Category Archives: APSCUF

by | January 22, 2017 · 5:09 pm

“How can I help?”

As we come back from the break that (I hope) allowed us to recover after last semester’s intensity, I think it’s important for us as a union to reconnect to that feeling we had in mid-October–especially the Friday the strike ended. Those last couple of hours, when we knew, we could feel in our bones that it was almost over, were as powerful as anything I’ve ever been part of.

Among many important realizations I’ve come to as I’ve been able to think carefully about the strike, here’s the one I want to highlight the most given the turbulent political scene we’re walking back into–

During the strike, I heard virtually nobody say, “The union needs to _____.” Instead, I heard dozens of people ask, “How can I help?”

If you think the union should be doing something we aren’t, then let’s talk about how to make it happen. The likelihood of success, as we learned in October, goes up exponentially when we do the work together.

So next time you feel yourself starting to tell “the union” what “they” should do, take just a second before you do and ask, “How can I help do that?” Your odds of seeing positive results go up. The sense that we’re all working together gets maintained. The number of people participating in the daily practices of being a union goes up.

Remember what it felt like when we won? We can’t feel exactly like that all the time, but we can be in solidarity, feel the trust and care we showed on the lines, all the time. Ask what you can do to help. Then do it.

 

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Strike, strike preparations, Uncategorized, Unions

by | October 28, 2016 · 10:29 am

We didn’t sing the Helplessness Blues – we were an advocating machine!

Fleet Foxes has a song that just about sums up my feelings about the strike. We have all been taught that we are “something unique”, and we are. But we are also part of something beyond ourselves, and this year, it was the mighty, mighty union, APSCUF.

What strikes me now is that as chapter president, I was indeed a “cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” From the students and faculty who worked on campus to the 14-campus group we were all part of, from my local executive council and our officers and strike team up to the state leadership, it was awe-inspiring to be in the middle of a movement. Let’s not forget that.

So, enjoy this song. It may not be your stylistic cup of tea, but it’s mighty inspiring.

Solidarity forever!

Mark

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Communities, Contingent faculty, Contract Negotiations, Higher Ed history, liberal arts, lobbying, Public education, Public employee unions, Teacher unions, Tenure, Unions, VoteSmart.org, West Chester University

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by | October 22, 2016 · 9:54 pm

Reflecting on the Strike

Spent much of today reading and writing about strike experiences with APSCUF siblings on Facebook. This piece was in an email, and it’s said so beautifully that I wanted to share it with everybody who reads the blog. What the writer doesn’t tell you is how willingly she gave hour after hour after hour doing any and everything that I or anyone else asked, and knowing what needed doing even when nobody else did.

With permission from Tina Chiarelli-Helminiak:

Over the past week, I had the great opportunity to witness amazing union solidarity, in addition to superb community organizing.  I am in awe of the support from our students, their parents, and so many others. 
I also had a unique vantage point as I may be the only person who visited every picket site on the West Chester campus as well as the Philadelphia campus location.  Each picket site had its own personality!  From the street party in Philly to the athletic training on South campus, to the few but strong on Carter Drive, to the festival in front of Philips to the jokesters on New St (how many PhDs does it take to set up an EZ-Up?!?).  I am so very fortunate to have served as witness to these scenes.
The preparations leading up to and the three days on strike provided us, as educators, with the opportunity to model for our students what it looks like to advocate for social and economic justice and workers’ rights.  We put into practice some of the very skills we attempt to teach in the classroom.  We also modeled the importance for advocating for ourselves.  Yet, this opportunity was more than anything that I, personally, could have taught my students inside the classroom.
During our 3 days on strike I missed classes, office hours, meetings, and a whole lot of sleep.  But during our 67 hours on strike I gained so much more!  I have never been more proud to be an alumnus and faculty member of the PA state system.  I am even more committed to my union. 
So, in sum, thank you for being a part of this process.  I am forever your colleagues, your fan, your friend, and your union sister.
🙂 Tina Chiarelli-Helminiak, MSW, PhD
 Assistant Professor
 Graduate Social Work Department
Proud product of public education from HeadStart to PhD

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Contract Negotiations, Strike, Uncategorized

by | October 16, 2016 · 1:08 pm

Staying Focused

Like many of you, I saw late yesterday (or early this morning, depending on how avidly you follow your email/social media) the news that APSCUF and the State System have agreed to a news embargo. I want very much to find that a hopeful sign.

On the other hand, the reality is that in terms of the likelihood of a Wednesday strike declaration, we don’t know anything we didn’t know yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that.

We can hope that the sides are making progress quickly enough to avoid a strike declaration, but we cannot let that hope make us lose our resolve to be on the lines Wednesday morning if that’s what our leadership decides.

Stay focused, y’all, and trust the process.

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by | October 11, 2016 · 12:57 pm

Good News from Chicago

In my inbox this morning–

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Congratulations to CTU for reaching a tentative agreement with a School Board that has been under the control of a career politician whose ideas about education are dangerously misinformed (foreshadowing, anyone?).

As we head into our last week of preparations for the looming strike set to begin October 19, the CTU settlement offers two important lessons for us.

  1. We’re fighting for quality, not for our personal enrichment or greed. The 2012 CTU strike provided the model by which teacher unions at all levels win strikes–by being clear about what’s at stake. Yes, our compensation matters to us, and we have to fight back against the “greedy teacher” trope, but the heart of the matter is our ability to work as professionals without having to fight off the wrong-headed (if not more insidiously dishonest) proposals of educational deformers who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about–and who don’t have to live the consequences of their bad thinking. In Chicago, those proposals were for increased class sizes, reduced funding for arts and even physical education, and a wide array of union-busting moves designed to de-professionalize teaching including evaluation regimens that are so meaningless it’s hard even to explain why the math is wrong and tons of similar examples.
  2. It’s possible to face down politicos whose agenda is anti-public-education if we stand strong against them. In Chicago, it’s Rahm Emanuel, a quasi-liberal education deform advocate who was elected Mayor in 2011. His (anti-) education agenda is well-documented. Obviously, in PA it’s Chancellor Brogan, who (and this may be the nicest thing I ever say about him) at least has a couple of years of classroom (sure, it’s fifth-grade, not college, but still) experience on his resumé. But his ideas about how to “reform” the state system are equally reckless and dangerous, and like Emanuel, he has no real stake in the outcome except how the narrative serves his political ambitions.

And that’s why, as we approach October 19, we must remember these two simple points.

We know more about what our students and our system needs to succeed than somebody who has never done our job or even thought much about it.

We’re a lot more committed to the success and well-being of our students and our system than the person who’s letting tax payers give him $345,000/year to do nothing that discernibly helps anyone in the system learn or teach more successfully. 

Just being right isn’t enough. Neither is being convinced that we’re right. We have to stand together, on picket lines if that’s what it comes to–and send the message loud and clear that we’re not greedy or lazy, and we’re not “teaching machines”; we’re hard-working people who know what we’re doing, and what the Chancellor wants is wrong for everyone who can’t jump ship whenever he feels like it. We have to push back against a politician who knows almost nothing about higher education so he doesn’t get to sell out 100,000 students, 6000 faculty/coaches, and thousands more staff and workers, for his personal political ambitions.

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Privatization, strike preparations, Teacher unions, Uncategorized

by | October 7, 2016 · 3:49 pm

A Friend and Union Brother’s Letter to the Chancellor on Our Behalf

Thanks to friend, colleague, and union brother Michael Hill (Department of English, Henry Ford Community College; Negotiations Team member, HFCC-FT, AFT Local 1650) for this letter to our Chancellor.

Chancellor Brogan:

I am writing to encourage you to instruct your team to negotiate in good faith with your faculty. As one of the negotiators for our faculty union, I can tell you that faculty enter into negotiations earnestly with the intention of getting back to their real jobs of teaching and researching. Negotiations are necessary so that faculty can protect their institutions, protect student learning and protect the integrity of the professoriate, but they are a drain on the real work we do. It is especially disheartening when negotiations turn negative and when the negotiating team for administration becomes intransigent and flippant about the future of the higher education enterprise.

Please know that faculty and students across the nation are watching your negotiations with concern and we hope to be able to continue to respect the fine tradition of higher education in your state. Those of us who care about higher education implore you to negotiate and work out a fair settlement before your office does serious damage to your schools.
Sincerely,
Michael D. Hill

 

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Filed under AFT, APSCUF, Contract Negotiations, Uncategorized

by | October 7, 2016 · 3:13 pm

An Open Letter to Chancellor Brogan

Two weeks ago today, APSCUF President Ken Mash announced publicly that without a contract settlement, our union will go on strike October 19. During the press conference, President Mash made the point that among other misrepresentations going from the Chancellor’s Office to students and the press was a claim that we had rejected negotiating dates.

I wasn’t happy about the distortion and dashed off a letter to the Chancellor, to which I never received a response–not even the canned form letter other people received for writing their own letters to him. So I thought I’d post it here, to see if maybe that encourages some consideration his part. Feel free to share around if you like it, and to ignore it if you don’t.

Chancellor Brogan:

I write as a West Chester faculty member and, as you’d find out soon enough if you care, a member of APSCUF’s Mobilization Committee that’s working to prepare our faculty in the event that a strike becomes necessary.

Although I’m doing everything I can to make sure our faculty are prepared to strike, I still very much hope a strike doesn’t come to pass. When we say, as President Mash did this morning during his press conference, that it’s a last resort, we really mean it. Unfortunately, what we hear coming from your office is making it difficult for even the most optimistic of us to remain that way. In particular, although this sounds like a trivial detail, it was deeply disheartening to learn this morning that our team had proposed five dates for negotiations sessions to your team, and had gotten no response, while your team proposed dates they already knew were unavailable. That problem became even worse when somebody told the press our side “was refusing to negotiate” as a result. That’s incredibly disrespectful.

The substance of the contract issues aside, I hope you can understand why news like that is very unsettling. Our negotiations team–our whole union–is committed to settling a fair contract, and when your team shows what seems like so little regard for even the simplest details, it’s hard for us to believe that your people are as engaged in the process as we need them to be.

Even though roughly a year and a half of meetings and discussions haven’t resolved the contract issues, most of us believe three and a half weeks of genuine negotiating could end this. But it can’t while your team is proposing sessions on days they already know can’t happen, refusing to respond to requests for others, and blaming us for being unwilling. 

As a whole, the faculty are deeply committed to the students and the institutions that make up the system. We’ve heard you acknowledge this more than once over the years, for which we’re grateful. Now we just need the small group of people you send into the negotiating sessions to act like they understand it too.

In hopefulness,

Seth Kahn, PhD

Department of English

West Chester University

 

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Filed under APSCUF, Contract Negotiations, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Uncategorized

by | September 28, 2016 · 6:23 pm

Solidarity is something we do, not just something we say

 

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Three weeks out from what would be the first-ever strike in APSCUF history, it’s high time to make sure every member of this union understands two very simple concepts–

We win this struggle for the integrity of our system, fairness for our students and for us by being united; the more united we are, and the more visible that is, the sooner we win and the better the results.

The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike.

As our strike preparations pick up pace, we must work to express our solidarity as loudly and often as possible, and work together to solve logistical and technical problems that would be new to many of us if we have to strike.

In more concrete terms:

  • Read your off-campus email.
  • When your department representatives tell you that you’re expected to sign up for picket duty, do it. We’ll have plenty of information regarding logistics (parking, rules, and so on) ready for you before you need it.
  • If you can’t picket for health or other reasons, let us know that as soon as possible so you can do something else to support the people on the lines.
  • Get on the bus to Harrisburg on October 6 to let the Chancellor know, directly, that he’s doing it wrong and needs to make it right. [If you haven’t already, RSVP to Monika <mmayer@apscuf.org>]. There are still a few seats available, and don’t make it somebody else’s job to fill them.
  • When an adjunct or untenured junior faculty member tells you they’re afraid to walk the line because they fear retaliation, tell them they’re safer being on the line (or serving in a support role) than at home because that lets us document the retaliation.
  • When a faculty member says “Oh, this is all the same old stuff, so there’s no reason to take it seriously,” answer them. The negotiations team has been doing everything in its power to reach a settlement for more than 450 days, and they need OUR HELP to finish it.
  • Share materials–the FAQs and factsheets–with students [Follow the rules, which you’ve gotten via email–contact me directly if you didn’t for some reason]. Answer their questions [Again, follow the rules!] as candidly as you can. When you talk to students, don’t soft-pedal the gravity of the situation because you’re worried about upsetting them. This situation sucks for everybody, but protecting them from the truth helps nobody.

This list could (and will) get longer as we continue to approach the deadline and PASSHE continues not to bargain seriously. You’ll learn more about how to prepare, about what happens during an actual strike, and other kinds of practical questions we know many of you have (because we’ve been answering them for months–yes, keep asking them!).

But from now until there’s a ratified contract, acting in concert, doing everything we can to be united and together, is our number one responsibility to our union. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask questions or offer ideas. It does mean that sometimes we might not like the answers, and that’s not a reason to bail out.

One last point: for months, many of us have said the best way to prevent a strike is to be fully prepared for one. Now, I want to make two different claims: (1) the best way to win a fair contract for our students and for us to be ready to strike if we need to, and to do it right if that’s what it takes; and (2) if all the preparations turn out to be enough pressure that we don’t actually have to strike, we’ll have the rest of our working lives together to look back at this moment and laugh at how close we came.

 

 

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Contract Negotiations, PASSHE, strike preparations, Uncategorized

by | September 22, 2016 · 12:48 pm

About Our Collective Mood

Those of you who know me won’t be surprised that I’m furious this morning about the turn of events in our negotiations with PASSHE. My mood isn’t improved by the press coverage (for example, see this story on PennLive from last night, which makes a couple of very misleading claims and gives a largely open microphone to PASSHE’s spokesperson).

So yeah, I’m mad. Like many of us, I hoped the negotiating sessions over the last week represented a breakthrough–at least to the extent that they were happening, finally–and to hear that PASSHE tanked them after days of hard work doesn’t sit well (for a more thorough articulation of what broke down, read Kevin Mahoney’s piece on today’s Raging Chicken Press) .

However, anger by itself accomplishes very little. So it’s important for us as a campus and as a union to try to focus our reaction a little differently. Does PASSHE deserve our ire? Sure. But what they deserve even more is to face the steady, clear resolve of a faculty who can say two things with confidence:

  1. We know our students, our campuses, our colleagues, and quite frankly the national higher education landscape better than management does, which means that their claims to be speaking on anyone’s behalf but their own are largely empty.
  2. Nobody deserves to get yanked around by their management the way we are right now, and if we have to strike to make that point loudly enough for them to hear it, then that’s what we have to do.

We’ve been clear since the beginning of the negotiating cycle that we don’t want to strike. Yesterday, I was ready to do it if our leadership calls it; today I’m more so. Whatever PASSHE is playing at, whether they’re really pushing us to strike or just being intransigent, we all need to hear this much: be ready, and if you weren’t sure we really meant it, WE REALLY MEAN IT!

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Contract Negotiations, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Uncategorized

by | September 14, 2016 · 12:21 pm

Friendly reminder: Adjunct faculty are always members of the bargaining unit, and often full members of the union

In the wake of Monday’s announcement that the membership overwhelmingly voted in favor of strike authorization, which is precisely what we needed to do in order to signal PASSHE that our patience is pretty well taxed, this seems like a good time to follow that good news up with a nudge that I REALLY wish we didn’t have to keep doing.

While our CBA is one of the two best (if not the best) in the country in terms of its provisions for adjunct/non-tenure-track faculty, the general membership (by which I mean US, the rank and file) is lagging behind in terms of coming to grips with the fact that our adjunct faculty are just as much a part of the bargaining unit, and thus the union, as any tenured/tenure-track (T/TT) faculty member is.

Two things are prompting me to say this:

  1. During our Strike Authorization voting last week, I heard at least half a dozen times, either first-hand or via faculty who were staffing the voting stations, that T/TT faculty were “surprised” adjunct faculty were allowed to vote. And in one case, when I responded, “Of course they are, if they’re full members. Why wouldn’t they be,” the person said, “They can be full members?!?” I didn’t actually cry, but I almost did.
  2. A friend who is an adjunct faculty member and long-time APSCUF member (I’m not going to identify them any more specifically than that unless they volunteer it themselves) said semi-publicly this morning that they really wish APSCUF members would stop “Talk[ing] about us like we’re the help and don’t have ears.”

Those of us who are T/TT faculty do this all too often. Not every one of us every time, but as a collective, we all too often simply ignore our own members, or take them for granted. And we do it oftentimes for the exact reasons that we need to be most vocally supportive of our adjunct sisters and brothers–because their working conditions are worse than ours, their schedules often keep them from interacting socially and professionally with us, the list goes on and on.

So, again (and again, and again): our adjunct faculty are brothers and sisters, and we’re doing it wrong (very profoundly wrong) every single time we forget that.

 

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Contingent faculty