All ballots will be counted publicly Thursday morning, January 14, 8:30 am, in EDU 380 (Psych and Social Foundations departmental conference room), and all faculty and professional employees in the bargaining unit, whether UFF members or not, are welcome to help and observe.
LAYOFFS AT FLORIDA STATE
With unrestricted net assets of nearly $ 313 million, Florida State University would seem to be able to weather even the $ 57 million cut its board faced last summer. The expected economic recovery is expected to be slow, but with Florida business community becoming increasingly nervous about missing the globalization boat, this would seem to be the time appeal to the faculty – and their representatives, the Faculty Senate and the UFF – to help position FSU to ride the recovery into the next decade.
Instead, FSU is laying off 62 faculty. In fact, FSU is laying off 35 tenure line faculty, including 21 tenured faculty, ten of them from the sciences. Departments are disappearing: Geological Sciences, Meteorology, and Oceanography are being merged (after losing many faculty) and chunks of Anthropology are being discarded. This decision does not appear to be based on need (Florida has major geological, meteorological and oceanographic issues) or quality (according to Science magazine, Oceanography just got a "glowing" external review). The rationale presented by the administration boiled down to student credit hours, with FSU Arts & Sciences Dean Joseph Travis telling Science magazine that "Sciences never pay for themselves ... There’s always a subsidy arrangement," but that in hard times, "the subsidy gets harder to find."
Meanwhile, searches for new faculty hires are underway, and has announced plans to hire about a hundred new faculty. "It is hard to escape the conclusion that the budget crisis has been used as a pretext for academic restructuring," concluded the UFF, which filed a grievance; the FSU Administration prevailed in Step One and Step Two, and the UFF is now moving the matter to arbitration.
The FSU Chapter of the UFF is also moving on publicity fronts.
- The Chapter conducted a survey of members in December of 2008 to ask faculty what should be done, and 62 % preferred furloughs and pay reductions. Only 21 % went with layoffs. The annual 2009 UFF poll of FSU faculty showed that 13 % were "satisfied with the way things are going at FSU" (as opposed to 40 % in 1999), and 33 % rated the performance of the President of FSU as poor or unacceptable (as opposed to 22% in 1999).
- Such cuts raise the issue of how the FSU Administration is spending the money it has now, and the FSU Chapter posted a study of personnel expenditures from the academic year 2002 – 2003 to the academic year 2007 – 2008. They found that the number of Administrative and Professional (A & P) employees had increased 43.4 % while the number of 9-month faculty had increased 8.1 %. A & P employees did not do as well on raises, though: the average annual increase in spending per person was 2.1 % for A & P and 2.9 % for 9-month faculty. For comparison, the corresponding increase was 1.3 % annually for staff, and 5.0 % annually for deans.
- The Chapter invited Matthew W. Finkin, the Albert J. Harno & Edward J. Cleary Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – and a long-term activist in the American Association of University Professors – to talk about the question, "Should Tenure Be Tenuous?" Professor Finkin talked about the history of using "financial exigency" to justify laying off faculty, and noted that sometimes it is just an excuse, quoting a president of Brown University who said, "Speaking now as an administrative officer, it is much easier for me to say 'no' to a man by pleading the exigencies of the budget than by denying a request on the merits." Finkin noted that the courts are increasingly skeptical of the power of tenure in itself to protect academic freedom or prevent dismissal [which is why we need contracts spelling out said protection and prevention].
With all this going on, President T. K. Wetherell did appeal to the FSU Chapter of the UFF, saying that the UFF grievance on layoffs was misdirected, and instead UFF should help him lobby Tallahassee for more money. Wetherell did not say what he would do if he got more money, and that question points to one of the oddest aspects of the entire situation.
As Finkin observed, it is not unusual for administrator to see opportunity in a crisis, and to use the crisis to justify cuts that remake the university. But Wetherell is retiring, to be succeeded by Eric Barron, a nationally-known researcher in oceanography (remember those "glowing" reviews of FSU's department?), which is one of the science programs being gutted. Barron might legitimately see such sweeping cuts as a massive fait accompli, with toxic relations with the faculty as an unwelcome chaser, so it is hard to see what the Administration and the Board are doing.
Of course, the Administration could be attempting such a makeover in the midst of a succession. Or it could simply be desperation and a lack of vision combining to create a catastrophic failure in leadership: it's happened before – down the road, in FAMU. Either way, FSU may well be in danger of foundering in the storm.
BAD NEWS: USF PROPOSES LAYOFF ARTICLE LANGUAGE THAT GUTS TENURE
At the November 20, 2009, collective bargaining session, the Trustees put a proposal on the table that would undermine tenure, and the UFF-USF bargaining team rejected it. At the end of the January 15, 2010, session, the Trustees' team put forward a second proposal on layoffs and deferred a formal presentation until the next session. But the bargaining team has the language, and so do you –
it is available on-line along with the Trustees' November 20 proposal and all of the proposals that the UFF-USF team put on the table January 15.
At this point, the chapter's bargaining team has not heard the reasons why the Trustees want to change the layoff article, and if the point is not to gut tenure, there may be ways to satisfy the Trustees' needs without compromising our academic principles. Here is the core of the bargaining team's concerns: in the current language of the layoff provisions (Article 13), the University must declare an organizational unit as a layoff unit. They cannot cherry-pick individual faculty or small groups – no layoff unit such as "the odd-numbered doors on the third floor of Cooper." That is what the arbitration at UF last year was about: UF President Bernie Machen tried to call a Vietnamese language assistant professor a layoff unit of one, though "Vietnamese language" did not appear on any organizational chart of the University of Florida. The arbitrator agreed completely with the United Faculty of Florida that the language of the contract prohibited that sort of cherry-picking for layoff purposes.
The language proposed by the Trustees would eliminate that restriction. The layoff language proposed by the Trustees would allow the Trustees to identify "a research specialty, program, group, or project" as a layoff unit, below the level of a department or other organizational unit. All active researchers at USF have research specialties, and part of the way we earn tenure and promotion is by demonstrating the special contributions of our research to our respective fields. If this language were in the contract, the more you were on the frontier of your field, the greater would be your risk of being declared a layoff unit of one. This language penalizes singular professional achievements by making uniqueness of one's research a justification for being declared a layoff unit of one employee.
If put in the contract, this language would undermine the values that both the faculty and the administration claim. Part of the role of the United Faculty of Florida is to preserve shared academic values, and the bargaining team will not agree to language that its members think will undermine the future of USF.
In part because of the November 20 proposal and in part to promote better awareness of bargaining, the chapter is now
posting a list of bargaining proposals on-line – you can
ask questions about bargaining anonymously.
UFF AND GAINESVILLE TENTATIVELY AGREE ON A CONTRACT
After four years (seven if one counts preliminary jousting), the UFF and BOT Bargaining teams at the University of Florida have finally tentatively agreed on a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
After Governor Jeb Bush (with Speaker John Thrasher) reorganized the State University System, the new boards of trustees resisted recognizing the United Faculty of Florida as the Collective Bargaining Agent (i.e., the union) for the universities. The fiercest resistance came from the University of Florida's board, which had to be dragged into court. After UFF won that joust, bargaining started in 2005.
Last fall, after about four years of bargaining, the UFF declared "impasse", which meant that proposals from both sides would be presented to a Special Master. That did not mean that bargaining had to stop, and on Monday, January 11, the two chief negotiators signed a proposed contract that will now be presented to the UFF-UF Bargaining Unit and to the UF Board of Trustees for ratification. If ratified by both parties, the University of Florida faculty and professionals will finally have a contract.
CALIFORNIA UPDATE
In the
October 22 Biweekly, we saw walkouts throughout the University of California system protesting budget cuts, tuition hikes, and other actions of the UC Administration.
UC faculty are not represented by any unions, and are thus subject to furloughs at will. However, many California state employees are represented by unions, and an attempt by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to impose furloughs of three days a month was rebuffed by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch, who ordered the Governor to stop furloughing workers represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges, and Hearing Officers in State Employment (CASE), and the Union of American Physicians and Dentists.
Reactions were mixed. Schwarzenegger's press office vowed to appeal and said that the issue will ultimately be decided by the California State Supreme Court. California State President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg said that the Governor should bargain "a rational labor agreement." But the President of the California SEIU worried that the Governor might prefer to try layoffs over negotiations.
Actually, the Governor preferred to change the subject, and on January 5, he proposed a pair of state constitutional amendments that would prohibit the state from spending more on prisons than on universities. "... thirty years ago, ten percent of the general fund went to higher education, and three percent went to prisons," Schwarzenegger told the legislature. "Today, almost eleven percent goes to prisons, and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education." Schwarzenegger's chief of staff said that the proposal was at least partly inspired by student protests, and UC President Mark Yudof enthused, "This is a bold and visionary plan that represents a fundamental restoration of the values and priorities that have made California great." But the California Correctional Peace Officers Association have promised a fight.
However heartening these amendments may sound, the immediate problem is a $ 60 billion deficit. As Schwarzenegger is term-limited out this year, it will be his successor who inherits the mess. Some of the problems are past constitutional amendments, including one that requires that the budget be supported by a sixty percent majority in the legislature: since California's districts are so heavily gerrymandered that many legislators prefer to take extreme positions, sixty percent is a very difficult bar to reach. But this central problem may change soon, for in 2008, California voters approved a Voters FIRST Act, under which a Citizens' Redistricting Commission draws the district lines. After the census, the CRC will draw new lines, and it will be interesting what effect the new districts have on the legislature.
In the meantime, three unions are enforcing the contractual rights of state employees.
AFSCME IN IMPASSE: THE SPECIAL MAGISTRATE RECOMMENDS...
A special magistrate recommended a resolution of the current impasse in bargaining (on salary and other issues) between the staff union AFSCME and the USF Board of Trustees (BOT). For salary, the recommendation is for a compromise to distribute approximately the amount that the BOT proposed, using approximately the distribution that AFSCME proposed. This is only a recommendation, and now comes the tricky part: is the recommendation an acceptable compromise?
The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees represents over 1,600 staff employees at USF. AFSCME was one of the primary targets of Governor Bush's reorganization of the State University System in 2003, and AFSCME had to fight to get recognition as the collective bargaining agent for staff at USF in 2005. It took three more years before AFSCME and the BOT ratified a three-year contract in 2008.
Like the contract between UFF and the BOT, certain articles of the contract between AFSCME and the BOT are "reopened" every year. In particular, salary. In 2008, despite President Genshaft's statement that "Monetarily recognizing our employees is one of our core principles and top priorities," the only raise in 2008 was a one-time bonus. "I’m unhappy that we still didn’t get a comprehensive paid plan," said AFSCME-USF President Bill McLelland, who told the Oracle in 2008 that the main focus of the agreement had been salaries.
Salary is a problem for staff at USF, for base rate raises – as opposed to one-time bonuses – are quite rare while the Cost of Living has increased about 29 % in the last ten years. In its presentation to the special magistrate, AFSCME contended that USF pay scales for comparable positions were below that of local employers, that some staff employees were unable to afford health insurance, and that in a recent survey, 95 % of staff responding said that they worked overtime to pay bills that would otherwise go unpaid. There is little doubt that many staff are trapped in a financial sandwich.
In 2009, articles of the contract were reopened, and after bargaining got stuck, AFSCME declared impasse. AFSCME's proposal was for one-time bonuses ranging from $ 1,000 to $ 2,000, while the BOT's proposal was for one-time bonuses ranging from $ 500 to $ 1,000.
Also on the table was the method of distributing bonuses. For years, the BOT has been pushing using performance to determine raises, and for years AFSCME has been resisting. A major part of the reason for AFSCME's skepticism is the way performance is currently measured.
Although the BOT called their proposal "a merit based bonus system", it more closely resembles the discretionary pay systems (plural!) that faculty experience during the Administration's random seizures of generosity. Staff performance is evaluated by supervisors who need no training in evaluating performance, and who are not required to turn in performance evaluations anyway, and if they do feel both conscientious and rushed they can turn in a "short" form that tends to give the employee last year's evaluation. Adding to the dissatisfaction is evidence that staff evaluations are peculiarly low in comparison to evaluations of their superiors: AFSCME got hold of some information on the Physical Plant and Parking Services, and found that only 12 % of that staff were "exemplary", while 55 % of the supervisors were and 79 % of the administrators were.
No custodial workers, groundskeepers, cashiers, mail clerks, or maintenance & repair workers were exemplary, although USF is the proud employer of an exemplary bus driver.
All unions are very careful about performance evaluations. For example, UFF has long preferred the formal and transparent merit pay system, with its safeguards and checks and balances, over the variety show of discretionary fads that parade by with no discernible schedule. AFSCME was wise to be skeptical of a proposal reeking of so powerful a discretionary odor.
When impasse is declared, a special magistrate is called in to hear both sides and then compose a recommendation. This recommendation is not just a proposed compromise: a rejected recommendation leads to unpleasant legalities, and the recommendation is also partly a prediction of what will ultimately happen if the two sides fight it out. Thus a recommendation carries not only moral authority but also hardheaded realism.
The special magistrate agreed with the BOT that USF could not afford $ 3.2 million in bonuses this year, but the special magistrate was a bit nervous about USF's current performance evaluation system, and so proposed using AFSCME's distribution system, but with $ 1.2 million in bonuses.
For the short term, since the recommendation is part prophecy, it may be the best compromise available now. For the long term, this round of bargaining has not only reminded us of the dismal pay our staff receive – it has also exposed a dysfunctional performance evaluation system. The time has come for USF to clean up its act.
QUEER THEORY AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT USF
For the last few years, the USF Departments of Sociology (and Women's Studies) have offered a non-catalogue course on Queer Theory, taught by Professor Sara Crawley. LBGT populations – like medieval peasants, contemporary town government, and meteorites – are attracting more scholarly interest than they have in the past. And students have flocked to the course.
Like many professors (including this UFF-USF webmaster), Professor Crawley circulated ads with topical pictures to lead the eye to the promised content of the course. The email in the middle of the recent spat had five questions, beginning with "Are lesbian/ gay/ bisexual/ transgender (LGBT) new identities or have they always existed?" But some readers didn't get past the photo of a young fellow in a white hat, suspenders and white pants captioned, "Drag performance of local gender illusionist, 6pak, a physiologically unaltered female-bodied trans guy." A Dr. Richard Swier posted a copy under his January 5 column on Red County: see his column: notice that Dr. Swier jumped to the conclusion that there would be live performances in class.
Dr. Swier was not the only one who jumped to this conclusion. The Florida Family Association was founded in 1987 with the "goal of improving America's moral environment." The Accomplishments pages of their website is primarily concerned with advancing and enforcing a particular and somewhat narrow view of sexual morality, and their home page features a photo of the same local gender illusionist, with a link to a page stating that "The course promo states that there will be a 'Drag performance of local gender illusionist...'," and provides another link to a form which a visitor can use to send an email to "the President and other officials" of USF, with a short disapproving message in the form ready to send: see the page for emails.
Senior Vice Provost Dwayne Smith told the Faculty Senate on January 27 that USF had already received three thousand emails with this same text: the FFA does indeed have thousands of supporters.
"USF class exploring 'queer theory' riles conservative group" reported the St. Petersburg Times, which set up a poll asking respondents to choose between "No wonder the USA is becoming a second rate country," "USF has my complete support with this...," and "What a waste of time, fighting over this!" (submit your answer at the survey page). The USF Oracle editorialized that the ad was a bit over the top in
the January 20 issue.
Both administrators and faculty were largely supportive of academic freedom. Smith told the USF Oracle that "A very core value of the University is intellectual inquiry and often time intellectual inquiry involves courses, or topics, or subjects that plenty of people are really unhappy with or disagree with." The Oracle published A Statement on Academic Freedom by the USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida from UFF saying that we are "part of an enterprise that explores the world and brings discoveries and ideas to our students and our community to be tested against evidence and unshackled debate," and that "It is our 'academic freedom' from shackles that makes this testing possible" (see pp. SSH-7 and SSH-8 of
the January 27 Oracle).
Since the course is not running drag shows, this entire affair may fizzle out. On the other hand, some political organizations require a steady schedule of performances of their own in order to stay in business, and the Florida Family Association's Accomplishments pages indicate a history of such steadiness. Eternal vigilance, said Wendell Philips, is the price of liberty.
AFSCME IMPASSE UPDATE
In Monday morning's student newspaper, the USF Oracle, there was an
article about the university's rejection of the neutral special magistrate's recommendation in the current impasse in bargaining between the university Board of Trustees and the staff union, local 3342 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME.
There are several issues at stake in the impasse. One is the basis for lump-sum bonuses – AFSCME proposed large bonuses to lower-salaried staff, and management proposed bonuses based on an evaluation process that was not bargained with AFSCME. The special magistrate recommended a total bonus pool equal to what management's proposal would cost but structured according to what AFSCME proposed (larger bonuses to those with lower salaries). The second issue concerns a number of terms and conditions of employment about overtime and leaves tied to regulations rather than contractual language. The old statewide AFSCME contract with the defunct Board of Regents identified BOR regulations as contractual terms and conditions of employment, and USF management wanted to eliminate those references.
The special magistrate recommendation favored the AFSCME position where the magistrate was convinced that the USF language was not just "cleaning up" anomalous language but a substantive change in terms and conditions of employment. The third issue comes from the way that USF management randomly picked Physical Plant staff to change shifts a number of months ago. AFSCME members were upset at the capricious shift changes and proposed a seniority system of shift-change preferences. The special magistrate recommended the adoption of AFSCME's proposal plus language that would allow USF managers to decide which staff were qualified for positions in different shifts.
USF management sent an e-mail out to staff on Friday after rejecting the special magistrate recommendations, and in response, this week AFSMCE distributed an e-mail from its president, Bill McClelland, available on
AFSCME 3342's new blog. In its e-mail to staff, USF management claimed that adopting the special magistrate's recommendation on references to the BOR regulations would wipe out any additional benefits from USF regulations currently being applied to staff that were not in BOR staff regulations. President McClelland’s response is that there is nothing in the recommendation or in the AFSCME contract’s current language that prohibits USF management from continuing the benefits mentioned in management’s e-mail.
There is one other simple fact about terms and conditions of employment placed in regulations as opposed to a bargained contract: nothing prohibits USF management from proposing to include those benefits in the AFSCME-USF contract.
The special magistrate’s recommendations are non-binding, and the understanding of UFF's state-level staff is that a Board of Trustees is required to eliminate all contact with its bargaining team on the substantive issues in the impasse until a public hearing, so that it can legally remain neutral … but the BOT’s bargaining committee is likely to impose what management recommends. Florida law gives the advantage to management in impasse so that in many cases, the governing board that supervises the bargaining team also has the authority to impose a settlement at the end of the impasse procedure.
(When management does not think it needs a waiver from the union on a mandatory subject of bargaining – i.e., a subject that management is required to negotiate by law or regulation – the primary power of the union is to organize against ratification of the imposed settlement. The reason is this: if the impasse resolution is not ratified, the imposed resolution lasts only to the end of the fiscal year. This means that bargaining on non-salary issues has to start from square one at the beginning of the next fiscal year.)
After an imposed settlement, as our statewide staff has explained the process, representatives of both sides then need to meet after imposition to draft contractual language that is then put up for ratification. In the case of an imposed settlement (different from a regularly-bargained tentative agreement), the union is free to organize against ratification of an imposed settlement. If the unit votes in favor of ratification, and the board also ratifies the language, the imposed settlement language becomes part of the binding contract that remains in effect until a contract agreement (or another imposed impasse resolution). If the unit does not ratify the language of the imposition, then the imposed settlement is in effect only until the end of the fiscal year. If employees in AFSCME’s unit at USF reject an imposed settlement, the main effect is primarily in the bonus, which is a one-time payment, and the other provisions would die on July 1.
If employees in AFSCME’s unit at USF ratify an imposed settlement and the BOT also ratifies it, then all the provisions of the imposition would continue past the end of the fiscal year.
A longer discussion of impasse proceedings is available at the
UFF-USF blog; and background is in the
previous Biweekly. As of yet, there is no date for the impasse hearing of the BOT.
TOWARDS A NEW FLORIDA
On Thursday, January 28, Governor Crist announced that "Economic development, an innovation economy and a knowledge-based economy: that's what the university system is all about." He was attending a meeting of the Board of Governors, which oversees the Florida State University System. While he was there to announce the reappointment of Vice Chair Ava Parker and the appointment of five new members – including former USF Board of Trustees Chair Richard Beard – the big news was the New Florida Initiative that he and SUS Chancellor Frank Brogan unveiled.
The news media concentrated on Crist's proposal of $ 100 million more for the universities this year (for a total of $ 3.6 billion), and with the current deficit in Florida's budget looking like three billion dollars, there was a lot of skepticism – especially since Crist was planning on getting the money from Seminole gambling (not a done deal), raiding trust funds and draining reserves (ditto), and optimistic forecasting. Senator Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned that "optimism doesn't pay the bills," while the Republican House Speaker designate, Dean Cannon, said that "You can't look at any budget item in a vacuum; they all impact all the other priorities."
But the real news was that this was to be the initial investment of a long-term commitment. As the announcement of the New Florida Initiative on the Board of Governors' web-page put it, "Florida’s economy is built upon the three-legged stool of agriculture, tourism, and growth. ... [this] existing three-legged stool needs a fourth leg that creates a more stable economic foundation and the capacity to thrive in the coming decades."
The need was outlined in that announcement (posted
< href="http://www.flbog.edu/new_florida/">on-line
): Florida now ranks 45th among the states for per person personal income growth, 47th in the rate of growth in per person gross state product and services produced, and a tenth of all residents are on food stamps. Citing several examples of American cities and states developing their economies by investing in higher education, the announcement went on to project a number of perhaps overly specific expected outcomes by 2015 and 2030.
While most of the news coverage concentrated on the coming legislative session – or on Crist v. Rubio – some of the media is looking at New Florida and these seem to be supportive. But there is some skepticism on whether it will materialize. As the largely favorable
Palm Beach Post editorial concluded, "The New Florida Initiative sounds great. So have similar campaigns that died for lack of money."
So there must be another campaign for that money. Brogan wrote several columns (in, e.g.,
the Miami Herald and
the Tampa Tribune), one beginning, "The best action Floridians can take now to revive our state's economy is to invest in talent production through higher education." The Advisory Council of Faculty Senates resolved to support "the New Florida Initiative to create a new economy based on knowledge and innovation." Even individual universities are jumping in: University of North Florida President John Delaney broadcast a Campus Update asking recipients to contact legislators to voice support for New Florida.
UFF AND THE NEW FLORIDA
A funny thing happened last fall. The President of the (statewide) UFF was invited to speak at a summit meeting of the Council of 100 at FAU-Jupiter. The Council of 100 is one of Florida's leading business groups – formed nearly a half century ago to advise the state government – and while they have long pressed for supporting education, there was a new urgency in the sessions as participants used talking points UFF has been pushing for years.
That was the story UFF President Tom Auxter told when he opened the UFF (statewide) Senate meeting last weekend. Major business groups in Florida are no longer as obsessive about low taxes and are talking about energy inefficiency, water shortages, and similar systemic problems. Solving these problems will require academic support, not only in developing the underlying theory and designing solutions, but also in training the workers who will have to carry out the complicated business of retrofitting the current inefficient infrastructure.
And the in phrase is now "knowledge-based economy", a phrase that appears in the joint Council of 100 – Florida Chamber of Commerce perspective,
Closing the Knowledge Gap, posted before Brogan's announcement in USF, calling (among many other things) for a New Florida Initiative to double SUS funding.
Now comes the awkward part: who is going to pay for this knowledge-based economy? Especially when Florida is facing a $ 3 billion deficit and almost all state agencies (except education) were cut 10 % in the last legislative cycle and are now justifiably predicting disaster if there is another round of cuts. UFF will be formulating a message for the legislature that education, and particularly higher education, can provide the tools for building an economy for the Twenty-first century. And we will be asking fellow stakeholders – university administrations, faculty senates, university communities (including individual faculty and professionals like you) – to work together to tell the legislature that higher education can provide the tools Florida needs, but that in turn higher education needs sustained and reliable support in order to do its job.
THE FINANCIAL CRUNCH
UFF (statewide) President Tom Auxter has said that Florida does not have a budget crisis or a financial crisis so much as a failure to get its house in order. This failure was very much on display when Florida Education Association Public Policy Advocate Pat Dix reported that the Legislature faces a three billion dollar deficit. Last year, said Ms. Dix, the Legislature reviewed every tax exemption, and left them all in place. The budget was balanced (if that is the word) with stimulus dollars.
This year, there appear to be fewer stimulus dollars, the demands on the public purse are greater, and legislators are still fearful of even discussing taxes. This will be a rough session.
The 2009 – 2010 budget was $ 66.5 billion, including $ 21.3 billion for education, $ 26 billion for human services, $ 9.3 billion for natural resources & environmental & growth management & transportation, $ 5.3 billion for the judiciary and corrections, and $ 4.7 billion for running the government. Governor Crist is proposing a
$ 69.2 billion budget for 2010 - 2011, which would provide $ 21.5 billion for education from the state government; with other funds (e.g., from local government), Crist anticipates $ 32 billion for education altogether. The current estimate (guess?) is that revenue will fall about three billion dollars short, and since Florida must balance its budget, a number of observers claim that Crist's budget is too optimistic.
Even assuming a miracle, the long-range problem is a tight squeeze. The much-loopholed sales tax produces less revenue during recessions, while Crist and the Legislature have been reforming property taxes out of existence; local goverments that depend on property taxes are undermined and becoming increasingly dependent on the state. Meanwhile, projections last summer suggest that the recession will stabilize this year, and start turning around next year for towards a prolonged "recovery" lasting into 2012, but without many new jobs. And without new jobs, the demands on human services will continue, along with demands on education as young adults delay matriculation while their elders return to school.
This is the situation that the Legislature faces as UFF goes to Tallahassee.
FACING THE LEGISLATURE
At the USF-Tampa Faculty Senate meeting on February 24, UFF-USF Chapter President Sherman Dorn told the Senate that he would be "relieved" if university funding remained flat. Of course, just wishing it won't help, and UFF will be spending a lot of time in Tallahassee this spring, talking to legislators.
At the UFF Senate meeting over the February 13, 14 weekend, there were many appeals to become more involved. Florida Education Association Higher Ed Director (and former USF-UFF Chapter President) Roy Weatherford called for volunteers to participate in the FEA's candidate endorsement process, and FEA Public Policy Advocate Pat Dix outlined a program by which members of political action committees of individual chapters can build relationships with their local legislators. As UFF Executive Director Ed Mitchell told the UFF Senate, "There is not a whole lot we can do if we don't have a voice in Tallahassee." Political junkies at USF who are interested in building relationships are invited to contact our Political Action Committee chair,
Bob Welker.
Building relationships with legislators includes inviting them for dinner, and two legislators visited the UFF Senate banquet. Assemblyman Bill Heller, D-Pinellas, is a professor of special education at USF-St. Petersburg, and Assemblyman Keith Fitzgerald, D-Sarasota & Manatee, is an associate professor of political science at New College.
Heller told senators that while the legislature is beginning to recognize that education has brought a lot of high tech to the states, the legislature was also toying with the idea of toying with tenure for K-12 teachers, and warned that if the legislature got away with it, university tenure would be next. Fitzgerald said that he was working on reforms to make the legislature more transparent (such as requiring that budget committee meetings be open to the public) and he warned that unless the operation of the legislature is reformed, higher education will eventually be hit. Both Heller and Fitzgerald stressed the importance of upcoming fall elections, when all legislative seats will be on the ballot, along with the governor's race, all cabinet seats, and the Fair Districts Initiative to take legislative districting out of the hands of the legislature.
The legislative session started on March 2, and cannot last more than sixty days. The UFF Senate spent some time on a particular message to hammer repeatedly, which was distilled into
six points. This is part of the FEA's Make Our Schools a Priority campaign
(launched last October by the FEA; see
the article on making education a priority and
how to make education a priority). In theory, we will know how it turns out on May 1, and during that time, UFF may ask members of the USF community to become involved and help communicate USF's needs and concerns to the legislature.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH
While UFF works in Tallahassee to bring home the bacon, UFF is bargaining and enforcing contracts at the chapter level.
Bargaining is underway at many places besides USF, but the big news was the 300-page contract that UFF got for the University of Florida. Items include full-pay parental leave, domestic partner benefits, protections against firing tenure-track faculty, protection against administration claims of ownership against copyrighted work, extension of academic freedom to service, community, and extra-mural activity (important since the U.S. Supreme Court Garcetti v. Ceballos decision is being used to undermine academic freedom outside of the classroom), moves a substantial part of governance down to the colleges and the departments, and makes appointment promises by administrators binding. The contract was a result of four years of bargaining, and UFF-UF Chief Negotiator Chris Snodgrass explained described his technique of implacable – and unflappable – patience.
Other universities were less fortunate. FAU is at impasse, while the UWF administration declared impasse and then undeclared impasse and somehow broke the law on declaring impasse. The FGCU administration is behaving very strangely, and UFF conducted a survey of FGCU faculty and found that forty percent were job-hunting.
Bargaining the contract is only half the job, for once the contract is ratified, the union has to make sure it isn't violated. UFF and university employees enforce contracts by filing grievances when contracts are violated. The initial "steps" of a grievance are at the university or college in question; after that comes formal arbitration, an expensive and risky third step. In addition, a direct violation of the law may be dealt with by an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) complaint filed with the Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC), which is also expensive and risky.
UFF Executive Director Ed Mitchell discussed the number of arbitrations, ULPs, and other expensive contract enforcement proceedings the union was undertaking, and warned that boards of trustees were looking for new opportunities to cherry-pick targets for layoffs: UFF had just won the
layoff case at the University of Florida and now is fighting over
FSU's plan to dump over sixty people. Mitchell said that there were nineteen arbitration requests before the UFF Contract Enforcement Committee (which handles grievances statewide), and each arbitration costs from five to fifteen thousand dollars, not counting staff time. Now you know one place union dues go.
Part of it is the economy. Between February and September last year, the committee processed eight requests; between September last year and the UFF meeting, the committee processed twenty-six, meeting every Wednesday this year to clear the backlog (the committee consists of college and university faculty working as volunteers for UFF).
While hard times should bring people together, often they do not, and in Florida hard times are inspiring many administrations boards of trustees toward panic or predation, occasionally both. In dealing with panic or predation, there is something to be said for implacable patience.
