This poster, with my annotations, comes from the Faculty Forward Facebook page. CLICK IMAGE FOR FULL SIZE
….Matthew 7:16
The SEIU brings with it an agenda that few faculty are likely to accept and that certainly will turn off most legislators.
The post on the left shows the problem . The organizations on this post are no more likely to get what the UW faculty wants from the legislature than an association with the far right would bring largesse from Jeff Bezos. The ISO is a far left organization that argues for a government takeover of Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast. The “SUPER” organization is devoted to the Hamas platform of replacing Israel with an Islamic state.
The UW faculty has real reasons to be unhappy. While there is great support for our new president, Ana Mari Cauce, the previous administrations have run rough shod over the faculty, eroding the role of the Faculty Senate to the point that few take it seriously.
The most immediate issue, however, is not the regular faculty. Rather it is the “contingent” faculty, the instructors and lecturers who do a huge part of our teaching, cutting costs while making the UW more competitive with a state college than with the research peers that led to our being ranked #4 amongst all great universities in a recent Reuters report.
These faculty, these teachers are being paid far below the wage recently negotiated by the Seattle Teachers. PhD faculty with degrees in math or English are being paid wages often below the poverty level. The UW chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) has turned to SEIU to campaign for a faculty union.
The result is a new organization called Faculty Forward. Faculty Forward is part of a national effort by the SEIU to organize campuses across the US.
The reasons for UW Faculty Forward are 3:
1. SEIU has huge amounts of money and staff to devote to this effort. This would be the first major University campus to be organized by SEIU.
2. Legislators have told faculty that we have no voice in Olympia and that the only way to be heard is by having a union.
3. The Faculty Senate has virtually no resources of its own and is not seen by Olympia as speaking for the faculty.
So, a part of the faculty, largely congruent with the leadership of the AAUP chapter, has created Faculty Forward and allied itself with the SEIU to campaign for a union.
The easiest way to understand the huge resources the SEIU has for this effort is to look at the campaign by Kshama Sawant as a Seattle City Councilor for District 3 (Capital Hill, Madison Park, the Central Area).
Sawant is best known for her campaign to get a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. For many of us that is a huge plus and obviously a good example for how we need to support the contingent faculty. I, however, now oppose Sawant strongly because of her other issues, including classist attacks on small business owners and hyperbolic promises to levy billions of dollars of taxes on the 3,000 or so Seattleites who fit her definition of the most rich,
My opinion is not all that important, however the opinions of the legislators and the citizens of this state are crucial to the UW. Whatever you or I may think of her, Sawant has run previously against Frank Chopp, the Speaker of the Washington State House. Her current campaign has gotten 1oo’s of thousands of dollars, of largely off the books support from SEIU and she is rumored to be planning to run against Mayor Murray or Representative McDermott if she can win the current race as a city councilor.
I support a union but only see the SEIU approach as a way of frightening our fellow citizens.