19 May Live Press Event on Full-Time Faculty Job Insecurity
Youtube Stream Goes Live 10:15am Thursday
- Press Event on Full-Time Faculty Job Security: This morning we announced in a press release that we will be elevating our concerns on job insecurity to the Board of Trustees. We will host a livestream press event this Thursday, 5/20, 10:15-10:45am.
- Contractually Guaranteed Raise Pools: Recently, Chancellor Amiridis announced 2% merit raise pools for staff. This matches the 2% merit pools guaranteed in our union contract, which also guarantees additional 2% pools for compression/equity adjustment, something our nonunionized colleagues at UIUC have not been offered at this time.
- Now Recruiting Contract Action Team Members: The next round of bargaining is coming up in 2022. Contract Action Team members help us communicate with 5-10 other members to inform, educate, and mobilize for a strong contract. Let us know if you’re interested in joining the CATs at UICUnitedFaculty@gmail.com.
Dear Members,
We have repeatedly asked the administration generally, and Chancellor Amiridis in particular, to respond to our demands to address job insecurity for full-time, non-tenure track faculty. At this time, we have still received no answers, and so we will be elevating our demands to the Board of Trustees. We have sent them a letter outlining our concerns, and asking them to match apparent public optimism over budgets and enrollments for the fall semester, with public action to improve transparency and overall retention.
The Board meets this Thursday, and we are planning our own concurrent press event, to be livestreamed at 10:15am. We will have both tenure and non-tenure track faculty speak on the issues and impacts of job insecurity, as they affect even full-time faculty who have been at UIC for years. We welcome and encourage our members to view the livestream, and submit any questions in the comments on youtube. We will try to answer any questions we receive.
Raise Pools
As you may have seen last week, Chancellor Amiridis announced 2% merit raise pools for university employees not covered under collective bargaining agreements. This amount matches our own contractually guaranteed 2% merit raise pool, but our contract also guarantees an additional 2% compression/equity. We know that union contracts often provide a floor for the university salary programs, and given the turbulence of the last year, locking in this collective 4% raise pool for our members has been a particularly fortuitous outcome from our last contract. As a reminder, these guaranteed raise pools objectively outpaced the campus wage pools for the last several years, and were only secured as a concession against a threatened strike in 2019. Our nonunionized colleagues at UIUC have only the 2% merit raise pool at this time.
Our Union Needs You
As another round of bargaining nears, we also want to remind you that it was and is our members that make the difference between a strong contract, and one that maintains the status quo, or worse. Our current contract runs through August 15, 2022, meaning that we will be back at the bargaining table as soon as next spring. We will need the support of all our members to win another strong contract in this next round of negotiations, and in particular, we will need volunteers to help us with various aspects of communicating with and organizing our members.
We are now actively recruiting Contract Action Team (CAT) members to help with those efforts, likely to begin with surveying our members in the fall semester about possible bargaining issues. CATs help the union by communicating and working with 5-10 other faculty in their units to build awareness and participation in union efforts. If you are interested in learning more about this role, please email us at UICUnitedFaculty@gmail.com.
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