Month: August 2006

This just in: EMU-AAUP President Howard Bunsis just sent an email out to everyone that says the strike is indeed a “go.” Given that this message was sent about an hour before the deadline, I guess this means a) neither side wants to blink, and b) I guess I’m going to lose the pool on the strike thing.

So, my “to do” list for tomorrow, more or less in this order:

• Go to the gym, mainly because the Washtenaw Country Rec Center has been closed for the last couple of weeks and I’m feeling the need to try to be a little less flabby.
• Picket. Probably with my son in tow, who will not be happy about it for all kind of reasons, not the lest of which is it’s his ninth birthday tomorrow.
• Make up for picketing with my son by going out for sushi. Yes, he likes sushi.
• Enjoy more birthday celebrations with both him and my wife.

And until the strike is over, which hopefully will be soon, I’ll basically repeat.

A colleague emailed me tonight and told me he liked what I was posting but he wasn’t as pro-union as I was on this one. Fair enough, though I guess I’d describe my feelings about the union as profoundly mixed for lots and lots of reasons that I’m not going to rehash now. But hey, that’s the way it is.

There will be a few folks who cross some lines and there will be a few folks who decide to participate in the orientation stuff this weekend. But if for some reason the administration thinks that the faculty union is going to cave now– after 30 or so years, after five or six strikes (most of which lasted only a few hours), after various ups and downs and everything else with this group– that’s just silly.

So, like I said, picketing at about 10 am; sushi at about noon.

Here’s what Geoff Larcom wrote/reported in today’s Ann Arbor News about the EMU-AAUP strike:

Faculty members at Eastern Michigan University voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to go on strike when classes start next week if they have not reached a new deal by the time their contract expires at midnight tonight.

(a bit later…)

Starting Friday, EMU faculty members will set up informational picket lines at selected locations throughout campus, with some spots being staffed around the clock.

I think this is flat-out wrong for a couple of reasons.

First off, the contract runs out at midnight on August 31. As part of the strike vote the other day, the collective decision seemed to be that the faculty have never worked without a contract before and we were not about to start now.

Second, and I guess this is what offends me more than anything else about this, faculty like me have been working already– in some cases, for several weeks. My department had its annual retreat today and all but a handful of faculty members were there. I have done little but work on school stuff since returning from vacation– doing stuff at school, sitting in on meetings, answering email inquiries from students and faculty, etc., etc. Any number of faculty will be working or not working during student orientation this weekend– more on that in a second. Not to mention the work that faculty traditionally do over the summer and most other times when they aren’t teaching or going to meetings, scholarship.

In other words, as anyone who is vaguely familiar with the way universities work (and you’d think that the guy who reports on EMU would know this), the work faculty do goes way beyond showing up and teaching classes. Just because I’m not in my office or performing in my classroom doesn’t mean I’m not working. Quite frankly, I sometimes wish that’s all it was.

So the pickets that will begin this evening (tomorrow morning for me) are not “informational.” They are the real thing. And if it comes to that (and I still think that’s an “if,” though I grow increasingly worried about my perhaps irrational optimism about all this), faculty know where to go and when to be there. Actually, the plans for the possible strike are surprisingly well organized.

Furthermore– and this is the real kicker here– faculty will be on strike during student move-in and during freshman orientation. This is a subject of some controversy, as I mentioned in my previous post, because there are some faculty who will be on strike during classes but who feel nonetheless to compelled to show up for the orientation events. I think this is a huge mistake, but at a minimum, I think it’s important that the administration and incoming students (and their parents) realize that the strike they are witnessing is not just “informational.”

But like I said, I still hope we settle.

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Update:
I just want to point out to all of the folks who have come across this page through a google search of some sort: I have several other entries about the strike, so you might want to visit my blog homepage for the most current news on the strike.

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If you do a search for “EMU strike” or “EMU-AAUP” or “EMU Faculty Strike” or something like that, this is one of the pages that comes up highest in the search. So, given that lots of people are doing that sort of search right now, I thought I’d post something this morning– something quick since I need to get ready for the annual English department retreat, which starts in about an hour and a half.

Anyway, there was a rally at noon yesterday that I thought was one of the more organized one of these affairs that I’ve participated in. Oh sure, it’s theater, mostly a photo-op for the media, but we did a pretty organized march around Welch Hall, there were some decent (although somewhat hard to hear) pep talks, and I think we were able to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish: Channel 4 and Channel 7 were both there (though I don’t know if that means we were on TV), and the area newspapers were there, too. So some decent coverage.

I marched around the building a couple of times; my wife Annette, with her not great knee situation, opted out and eventually went on to her physical therapy appointment. My son Will walked with me though. While practicing for the picket, I noticed Tom Venner standing off on the side and watching us. Venner is the chair of the Art department and is on the bargaining team for the administration.

Just as a slight tangent here: I really am at a loss as to why the administration is being the way that they are here, at least based on what I’ve heard. There was a guy from the national office for the AAUP at the rally, and he said there (and again on WEMU radio this morning) that the administration here has been a lot more difficult to deal with than any of the other universities in Michigan that have been negotiating contracts lately. What I don’t get about all this is I know some of the administrators at the table right now, and my experience has been that they are good people. I mean, Hartmut Hoft is a really good dean; Venner was the chair of the search for a new department head in English, and he did a great job with that. So as far as I can tell, some combination of things must be going on here. Maybe folks like Hoft and Venner are just tools for other administrators, which begs the question of why John Fallon and members fo the Board of Regents seem to be getting a “pass” by the media and the union on all this stuff. Maybe it’s just the lawyer, Jim Greene, who doesn’t exactly have a reputation of being a warm ‘n fuzzy guy interested in a fair compromise. Maybe Hoft and Venner aren’t such good guys after all. I don’t know. But if being an administrator means you either have to be tool or a jerk to the faculty, then that’s a job I’m not interested in.

The guy from the national AAUP said something else worth mentioning here: the faculty is not asking for anything more than what all of these other schools in Michigan have received in recent negotiations.

Anyway, the rally was a fine event, and then there was the actual meeting/discussion/vote on a strike. There was really no talk at all about whether or not we ought to go on strike, and this is kind of interesting to me. As far as I can recall, this has always been a topic of discussion before; there was a lot more division about whether or not we ought to walk out during the last contract negotiation.

The only real issue talked about was when to strike and how a strike would work. There was some concern about what it would look like for us to strike during the student orientation that starts this weekend. The argument went that if we didn’t go to the orientation sessions, then students would only hear about EMU from administrators and it wouldn’t look good for parents and incoming students to see faculty marching around with picket signs. Well, from my point of view, you’re either on strike or you’re not, and quite frankly, I want parents and incoming students to see faculty with picket signs. We’re not going on strike to make the administration and the institution look good; we’re going on strike to bring attention to the fact that the administration and institution are treating the faculty poorly. Maybe faculty picketing will make us look bad; but I happen to think it will make the administration look worse.

As I type this, EMU-AAUP President Howard Bunsis is actually on the radio talking about this stuff right now, actually. He’s talking about a number of the things I’ve already mentioned, so I don’t have a lot to add. One of the thing that I think Howard has learned well over the last couple of years is how to talk to the media. He stressed what I think is actually true fundamentally, that faculty want to be back to work and want to be teaching, and, simultaneously, he minimized what I see as the reality, which is there’s no way faculty are going to work without a contract and it sure looks like the administration isn’t willing to make a deal until they see if we really will strike.

So we’ll see what happens here. I guess I’ll find out at about midnight or so….

As reported in a variety of places, Ferris State’s faculty have settled a contract right before classes began. According to the linked story, “The tentative agreement calls for a four year contract. The faculty would get a 2% raise the first year, and a 3% raise each year after. As for the health benefits, the school pays 90% the first year, and anywhere between 80% and 90% the following years.”

So, there you have it.

The issues are different between here and there– the health care scheme seems quite a bit different, for example– but here’s what I predict:

• We will get a nearly identical deal– maybe an additional percentage in the first year, but around 3% for four years (though they’ve been talking about it being a five year deal for a while now).
• We will get this nearly identical deal at the last possible moment. The only thing up in the air is what exactly the “last possible moment” is going to be. Will it be when the contract runs out– which is September 1– or will it be right when classes start on September 5? We’ll see….