APSCUF’s Voice on Contract Change
APSCUF and PASSHE will be meeting on Nov. 2, and Nov. 9 for a new contract negotiation.
There are a total of 15 points that APSCUF would like to negotiate. They include points such as:
- APSCUF is being asked to “give back” far more than any other statewide union.
- The key outstanding issues include compensation for temporary faculty, health care for active members and annuitants, and distance education.
- PASSHE’s current proposal would decrease pay for temporary faculty by 35 percent. The starting salary for a temporary faculty member would be just over $29,000, far lower than the living wage for a family.
- PASSHE’s proposal disproportionately affects female faculty: 59 percent of temporary faculty members are women.
- Faculty members already pay the highest percentage of premium of any state worker – between 15 and 25 percent.
- APSCUF has attempted to fairly negotiate health care savings for the State System by putting proposals on the table that would have saved the System hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs.
- The State System wants to eliminate all distance education compensation for faculty.
- APSCUF wants to settle a fair contract with the State System so that we can continue to provide high quality education to our 115,000 students.
- APSCUF and PASSHE have been negotiating for 22 months and faculty has been working without a contract since June 2011.
The APSCUF board voted on Oct. 20 unanimously for strike authorization. Everyone in APSCUF will vote for whether they actually will to strike or not around Thanksgiving.
One of the other talking points was that APSCUF “[does] not make this decision lightly. Faculty members at the 14 state-owned universities do not want to go on strike; we want to settle a fair contract with the State System. We want to educate our students.”
