Summer Bargaining and LEO's Next Steps

You should have received this email from the Union Council earlier today. Continue reading below for further analysis.

“Back in March, when the COVID crisis hit, U of M administration began to take drastic financial measures, such as instituting a blanket hiring freeze, canceling raises for non-union employees including tenured and tenure-track faculty, and stopping retirement matches for non-union Michigan Medicine employees. In addition, some top administrators took token cuts to their astronomical base salaries. 

Around this time, they also asked campus unions to engage in voluntary cost-sharing measures. In order to gauge member sentiment, LEO’s Union Council polled members, held General Membership Meetings on the three campuses, and met as a Tri-Campus Council to discuss the ramifications of giving up or deferring our raises, and to decide what to ask for in return. Members were concerned with the large number of layoffs, especially in Flint, and hoped we could remedy that situation by talking to management. So, after two months of deliberation and discussion amongst members, LEO leadership notified management that we were willing to go ahead with negotiations to alter the third and final year of the current contract. We offered to defer 2020-2021 raises (an estimated value of about $3 million) in exchange for things like a seat at the table in COVID reopening committees, health insurance for the lecturers who lost it due to partial layoffs, protections for an instructor’s choice of teaching modality, extended recall rights for those laid off, and an extension of our contract for a 4th year, with increases to starting pay and raises.  

When we began negotiations, however, it quickly became clear that the administration wasn’t as serious about saving that $3 million as they had initially indicated. Despite the rhetoric of a “financial crisis” created by the COVID-19 pandemic, they were unwilling to grant basic governance rights or a formal voice in decisions about our own teaching. They were also unwilling to grant full health care coverage continuation to those who lost it by dropping below 50% appointment (they were willing to extend partial benefits, with no dental or vision, only in Fall 2020, to an estimated ten - that’s right, ten - people). Instead, they proposed delaying our September 2020 raise for 12 months, with no raise in 2021. After a few meetings, LEO and management agreed that we didn’t have enough common ground to continue, and negotiations came to a close. 

After all that work, we are back where we started. We will get our raise in September 2020 and will begin full contract negotiations, as originally planned, in January 2021. Before then, we have a lot of important work to do. We have to form a bargaining committee, send out bargaining surveys, hold department meetings, build a platform, and be ready to enter negotiations in a strong position to win a fair contract next year. We have seen what we can achieve when we are organized and active. It’s time for you to start thinking about how you want to be involved in what will surely be a challenging bargaining process.”

We can draw a few conclusions from this. First, the annual raises we fought so hard for three years ago -- the raises they denied us at the bargaining table for 10 months until the eve of a planned walkout and the Regents expressed reluctance to pass a budget without sufficient raises for Flint and Dearborn -- those raises are a drop in the enormous UM budgetary bucket. 

The second conclusion we might draw is that there is no real financial crisis after all.  We know that U of M is an incredibly wealthy institution with an endowment of over $12 billion, of which over $6 billion is “unrestricted” (meaning that the money can be spent on whatever University leadership decides to prioritize). We also know that the One University campaign had a big victory before negotiations started, resulting in the allocation of $20 million for the Flint and Dearborn campuses, demonstrating that there are accessible funds that can be allocated to improving students’ learning conditions and lecturers’ working conditions if there is a will to do so. We further know that the Regents approved a 1.9% tuition increase in Ann Arbor and Dearborn and 3.9% in Flint, ostensibly to cover some of the loss of revenue from the crisis. In other words, the university has a ton of money and plans to bring in even more.

In light of these facts, the most plausible interpretation of the administration’s attitude at the bargaining table is that they have no problem passing costs on to students and workers if it means they can preserve their precious endowment. The administration has continuously demonstrated that they don’t think it is important for lecturers to be involved in decisions of teaching modality and campus reopening. They’ve shown that they do not respect the huge amount of extra work that lecturers are putting into online teaching during the pandemic. They’ve proven that, rather than cut costs at the top or use the massive reserves generated by the endowment, they would rather cut jobs, slash benefits for lecturers and other workers, and charge students more for their education.