YOUR BARGAINING TEAM - HOW IT WAS SELECTED AND WHO'S ON IT
The United Faculty of Florida (UFF), the faculty's certified bargaining agent, has always believed that the University's own faculty are the best people to bargain over their salaries and working conditions, because they are the ones most familiar with their own needs. Although the union regularly consults with labor attorneys, it has always trained faculty to negotiate their collective bargaining agreement ("the Contract").
Bargaining on the new Contract, the first specifically tailored to UF, was supposed to begin in 2002, so the selection process for your faculty bargaining team actually began several years ago. In June 2001, the UFF called for volunteers to serve on nine faculty task forces, whose charge was to study working conditions at the nation's top research universities and formally recommend provisions for the new UF Contract.
Membership on the task forces was open to all UF faculty, whether or not they were within the collective bargaining unit governed by the Contract. Over one hundred faculty members volunteered, approximately 70% of which were from the bargaining unit. The members of those task forces worked for the next year preparing their recommendations. These recommendations (summaries of which can be found at www.uff-uf.org) formed the basis for the proposals that your Bargaining Team is presenting during current negotiations.
In October 2001, UFF publicly announced that the union would provide free training "to any faculty member who might have any possible interest in being on a Faculty Bargaining Team, either now or sometime in the future." Participants were under no obligation, and the union paid all their expenses "even if all you want to do is learn more about the process."
The first workshop was conducted by FEA and NEA bargaining experts over three days in mid November 2001. Two subsequent intensive workshops, attended by additional faculty, were held in the next few months and were also conducted by professional NEA (as well as AFT) bargaining experts. Any interested faculty member could attend the workshops, but UFF/UF made an effort to recruit potential bargaining team members from among the members of the faculty task forces, who were familiar with the issues that would be subject to negotiation. The most effective workshop participants were identified, and the UFF/UF Executive Council made the final selection for your Bargaining Team from among them.
For over a year in 2002 and 2003, the Bargaining Team met several hours every week, adapting the specific recommendations of the nine task forces into suitable contract language. They then presented the proposed language to the appropriate task forces and made revisions, as necessary, until the task forces approved the proposals.
The start of bargaining at UF was delayed for nearly three years because of ongoing litigation over whether the UF Trustees were obligated to bargain with UFF. During this period, the Team continued to keep abreast of national trends reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and other academic news sources, while faculty Contracts were bargained and ratified at almost all of the other universities. As a consequence, your Bargaining Team has updated the UF faculty's proposals in light of the gains in faculty rights and benefits achieved in those other faculty Contracts.
The members of your Bargaining Team are, in alphabetical order:
JACKIE AYERS, Psychologist and Director of UF Student Mental Health Services and the Employee Assistance Program and affiliate member of the Department of Counseling Psychology. Dr. Ayers has served on numerous university committees, including the JWRU Board of Managers, O'Connell Center Advisory Board, Master Plan Steering Committee, Healthy Gators 2010 Steering Committee, Student Financial Aids Committee, University Minority Mentor Program Council, Trauma Response Team, and as President of the UF Association of Black Faculty and Staff. Nationally, he has served as President of the American College Health Association (ACHA) and as Chair of numerous committees, including the ACHA Board of Directors and the ACHA Program Planning, Nomination and Fellowship Award and Diversity Committees. He is a recipient of the ACHA Ruth E. Boynton Distinguished Service Award, among several other national honors.
ELIZABETH DALE , Associate Professor of History and affiliate member of both the Levin College of Law and the Center for Women's Studies. From 198384, after receiving her J.D., she clerked at Katz, Friedman, Schur and Eagle, a union-side labor law firm in Chicago, and from 198590, before earning her PhD, she worked as an attorney at the law firm of Kenneth N. Flaxman, where she practiced employment and civil rights law. In addition to articles on American history and constitutional law, Dr. Dale is the author of two books, Creating‹and Debating‹Authority: The Failure of a Constitutional Ideal, Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1649 (Ashgate, 2001) and The Rule of Justice: The People of Chicago versus Zephyr Davis (Ohio State UP, 2001). Dale has served as Associate Chair of the Department of History and has received the Department's Mahon Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
KIM EMERY , Associate Professor of English. Dr. Emery is the author of The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century United States (SUNY Press, 2002), as well as articles on critical theory, American literature, popular culture and intersections of representational conventions in history and politics. Since joining the UF faculty in 1994, she has served her departmental, college, and the university in numerous capacities, including in the Faculty Senate under three different university presidents (Lombardi, Young, and Machen), and she recently concluded a term on the Faculty Senate Steering Committee. She is also past-President of UFF-UF. Emery has served as Associate Chair and Undergraduate Coordinator for the Department of English and received a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year award.
LOUISE NEWMAN , Associate Professor of History. Dr. Newman is the author of White Women's Rights: Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1999), and the editor of Men's Ideas/Women's Realities: Popular Science, 1870- 1915 (Pergamon Press, 1985), in addition to articles on nineteenth- and twentieth- century American social and cultural history. She has received numerous teaching awards, including CLAS Teacher of the Year (1995), Baha'i Award for Teaching Excellence (1997), the History Department's Mahon Award for Undergraduate Teaching (1997) and Wilensky Award for Graduate Teaching (2000), as well as the CLAS Undergraduate Mentor Award in the Humanities (1999). She has also served on various university, college, and departmental committees, including the Executive Committee for the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, and has been Graduate Coordinator in the Department of History.
CHRIS SNODGRASS , Chief Negotiator, Professor of English. In addition to numerous articles on late-Victorian literature and art, Dr. Snodgrass is the author of Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford UP), which was named by the CHOICE rating service as one of the "outstanding academic books of 1995." He has served on many university, college, and department committees and has received various teaching awards, including a CLAS Teacher of the Year Award in 1997. Dr. Snodgrass has been involved in collective bargaining on behalf of Florida's state university faculty ‹ as a lecturer, trainer, or negotiator ‹ for many years, having eleven times led bargaining teams in negotiating and reaching agreement on complete, multi-year collective bargaining contracts (in addition to bargaining limited reopeners on several other occasions).
The Bargaining Team has also made arrangements for other faculty, including members of the original faculty task forces, to assist in negotiations on particular issues, as necessary.
Any comments or suggestions you may have for your Bargaining Team may be sent to YourBargainingTeam@uff-uf.org.
Sincerely,
Connie Shehan, President
United Faculty of Florida
238 Norman Hall, PO Box 117055
Phone: 392-0274
Email: president@uff-uf.org
