anti-union faculty hire lawyer too

Apparently Frohnmayer’s got a conflict on this one, but I hear Melinda Grier is available. An email circulated to TTF today, 4/2/2012:

Dear Colleagues,

On the Friday of winter-term finals week, a group of tenure track faculty members distributed a petition that expresses some of our objections to the union’s proposed bargaining unit.  At the time this reminder is being sent, the petition has 299 signatures.

In an effort to make sure that we have reached everyone who has an interest in joining in our objections to the proposed bargaining unit, we are sending out a post-spring break e-mail.    If you do not wish to sign you can stop reading now.

If you have signed already, we would like to bring to your attention a group of faculty who have decided to hire legal representation, and would like to coordinate efforts based on that advice.  Please email to [email protected]  if you’d like to join in supporting that effort.

As we said in our initial e-mail, the petition lists four reasons that the TTF should be excluded from the proposed bargaining unit.  Admittedly, it is not perfect, but time is of the essence so we have attempted to concisely articulate the points in the time we have available.  In their comments, several signers of our petition have either supplemented these reasons or agreed with a subset of the reasons.

Two items that were not mentioned in our initial e-mail, but we believe to be true, may concern you as a tenure track faculty member:
1) Tenure track faculty will comprise less than half of the union and therefore we will likely have a minority voice.
2) This decision is difficult to reverse.  If the union does not work out from the standpoint of TTFs, it is not obvious how to withdraw from the union.

Ultimately, our hope is that those who have concerns regarding the proposed bargaining unit will have the opportunity to be heard by the ERB.  If you plan to support this effort to be heard, please sign the petition as soon as possible.  We must turn in the petition to the ERB by April 4th.  If you share our concerns with the proposed bargaining unit, please sign today.

 The petition can be found here:  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/objection-to-proposed-bargaining-unit/

Further information and discussion can be found at — http://TTFagainstUOunion.com

Best regards,

Concerned faculty at the University of Oregon