Dear PATFA members:
Members of the Part-time Faculty Association of Maine ratified the 2013-2015 contract with the University of Maine System by a vote 95-2 last month, and the board of trustees has approved it as well.
We concluded our negotiations with UMS on Friday, March 21.
The agreement is a miserable one, one I can barely find the energy to articulate.
-- A 2% increase in pay in 2013-14 (retroactive to Sept. 1, 2013) and 2014-15.
-- No retirement incentive, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside for AFUM retirement incentives.
-- No change or improvement on the Academic Year Appointment situation, except an administrative letter that is basically the exact same one that was crafted in 2004.
-- No movement on the idea of regularizing long-serving faculty.
-- And for any other proposals we floated and I've forgotten, nothing on those either.
Thus, the first bullet point is the only one where we got something, and all we got is whatever every other unit got, with no meaningful negotiation over it.
We had gone to mediation after three fruitless sessions with the UMS, but after two sessions with the mediator, he threw in the towel as well, and the negotiation team felt there was no use going further. Clearly, a System such as ours that has been mismanaged for decades, and which has absolutely no sense of purpose or direction and no fresh ideas on how to provide a quality higher education in Maine, is hard to deal with. It's like negotiating with blocks of wood.
In any reasonable "business" which the UMS purports to be (at times convenient to it), the people in charge who had let the business founder, and who were driving "customers" away, would be fired. That would include boards of trustees, presidents and chief financial officers of campuses, upper administrators in the System office, anyone who has been around for more than five years. But of course that won't happen. They'll fire or squeeze the workers and keep their own positions, while being paid far more than any faculty member.
I hope to generate some ideas soon about a way forward from here. As Harlan Baker used to say, negotiations don't start when the negotiations start, but two years before. In other words, now is the time to start preparing for the next negotiations; how is the question.
Best,
Michael D. Burke, president, Local 4593, Part-time Faculty Association of Maine. mdburke@maine.edu