More News
Dear Colleagues,
Your UFF-FSU bargaining team met with representatives from FSU’s Board of Trustees on Friday, August 21, for an active session with plenty of movement across several key articles. This is a brief summary of where things stand. We encourage you to read the drafts for yourself and share your feedback with us.
We kicked off the session by passing Article 32 (Artificial Intelligence) to the BOT team. In response, they passed us four articles: Article 17 (Leaves), Article 3 (UFF Rights), Article 10 (Performance Evaluations), and Article 23 (Salaries). After taking a caucus to review their proposals, we passed our counter on Article 23 back to them. They then returned Article 32 to us, and we ended the session by passing Article 32 back into their court once more. Currently, all active articles are with the BOT team as we await their next moves.[RG1]
On the salary front, let’s start with the good news: for the first time this year, the BOT team offered us recurring raises in the form of a 1% merit pool increase to be distributed according to departmental procedures. We know from your feedback that this falls short of what is needed, especially considering that faculty at UF just agreed with their administration to a 5% merit increase. We will continue to fight for better, higher-impact raises that our faculty deserve.
The BOT still has not agreed to the MOA ensuring that Post-Tenure Review (PTR) raises/bonuses and Sustained Performance Increases (SPI) reviews will be implemented on time.
Regarding Article 32 and AI, we continue to fight for the rights of (human) faculty to evaluate work, conduct research, and teach students. We are also standing firm on our right not to have our privacy invaded by productivity monitoring technology that tracks eye movements and monitors keystrokes, technologies that are unfortunately becoming more common. Whether our administration currently wants to monitor our work in this way is not the point. We are working preemptively so they cannot implement this extant technology in the future.
We are also pushing for more representation on the IT Governance Council by faculty from various disciplines. Our ask has been simple: put four faculty members on the council. Currently, only two faculty members represent us on a seventeen-member committee, which is the exact same number as the student representatives. The administration has not been budging on this, which seems a little strange given the breadth of faculty expertise. We believe that more faculty and faculty from different disciplines should be represented on the committee that governs AI usage at the university, and, since the meetings of this committee are public, they should be announced so that faculty can know about them if they want to attend.
Article 3, “UFF Rights,” also remains a sticking point. The Article adjusts the course load of a handful of faculty members who represent you in bargaining and contract enforcement, placing a proportionately higher weight on service. The BOT is saying that the new law (SB1296) blocks such “release time.” We have pointed out to them that this is an idiosyncratic interpretation of the badly-written law, as a majority of other universities in the state, as well as public schools more generally,[2] are honoring release time. At present , your union officers had to add additional classes to their schedules, making it significantly harder for them to represent you. We are here to stay and are happy to do the union’s work to defend our rights and make all of our lives better, but the university’s intransigence and insistence that their reading of the law is uniquely correct is creating unnecessary hardships and may mean that our union’s bargaining and contract enforcement/grievance activities will be done during whatever “free time” your faculty union volunteers can spare, and representational activities might not receive all the attention and due diligence that they need.
Finally,[3] the BOT team passed us an MOA regarding Winter Break, and we agreed to sign it.
It is an honor to bargain on your behalf, and we always welcome your feedback and presence at our sessions. Please come to bargaining Wednesday this coming week from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM in the Training Center to show your support and let the BOT team know we mean business!
In solidarity,Jack Fiorito on Behalf of the UFF-FSU Faculty Bargaining Team