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Dear colleagues,
Your UFF-FSU bargaining team met with the FSU BoT team last Friday, September 4 and our session was productive, moving substantially toward agreement.
Most consequentially, both sides came to tentative agreement on our brand-new Article 32 on Artificial Intelligence Use. This is the first such contract article in Florida’s higher education system (possibly the first anywhere in Florida) and it marks our first completely new contract article in decades. Article 32 includes the following faculty and administrative rights and responsibilities:
- To use or not to use AI tools in our work;
- To acknowledge the importance of protecting faculty intellectual property against unauthorized AI entrainment;
- To provide faculty training in AI tools;
- To include faculty “from a range of disciplines” in making decisions regarding university AI oversight;
- To acknowledge the faculty’s and administration’s mutual interest in maintaining human-led instruction;
- To maintain the faculty’s and administration’s ultimate authority over curriculum;
- To acknowledge and respect our diverse fields’ ethical, legal, and professional standards;
- To mutually enforce rules against plagiarism and other forms of cheating using AI; and
- To protect faculty against almost all forms of AI-driven electronic monitoring.
Does it accomplish everything we set out to do? Of course not, but it is truly remarkable for what we did achieve through collective bargaining. And it now gives us a set of rights that we can continue to hone and improve in future bargaining seasons.
We also made progress in salary negotiations. The BoT team came up a bit on offers for both this year and for next year (as a two-year package) and they offered trigger language that would reopen salary bargaining next year if FSU receives a substantially higher legislative allotment of unrestricted E&G funds than it did this year. That language goes a long way towards allaying our fear that if we settle for a low two-year salary offer this year, we might be missing out on the possibility for a substantially larger raise next year. The administration repeatedly asserted their interest in raising faculty salaries if there is money allotted to do so. (And they are right that this year’s and last year’s legislative allotments have been substantially smaller than in 2023 and 2024, when we were able to negotiate larger raises.) We softened our own trigger language from asking for parity with raises for upper administrators to asking for automatic reopening of bargaining should FSU vice presidents receive larger raises than we do. The following chart shows the progress during Friday’s session, listing only points where the parties are not yet in accord.
| This year | BOT 1 | UFF 1 | BOT 2 |
| Performance (ATB) | 0 | 1.0% | 1.0% |
| Dept. Merit | 1.0% | 0 | 0.25% |
| Performance Bonus | $1,200 | 3.0% Dept. Merit | $1,200 |
| Next year | |||
| Performance | 0 | 1.5% | 0 |
| Dept. Merit | 1.5% | 0 | 1.5% |
| Bonus | 0.5% | 2.5% Dept. Merit | $1,000 |
| Trigger to renegotiate in 2027 | $25M unrestricted E&G | $20M unrestricted E&G | $22.5M unrestricted E&G |
| Trigger based upon VP salaries | None | Re-open bargaining either year. | None |
There is still unfortunately one very major sticking point in reaching final agreement and it has to do with the FSU administration’s interpretation of SB 1296, which went into effect in July. As I’ve reported before, they believe that it necessitates UFF service to complete vanish from faculty AORs. The administrations’ legal interpretation would require those of us who bargain and who enforce the contract to do so above and beyond a full load of teaching, research, and other forms of service. At least five other universities in Florida have interpreted this (poorly written) law as allowing the continuation of status quo. We proposed a Memorandum of Understanding that would acknowledge our (lawyers’) different legal interpretations while continuing status quo unless and until a court or the Public Employees Relations Council ruled one way or the other. We believe that allowing a third-party to rule on this conflict offers a clear path toward reaching agreement on the contract as a whole, without either side ceding the right to mount legal challenges to anti-union legislation that (even according to legislative staffers) appears to run afoul of Florida’s own constitution.
Our next bargaining session will be this Wednesday (tomorrow) from 2:00–5:00. We invite you to attend in person (preferably!) or to stream over Zoom. And we hope that you will join UFF-FSU. Who else fights for sensible AI policies and bargains tirelessly to raise your salary?
Michael Buchler, on behalf of your UFF-FSU Bargaining Team
Michael Buchler
Professor of Music Theory
Florida State University College of Music
Chief Negotiator, United Faculty of Florida–FSU Chapter