News

Dear colleagues, The collective bargaining session on Wednesday, September 16 between your UFF faculty bargaining team and the Board of Trustees’ team was productive, but relatively brief and limited in scope. (Perhaps only in collective bargaining would we describe a 2+ hour meeting as “brief!”) Both teams went back and forth on Article 3 (UFF Rights), which has become something of a lynchpin toward achieving final settlement.  In short, our lawyers and the BOT’s lawyers have very different readings on the new law (SB 1296) that went into effect in July and we are trying to come to a reasonable compromise. The central issue is that bargaining takes a great

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:   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    

Dear colleagues, On Friday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that the Board of Trustees has awarded President McCullough an 8% raise, boosting his salary to approximately $1.35M. They also added a $600,000 bonus if he serves out his contract. The UFF-FSU chapter congratulations him on his good fortune and we are glad to continue working with him as our President. In seemingly unrelated news, at our latest bargaining session this past Wednesday, August 26, the Board of Trustees offered faculty a two-year salary contract, where we would receive an average 1% raise in departmental merit and a $1,000 bonus this year, and a 1.25% raise in departmental merit and a 0.5% bonus next year. We were also told that

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

Dear Colleagues, Your UFF-FSU bargaining team met with the representatives from FSU’s Board of Trustees on Wednesday, August 12 and we had a productive session that moved us closer to agreement, though there are still some considerable gulfs between the two teams’ proposals. This is just a brief summary, but I would encourage you to click on the links and read the article drafts for yourself. As always, we welcome your comments! Indeed, a bit later, we especially would like to hear your views about the latest salary proposals. Good news! The BOT team began by agreeing to sign a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that ensures faculty promotion raises (12% and 15%)

Dear Colleagues, During our last bargaining session on July 29th, the UFF-FSU team presented a new salary proposal that includes an ‘Administrative Parity’ clause (see below). The BOT Bargaining Team ended the bargaining session somewhat abruptly after we submitted this proposal and they did not accept our request to meet on August 5. However, the BOT team has now proposed a bargaining session at 1:30 pm on August 12 and we look forward to a productive dialog.  Our Salary Proposals As is the nature of negotiations, UFF has sought accord by steadily moving toward a financial compromise with Board, reducing the total cost of our economic package by millions of

Dear FSU Colleagues, The BOT and UFF-FSU teams met July 22 and discussed Article 23 (Salaries), Article 17 (Leaves), Article 32 (Artificial Intelligence), and Article 10 (Performance Evaluations) and the corresponding Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) for the pilot program for In-unit Chair Reviews. We also presented a new MOA that would, if the BOT team agrees, implement promotion raises, sustained performance increases, and Post-Tenure Review increases and bonuses on time for the new semester as we continue to bargain. A summary of each discussion can be found below. Regarding Article 23 (Salaries), the UFF team asked numerous questions about the budget and were told once again that though faculty are

Dear FSU Colleagues, The FSU Board of Trustees (BOT) and United Faculty of Florida FSU (UFF-FSU) bargaining teams resumed negotiations for the 2026-2027 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) on Wednesday, July 15.  The negotiators were joined by several additional FSU faculty members in person and via Zoom.  The presence of these observers was greatly appreciated by our faculty bargaining team.  Thank you! Issues discussed included a memorandum of agreement (MOA) establishing a pilot program to reward department chairs for their administrative contributions, artificial intelligence (AI), leaves, UFF-FSU rights, and salaries. Bargaining team co-chair Jennifer Proffitt and the UFF-FSU team presented a counter-proposal on the MOA regarding administrative service contributions and evaluations. 

Dear FSU Colleagues, Thank you to our many faculty colleagues who attended bargaining in person and online on July 1. Your presence in the bargaining room truly made a huge difference, and we hope that the show of support will continue at the next bargaining session, scheduled for July 15 from 2-5pm (location to be determined). This update is a bit long, but there’s a lot to consider. The short version is the teams discussed Salaries, Leaves, Artificial Intelligence, and In-Unit Chair Reviews. Let’s start with salaries. The BOT team presented their salary counter proposal, and this time offered a one-time Performance Bonus of 1%. This is unacceptable, especially in today’s economy with

Dear Colleagues, The June 24 bargaining session between your UFF team and the Board of Trustees was, to say the least, alarming. After seven weeks of bargaining, the BOT team finally responded to our proposals for salary (Art. 23), leaves (Art. 17), and AI Use (Art. 32). For next year’s salary increases, they offered us a grand total of… nothing! No across-the-board raise (= performance merit), no departmental merit, no deans’ merit, and no market-equity raises. They did propose continuing previous years’ raises for promotion, sustained performance for specialized faculty (SPI), and Post-Tenure Review (PTR)—important raises, but ones that only affect a small percentage of faculty in a given year. If you

Dear FSU Colleagues, Our UFF bargaining team, which includes both specialized and general faculty members from across campus, works diligently to negotiate the rights outlined in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), but if we do not have at least 60% membership density in early July, we will lose our right to bargain salaries, evaluations, tenure and promotion protections, workloads, benefits, and so much more. Please join now! And if you’re a member, thank you for your support, and please talk to your colleagues about the importance of having a union, a CBA, and contract enforcement. On June 17, we signed a Memorandum of Agreement to implement three additional paid summer holidays: the Juneteenth

Dear colleagues, Your UFF-FSU Bargaining Team and the representatives of FSU’s Board of Trustees (BOT) met on June 3 for the latest round of negotiations. The administration has not yet responded to our initial article drafts on Salary (Article 23), Leaves (Article 17), or Artificial Intelligence Use (Article 32), so the breadth of negotiations was quite limited. What we did discuss ranged from weird to galling. Weird: as I mentioned last week, the BOT team opened Article 10 (Evaluations) to provide a review every five years for in-unit administrators (e.g., department chairs) who are members of the faculty, but have been prohibited by the BOG and the BOT from going through