By SUSAN JONES
The Senate Benefits & Welfare committee is grappling with defining its mission in the wake of unionization by faculty and staff.
In December, Senate Council President Robin Kear said three Senate committees — Benefits & Welfare, Budget Policies and Faculty Affairs — are “working through what the increase in union representation means,” including possibly updating their mission statements.
Because many benefits are the subject of union bargaining, the administration has said it can’t attend the Benefits & Welfare meeting unless there is a request for information. As of now, roughly 3,500 faculty, 6,300 staff members and 2,100 graduate workers are in bargaining units represented by the United Steelworkers.
But there are still others at Pitt who are not represented by a union. All of the School of Medicine faculty — there are around 2,900, but it’s unclear how many receive benefits through Pitt — are outside of the union. Lindsay Rodzwicz, president of Staff Council, said that about one-fifth of Pitt staff are not in the union bargaining unit, and most post-docs also are unrepresented.
The contract approved by faculty last year also does not include anything about retirement benefits, which has been a core issue for the committee. The staff and graduate worker unions have just started negotiating their first contracts.
Laura Lovett, co-chair of the committee and a professor of history, said she and co-chair Marcia Rapchak, a teaching assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information, met with Senate leadership and exchanged emails with Tyler Bickford, president of the Union of Pitt Faculty, to try to figure out what the committee could discuss without impinging on issues between the union and Pitt’s administration.
Lovett indicated that she thought they could only discuss benefits related to those outside the bargaining unit.
Linda Tashbook, who chaired the committee for several years, said, “I’m surprised by the language you’re using when you say, we’re not allowed to talk about benefits. That is not true. We are allowed to talk about benefits. I understand that where you’re going with this is to modify the mission statement, but let’s be clear to begin with that we are certainly allowed to serve in an informational capacity, not an advocacy capacity.”
The committee’s mission statement currently includes the line: “The committee is an advocate for protecting and advancing a highly competitive benefits program for the University community including students.”
Committee member Tom Songer, assistant professor in the School of Public Health, said he believes the committee still has a valuable role. “A big issue that we can do is communication,” he said. “We could serve as a conduit between our faculty, and we could communicate to the union and to the administration, not advocate. I think with regards to benefits and welfare, a lot of staff and faculty could really be enhanced by having knowledge about what the benefits and welfare opportunities are and how it affects them.”
Songer also said that when he was chair of the Faculty Affairs committee during the faculty union contract negotiations, they established a subcommittee of people who were not in the bargaining unit and with whom the administration could meet with freely.
Stanley Seah, a postdoc in the Department of Psychiatry, agreed, saying he hoped “this committee would be a great opportunity, I think, to represent and also advocate for some of the needs of postdocs, because we are so divided between associates and scholars, and the benefits are different.”
Retirees Harvey Wolfe (engineering) and Irene Kane (nursing) questioned what their role on the committee would be going forward if they couldn’t advocate for retirees.
Lovett came to Pitt in 2018 from the University of Massachusetts, where she said the faculty and librarians have been unionized for decades. “The faculty governance structure was such that the the equivalent of this committee was a place where we had what were called off-table negotiations — places where the university and the union could agree. This was something that was in both groups interest. I think we’re a ways from that at Pitt. But I also realized that one of the things that we had at that university was an organization of retired, emeritus professors. And I don’t believe there’s any such organization at Pitt. … So there isn’t really a venue for a voice (for retirees).”
“This committee was the venue,” Wolfe said. “But if the administration is not going to participate, then that essentially takes away the venue.”
Lovett said she sees a real need at Pitt for a separate advocacy group for retired faculty and staff. “I’ve been at two other institutions that always had kind of active emeritus faculty groups, and they really did play an important role in the campus, but also in terms of discussion.”
As for the med school faculty, Mike Modo, a professor in the Department of Radiology, said that now he was the only representative from the School of Medicine on the committee, along with Penny Morel, a professor in the Department of Immunology who as Senate secretary serves as a liaison to the committee. “That’s a small sample, in terms of thinking about how many people we have to represent,” Modo said.
Morel said there are some people in the School of Medicine discussing whether to form their own faculty assembly. “There are a lot of people concerned about the fact that if benefits change as a result of the CBA, then the School of Medicine doesn’t have a voice in those negotiations. And that would be the same, I guess, for the staff that are not represented or the postdocs,” she said.
Rodzwicz of Staff Council said she sees bringing all those voices together of people who are outside the union bargaining units is the value of the Benefits & Welfare committee.
“I would not want to change this committee to be only for those people who are not represented by the union,” Morel said, “because even if the main meetings are informational, I have found those sessions to be really valuable. It’s such a huge organization, it’s really hard to know all the benefits that are available.”
Morel also said that with her role in the Senate she knows that the administration is “not keen to have multiple different benefits for different groups of faculty.”
There also are some benefits that are, at least for now, not covered by the collective bargaining agreement, such as parking, access to recreation facilities and child care.
In the end, the committee came up with a draft for new mission statement but did not take a vote. The new mission statement would read:
“The Senate Committee on Benefits and Welfare is concerned with the broad areas of health and welfare benefits, wellness programs, retirement programs, and other related matters for active and retired faculty and staff at the University of Pittsburgh. The committee is an advocate for protecting and advancing a highly competitive benefits program for community members not represented by a union, including students, post-doctoral researchers, and retirees. The Benefits and Welfare Committee functions in a consultative role in the process of shared governance. The committee functions in an informational role on these issues to the entire university community.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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