Anonymous email received by some UW faculty <[email protected]> On 10/16/2015 3:18 PM, Concerned Faculty wrote: We are UW faculty members and like you, we recently received emails about a union. So, we decided to research the implications of an SEIU faculty union. Here’s what we found: SEIU dues would be about $1100 per year for most faculty The most recent peer-reviewed evidence shows that there is no wage premium and perhaps a wage discount at public universities with a union (Ashraf and Williams, 2008, The effect of faculty unions on salaries: some recent evidence, Journal of Collective negotiations). You may wonder why the SEIU is willing to pay organizers to come to our classrooms, offices and homes to solicit signature cards. We found that this is because a faculty union would generate significant revenues for the SEIU: 20% of our union’s budget must be used for local unionizing efforts and a substantial portion is remitted to the International Union (SEIU bylaws). Only about a third of our money will go toward representing us. If the SEIU is certified, it is virtually impossible to decertify it. This choice is permanent. If we do not like the SEIU, we will not be able to go back or to switch to another union. The SEIU knows that if they are able to get us to be absorbed by them, they will have millions of dollars in dues from us every year, forever. That is why they are trying to hard to absorb us. If the SEIU gets enough signature cards, the UW will be forced to release ALL of our home addresses and contact information to the SEIU. If you do not support the release of everyone’s private contact information, you have the right to revoke your signature of support before the SEIU submits the cards to Washington PERC. Our Faculty Senate, which has both tenure-track and non-tenure track faulty, is close to finalizing a new salary policy with regular, predictable raises and clear promotion paths for all faculty. In summary, there appears to be no clear benefit to being absorbed by the SEIU and substantial risks and costs.
The anonymity of the email at the left aside , I think the content is accurate and raises the issue of SEIU and how it uses the dues as well as the weakness of the UW’s concept of shared governance.
1. I oppose the SEIU because it is much more than a union of workers, it is a political party that spends its money on local political activities including the current effort to elect Kshama Sawant.
Red baiting aside, I am not a “socialist” as defined by Sawant or by the SEIU. I doubt such views represent a large faction of UW faculty. Even if they did, an association with such a union would undermine our relationship with the people of this state.2. As for shared governance, it seems to me that this would be a great time to propose an overhaul of the Faculty Senate. The concept of “shared governance” has eroded to the point of being largely meaningless.
Here are a few facts any of you can check out:
1. Unlike any union, the Senate has minimal staff and is not allowed to employ attorneys. This hobbling of the Senate is even true when the matter is legal contention between the UW (with staffs of attorneys employed under covers that escape the state law requiring that only the AG represent the UW.)
A good example of how this effects individual faculty, is this story by Sharona Gordon. Under the Code, Professor Gordon SHOULD have gone to the Secretary of the Faculty, a faculty member, rather than to the Ombudsman, an employee of the UW Office of Risk Management. Her story is one I have suffered myself when a UW vice provost threatened to remove my tenure and to investigate my grants unless I agreed to perjure myself. My wife and I hired an attorney to handle this. That cost us $15,000. We won only after the VP slandered me with a wide-spread emailing.
The Senate needs money to hire its own legal staff.
2. The Faculty Code is no longer a separate document. Instead it has been merged with rules made up ad hoc by the administration. Obviously a Union would never stand for its contract’s being determined by the bosses.
As a result, admins freely override the code, creating their own ethics codes (with exceptions for admins). Faculty have been fired here by a unilateral decision of the admin . Our former provost, Phyllis Wise, brought these UW practices to her job as Chancellor of the University of Illinois and promptly withdrew tenure for Stephen Salaita with NO legal process.
As one example, we once had a preamble that described faculty responsibilities and rights in a voice not unlike the US Constitution. Where has this gone?
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The Faculty Code needs to serve as a contract. The Code must stand apart from the rules made by the administration and those unilateral rules should not determine the faculty contract.
Officers of the Senate need to be elected for longer terms with effective pay.