10/30/2011: One for tenure track faculty, one for NTTFs. From the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
Montana State University’s two new faculty unions have approved their first-ever collective bargaining contracts on the Bozeman campus, covering roughly 400 professors and 200 instructors.
Leaders of the Associated Faculty of MSU unions announced Friday that majorities of both the tenured and tenure-track professors and of the non-tenured, adjunct instructors voted to ratify the agreements.
The union – website here – is associated with the Montana Federation of Teachers – part of the AFT. The contracts note this for dues:
3.02 DUTY OF FAIR REPRESENTATION AND REPRESENTATION FEE
AFMSU, as exclusive representative of all employees described in Section 3.01 will represent all such persons fairly whether members or not. No employee shall be required to join AFMSU, but membership in AFMSU shall be made available to all who apply, consistent with AFMSU constitution, bylaws, and policies.
(A) Beginning in AY 2012-2013, the amount of the representation fee shall be determined by an independent audit annually conducted of the MEA-MFT and NEA/AFT/AFL-CIO and in no case will the representation fee exceed the annual membership dues.
(B) The representation fee shall be forwarded to MSU annually on or before September 1. The University shall deduct the fee from non-members and transmit the monies to AFMSU in the same manner specified in the collection of dues article. If the University offers individual contracts, the individual contract shall contain an authorization for payroll deduction of the representation fee by non-members. …
Montana has a historic labor tradition, starting with the immigrant miners in Butte, then Big Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW. As a onetime Montanan who learned a lot from the old-timers in the M&M Keno room I’m happy to see that these latest negotiations do not appear to have required defenestration or dynamite:
On the annual celebration of Miner’s Union Day, June 13th, an angry crowd ransacked the Miner’s Union Hall after their own parade erupted into a riot. When the acting mayor, Alderman Frank Curran appeared in the union hall to plead for calm, he was told to “Go to hell,” and then pushed out of the second story window. All semblance of order followed him out the window. The mob removed the union’s safe from the building and took it to a field in the valley below. One miner doused the safe with a liquid from a bottle that he swore was filled with nitroglycerin. When it turned out to be whiskey instead, dynamite was used to blow open the safe.
Trick or Treats from a Random Dog:
(Yes I know I am not commenting on this post –
maybe UOmatters can figure out where to put this)
With the impending/likely departures of Dyke,
Tomlin and Bean this dog has smelled a small uptick in faculty morale. But before we all get carried away into the land of Euphoria (where I hear there is chocolate). This dog would like to identify 5 indicators that would show progress within the UO as an academy. The dog does not need to live to see these completed, but if they just got started, this dog could expire slightly happier.
1. Build a state of the art new classroom building instead of arenas. Such a building should have a robust visualization center and a series of studios for the production of digital content by our students in this age of pixels.
2. Increase our graduate student population so that we may evolve towards a real Research University.
3. ShitCan our current computing center and shape a new on that offers real programming and support services for the campus research community so that we may evolve towards a real Research University.
4. Increase the number of tenure track faculty by 50% over some reasonable timescale.
5. Create new, innovative, cross-disciplinary undergraduate degree programs that are related to the set of global problems and global ideas that currently engage us. Replace seat credit hour time with portfolio based credit hours.