Academic Library Union News


Academic Library Union News

 

American Association of University Women releases study Behind the Pay Gap, showing the pay gap begins with women's first job after graduation from college for women and continues to grow from that point.

 

May 8, 2007.

20.7 % Base Pay raise for California State University Librarians

California State University faculty union members overwhelmingly approved a new labor agreement, association officials announced yesterday. Last week, 97 percent of voting members of the California Faculty Association agreed to accept the tentative agreement between the union and CSU administration. CSU trustees are expected to vote on the contract at meetings on May 15 and 16.

The tentative agreement was reached in April after 23 months of contentious negotiations. The union, which represents more than 23,000 faculty, coaches, counselors and librarians, had threatened to strike for the first time.

The contract would raise base pay for faculty by 20.7 percent over four years. Additional increases for longevity and merit would make the package worth 24.9 percent to many members.

 

March 26, 2007. INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION reports: The faculty union and the administration at the Community College of Philadelphia reached a tentative agreement Sunday to end a strike that started March 13 and has halted classes since then. Also on Sunday, the faculty union and the administration at the California State University System agreed to a short extension of the current contract — through April 6 — with the goal of resolving contract differences without a strike. “Rolling strikes” have been expected to start as early as next week.

 

March 22, 2007. BERKELEY, California (AP) --[Library faculty will strike as well]. Professors for the nation's largest four-year public college system could walk out of California State University classrooms as soon as next month after union leaders announced Wednesday members had authorized a strike.

The vote comes after nearly two years of bargaining have failed to produce an agreement for faculty.

"We are a faculty that is fed up and we're a faculty that's ready to walk off the job," California Faculty Association President John Travis said as he announced results of the vote at the Southern California campus of CSU Dominguez Hills.

Union leaders said if a strike is called it would be limited to two-day actions that rotate from campus to campus to lessen the impact on the system's more than 400,000 students.

Chancellor Charles Reed said in a news release that administrators were doing everything they could to reach a settlement, but if faculty strike, the system has plans in place to minimize disruptions.

In Sacramento, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a news release saying he was optimistic talks would resume.

Nadir Vissanjy, chairman of the California State Student Association, said the organization doesn't have a position on the strike, but it supports having university employees paid competitively.

Both sides agree the professors and lecturers are paid less than peers at comparable institutions. But administrators said they made an offer to increase wages by nearly 25 percent over the next three years.

 

STRIKE! Community College of Philadelphia

March 13, 2007. There are 37,000 students.

“We’ve got people at every door; we’ve got 100 people that are picketing at the moment,” John Braxton, co-president of the Faculty and Staff Federation of Community College of Philadelphia, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, said around lunchtime Tuesday.“People are very spirited — we represent both the faculty and staff, so there’s a great sense of unity out here now.”

Inside Higher Education reports:

The union has been involved in increasingly contentious negotiations with the college’s administration regarding new contracts for all three of its bargaining units (full-time faculty, adjunct faculty and classified employees) since the former contracts expired in August.

 

Largest university strike in U.S. history looms-Includes LIBRARIANS

March 5, 2007, The COE reports on the California State University System strike vote: Unionized instructors across the 23-campus began taking a strike vote today, casting ballots on whether to stage “rolling walkouts” that would send professors to picket lines for two days at a time, from one campus to the next.

The California Faculty Association, the union holding the vote, represents about 24,000 professors and instructors in the system.

This week, from today through Thursday, union members on 16 of the system’s campuses will vote on whether to authorize the union’s Board of Directors to call the strike. Professors on the remaining seven campuses will cast their ballots from March 12 to 15. John Travis, the union’s president and a professor of political science at Humboldt State University,  said he thought the strike authorization would win approval. “We hope and expect it to be positive,” he said.

 

 

E-Mail Inflames USF Contract Feud

Tampa.March 2. The Tampa Tribune reports: University of South Florida Administrators' private notes inadvertently sent to faculty - then recalled - intensified ugly debate between the two sides over contract negotiations.

In an electronic bulletin late Wednesday, leaders from USF's chapter of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF)  charged the school's leaders with an "appalling attack on the integrity of the university's e-mail system." On Monday, administrators inadvertently sent an e-mail to all faculty members that included notes - some of them embarrassing - that administrators first shared with one another.

When they realized their confidential deliberations ended up in thousands of electronic inboxes, they recalled those they thought were unopened by faculty members, said Dwayne Smith, vice provost for faculty.

But faculty at the College of Arts and Sciences found the message zapped shortly after they received it, even if they read it. The college, USF's largest, uses a different computer server, Smith said.

In its bulletin, union leaders said the scramble to delete the message was little more than "an attempt to cover up an embarrassing revelation about the attitudes of some administrators."

Worse, though, is the idea that USF's administration can purge an e-mail inbox at any time, said Roy Weatherford, the union's local president.

"From a legal point of view, you own a good deal more of us than we like to think you do," Weatherford told the university's Board of Trustees at its meeting Thursday.

LIBRARIANS at the University of South Florida are in the UFF bargaining unit.

 

 

 

NEW YORK. Jan 29. NYSUT (New York State United Teachers), CEAS and  AFSCME District Council 37 are supporting the New York Library Association in its quest for $27 million in additional state funding for libraries serving New York's schools, colleges and communities. "Numerous studies demonstrate the positive impact that school libraries staffed by certified librarians and equipped with current materials and technology have on student academic achievement," aid NYSUT Executive Vice President Alan Lubin.  "Now is the time for New York state to put research into practice by increasing state funding for school libraries."

NYSUT, the Civil Service Employees Association and District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees represent thousands of library workers in public, academic and school libraries across the state.

 

Progressive Librarians Guild. January 2007. "There is Power in a Union: Library Union Activism, 2006," Progressive Librarian #28 (Winter 2006/07): 101-104.

 

2.27.07. Inside Higher Education reports:

Mammoth Faculty Strike (includes LIBRARIANS) Looms in California

MAMMOTH FACULTY STRIKE LOOMS

California State U. administration, professors' union at odds over pay and a range of other issues.

The union that represents roughly 24,000 Cal State instructors is planning to hold votes beginning in early March to determine whether to strike if its salary demands aren’t met by the system’s administration. The California Faculty Association says the faculty walkout, which would be the first of its kind in system history and potentially the most massive in the history of higher education, would likely take place this spring at different intervals across the 23-campus system to send a message to Cal State leaders while preventing a systemwide shutdown. The system enrolls some 400,000 students.

 

Negotiations between the union and the state system, which began nearly two years ago, are at an impasse. The current contract was already set to expire but has been extended through the negotiation process.

 

Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada.  2/6/07. The Record.com reports

 The powerful union representing Ontario's secondary school teachers is wooing support staff at the University of Waterloo. The union drive by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation is in full swing.

The federation now represents support staff at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie and Brock University in St. Catharines...The UW Staff Association, an advisory body only, did not prompt the federation's union drive and is not involved, association president Joe Szalai said...However, Szalai said he personally favours the federation's bid on campus...Szalai, who works in UW's library, said he's very optimistic about the federation's chance for success on his campus.  The federation needs the support of at least 40 per cent of the potential bargaining unit in order to make a certification application to the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

 

 

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITIES -STATEWIDE, February 1Librarians are members of the California Faculty Association.

The Contra Costa Times reports: Faculty at California State University campuses are doing some instructing outside the classroom as they walk informational picket lines to protest stalled contract negotiations.

The union representing faculty at CSU's 23 campuses started the pickets last month and will continue them during the next few weeks, said John Travis, president of the California Faculty Association."We're finding that there's a lot of unrest on all the campuses," he said. For details of various campus pickets see Union Librarian.

 

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, Jan. 30. The Justice reports:

"Laid-off library staffers return." Two part-time library staffers laid off in November were recently re-hired to share the newly created position of resource sharing coordinator, according to Union Steward James Rosenbloom. Nancy Mazur, 61, and Patty Shesgreen, 51, will work half-time in the position.The employees were terminated in November, Mazur said, because Chief University Librarian Susan Wawrzaszek said she wanted to hire a full-time staff member in their place...Service Employees International Union Local 888

 

SAN JOSE ,CA. Jan. 30. The Spartan Daily reports: A picket will be held on 1/31/07 outside the student union at San Jose State University. The California Faculty Association is the unionized faculty group that represents all of the 23,000 professors, librarians, counselors and coaches in the 23-campus California State University system.

The purpose of the picketing event is to raise awareness about the unfair wages of faculty, to recruit new members and to show strength in numbers to the Chancellor's office in hopes of reaching a deal for a new contract, stated Jonathan Karpf Chair of the SJSU strike organizing committee who put together the picket. [read more at Union Librarian]. 

MONTREAL, Jan. 27 /CNW Telbec/ - The members of three CSN unions
representing 640 employees at Concordia University will demonstrate today,
January 27, during the school's Open House activities. The protest will begin
at 11 am outside the Hall Building at 1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard W.
Without collective agreements for periods of up to four years, library
workers
, technicians and support staff will gather to denounce an increasingly
evident anti-worker attitude on the part of Rector Claude Lajeunesse
.