an example of internal racial inequity, and our proposal goes to the heart of that problem with a clean and clear solution: give everyone access to the benefit, and the AAUP will reap the rewards in return, with the new skills developed and projects undertaken during study leave significantly increasing the capacity of a small organization, which relies on a nimble staff to fill many roles, to do even more than it already does. In providing coverage for colleagues on study leave, staff members also have the opportunity to expand their skill sets and to develop a greater appreciation for and familiarity with their colleagues’ work.
Staff in all roles are interested in the important professional development opportunity that study leave presents, and extending the benefit to all would attract, retain, and support the growth of excellent staff. We surveyed our associate and assistant staff about what kind of projects they would do and the responses ran the gamut: new certifications in the digital platforms that are the backbone of the AAUP’s work, creating a digital archives for the work of our Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, becoming an advanced developer on Salesforce to enhance the work of our membership department, and more.
As part of our proposal we were also happy to add the management’s proposal for a recharge leave of four weeks as an additional benefit to staff. More and more research shows that time off is crucial to health and productivity, and adding the recharge leave would go a long way toward supporting the well-being of staff, further incentivizing valuable and knowledgeable staff to remain in their positions during a period of significant staff turnover.
We also made a proposal calling for equitable access to family leave regardless of where staff are based. When the DC Paid Family Leave (PFL) law went into effect in 2020, this extension of benefits highlighted limitations in the AAUP’s current family leave policy (for example, the personnel manual stipulates that employees would receive only six weeks of paid parental leave, while the new law provides for twelve weeks), and it created enormous disparities between AAUP employees based in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and those based in states with lesser PFL laws and coverage. Recognizing the disparity, management and the union formed a committee in 2020 to “coordinate how this law interacts with AAUP’s leave policy.” The management team did not address any of the union’s concerns about the disparities at the time, arguing that any changes would need to wait until bargaining. That time has come.
We have proposed a new article on family leave that covers five kinds of family leave events:
(i) parental leave;
(ii) family medical leave (simply referred to as “family leave” in DC PFL materials);
(iii) medical leave;
(iv) prenatal leave; and
(v) school-related parental leave.
The three big ideas in the proposal are as follows:
Employees based in Washington, DC shall participate (as required by law) in the DC PFL program, which expands most types of family leave to twelve weeks. Because the DC PFL program does not provide 100 percent wage replacement, the AAUP shall make up any differences in wage replacement to ensure 100 percent gross wage replacement during paid family leave events.
If any kind of family leave event covered by the DC PFL program is not fully covered by a non-DC employee’s state or local PFL program, the Association shall provide equivalent coverage or make up the difference to ensure benefits equivalent to that to which DC employees are entitled.
The DC PFL Employee Handbook shall serve as a guide for who qualifies as a “family member,” what qualifies as a “serious health condition,” and so on rather than our trying to specify all the minutiae of a PFL program.
We believe that our proposed family leave article is reasonable, fair, feasible, and easy to understand, and we are hopeful that management will see it is a good-faith effort to provide appropriate family leave benefits for all employees.
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