Welcome
to the UFF-FGCU Web
Site
Next Event:
UFF Chapter
Meeting - Informal
February 24
Lunch Provided
SRHM 111
Later this semester:
UFF Chapter
Meeting - Formal
March 16
Lunch Provided
Room TBD
April 8
3:00 pm – 5:00
pm
Wine & Hors
d’Oeuvres
Room TBD
Donate to the United Faculty of Florida's Political Agenda Committee. Read more...
With new faculty arriving at FGCU and others leaving, our chapter is under 50% membership. Please take a few minutes to share the importance of having a strong faculty voice in governance with your colleagues. Contact Sheila Bolduc-Simpson (sbolduc@fgcu.edu) for more information. Download the membership form.
Our Future as Faculty: Ratified Agreement Honors Our Commitment
Dear Colleagues:
Another school year starts on the heels of a summer that flew by. I hope you found yours restful, productive and energizing as you embark on this new year which promises to be exciting and challenging. UFF returns to campus this year with more than half of the faculty as members (we are the second largest proportion unit in the state) and having just completed negotiations that averted impasse and achieved, among other things, a bonus and raise for continuing unit employees. The work that lies ahead this year is to fully negotiate a new three year agreement that continues to strengthen faculty rights and protections and partners with the University to support our growth in numbers and stature.
After
15
months of negotiation, the United Faculty of Florida – Florida Gulf
Coast
University Chapter (UFF) and University Administration reached a
tentative
agreement on issues that led to impasse. As a result, impasse hearings
were cancelled. The University
Board of Trustees approved the contract at their Sepember 21st meeting
(download the contract). The
agreement includes key gains for faculty consistent with the values
outlined below:
- The tentative agreement honors FGCU’s commitment to shared governance.
Protecting the legal rights of faculty to bargain the
terms and conditions of employment was a very high priority for faculty
in bargaining this year. UFF protected these rights in two ways. First,
we now have authority in the contract to hold the administration
accountable if faculty members are not regularly and meaningfully
consulted throughout the coming year on issues related to terms and
conditions of employment, including those not explicitly stated in the
contract. Second, the agreement
strengthens faculty rights to bargain over the impact of any
administrative regulation or policy that affects us. Faculty will
assist the administration through UFF and in conjunction with the
Faculty Senate to make new policies useful and effective.
- The tentative agreement honors our commitment to
provide high quality education by compensating faculty with a $1,000
The tentative agreement honors our
commitment to provide high quality education by compensating
faculty with a $1,000 one-time performance bonus effective
October 1, 2010, and a 2% faculty raise effective January 1, 2011. The agreement specifies that Administration
and UFF will jointly hire an
independent, outside consultant to complete a salary compression and
inversion study.
What’s next?
In
February 2011,
UFF and
Administration will begin negotiating the entire Collective Bargaining
Agreement article-by-article, line-by-line in order to complete an
agreement
covering 2011-2014. There is hard work ahead in this process and UFF
remains
committed to ensuring that FGCU honors
our commitment, particularly in the following areas.
- UFF is committed to
negotiating the removal of salary inequities in our colleges and
departments (inversion and compression) and to
instituting mechanisms to stop this from becoming a large issue again. The study will give us the tools we need to
identify the problem and strategies to ameliorate that which has been
allowed to develop. Once these results are
available, we can work with Administration to codify plans in the next
contract.
- UFF is committed to
addressing the need for domestic partner benefits. A proposal to
address these benefits is another high priority for next year’s
negotiations. The plan is to set up a task force to research the
methods and costs associated with domestic partner benefits.
- UFF is committed to
negotiating appropriate compensation and recognition for all work,
such as advising, mentoring, and supervising undergraduate and graduate
students in internships, senior research projects, overloads, directed
and independent studies, and graduate studies. UFF
will host an open forum this fall to explore workload issues. This forum may lead to the formation of a task
force, similar to the one related to domestic partner benefits, to help
research and develop solutions to workload issues.
This most recent agreement is a testament to the spirit of collaboration among faculty. We are especially grateful for the support of new members who helped us achieve majority membership at a critical moment and for all members who helped us write messages, attend bargaining sessions, raise issues with colleagues, and inform us about what is important to them so that we can represent all areas of faculty concern.
The
voice of the faculty union is strong and it is critical
that it becomes stronger with a larger and larger majority. More voices
and
hands increase our chances of success. Please join, get active, and
help
realize our vision of a quality University that honors our commitment
and a
quality education for the people of