UFF-FSU Bargaining Update July 28, 2025

Dear colleagues,

Our latest bargaining session was held on Monday afternoon, July 28. Your UFF-FSU faculty team and the Board of Trustees’ team discussed salaries (Article 23), parental and family leaves (Article 17), and inventions and works (Article 18).

We were disappointed with how things went. I thought that we were close to agreement on Article 18 and we only needed to add a very minor clarification that not all of the research we do can be claimed as university property. However, this proposed change was met with apparent disagreement by the BOT team. I thought that we had settled the matter of what is and isn’t an “independent effort,” but the reaction from the BOT tells me that I was naïve to imagine that we had come to agreement.

We had also believed that the administration genuinely wanted to improve FSU’s parental leave policy. Two of our faculty colleagues (one a FSU Faculty Development and Advancement Faculty Fellow, one a Lawton Professor) had studied leave policies at Top 20 and AAU universities and had reported on their findings to the Provost early last semester. We took this as a positive sign that the administration truly wanted us to update our policy, getting rid of the oft-ridiculed one-child policy and making leaves more flexible, including allowing both members of a faculty couple to take leaves for the same birth or adoption. I thought that perhaps they were just playing some kind of bargaining game, lowballing us in hopes of compromise. But they have now—three weeks in a row!—insisted on changing our six-month non-repeatable leave to an eight-week leave, repeatable every two years. Their big concession this time was that two faculty parents could both take a leave for the same child. What they have proposed—again and again and again—would only pay off for faculty who have at least four children, all spaced at least two years apart. We are clearly better off with status quo than adopting these HR-driven ideas for family planning.

Still, we tried again. Our latest proposal to the BOT specifies:

• All faculty may take up to two paid leaves total in their careers at FSU (up from the current one leave).
• Each leave can last up to 16 weeks.
• Two parents may take a paid leave for the same child.
• One of the two leaves may be used for a family leave, to take care of a sick or injured family member (making one leave available to faculty who choose to have fewer than two children).
• There would be no minimum duration between leaves.

This proposal would offer so much more flexibility for faculty and would make our policy commensurate with most AAU schools. And all it requires is for the administration to offer two more months of potential leave during a faculty member’s career.

Finally, we went back and forth on salaries. The good news is that the BOT’s position moved up 35%! The bad news is that last week they offered us a paltry total of 1% (folding together across-the-board and merit increases, and excluding promotion, SPI, PTR, and ADI increases, which go to relatively small numbers of faculty members), so this week they’re up to 1.35%. Still paltry, but perhaps approaching meager? According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index increased by 2.7% from June 2024–June 2025. We continue to believe that our performance raises (essentially across-the-board) should cover the cost of inflation. Otherwise, our salaries effectively diminish from year to year. Here are the details:

One more thing: the administration also wants to create a new category of awards: “Research Incentive Awards.” We certainly like faculty awards, and we are glad that the administration wants to standardize how various colleges offer rewards. However, we were astonished that they want us to give them a waiver to define the awards however they like without collective bargaining. The more questions we asked, the more mysteries surfaced. We hope that the administration will be willing to briefly describe the nature of the awards, their criteria, and who is eligible. What they’re asking us to approve is tantamount to a syllabus that just says “trust me” under grading policies.

Our next bargaining session will be tomorrow: Thursday, July 31 at 3:00 at the Training Center across from the Stadium.

Thanks for reading and thanks so much for your support! Though this week’s update might not be as cheery as any of us would like, the fact that we cleared the high bar of 60% membership is something to celebrate. Without collective bargaining, we would have to take whatever raise (or bonus!) the Trustees tossed in our tin cups, parents could see parental leaves diminished or eliminated, and inventors would lose any right to their independently made creations. If you haven’t already joined us, please do!

In solidarity,

Michael Buchler, on behalf of the UFF-FSU Collective Bargaining Team
Professor of Music Theory
FSU College of Music