By SUSAN JONES
The 70 or so faculty union members and supporters who crammed into the eighth-floor lobby of the Cathedral of Learning on Dec. 7 had a message for Provost Ann Cudd.
“We’re here today to show the provost that we have the power. It is our work that makes this University run,” Melinda Ciccocioppo, a teaching assistant professor in psychology and chair of the union’s communications team, told those assembled. “We voted overwhelmingly to form a union because we want a real say in our working conditions. And that means negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with our elected bargaining committee in good faith. Thus far, the administration has been dragging their feet.”
The specific proposal the union wanted to see addressed is allowing non-tenure-stream (or appointment-stream) faculty who are on renewable contracts to be automatically renewed if their performance has been good and there is work for them to do.
The union says this involves two-thirds of the members of the bargaining unit, including both full- and part-time instructors. The University was unable to say definitively how many faculty members are on renewable contracts.
The union said last week that it first submitted a proposal on this topic in June and had gotten no response from Pitt’s administration, even though, Ciccocioppo said, the administration’s team “has said openly that you (the provost) also want to make improvements in these areas through the bargaining process, which we hope to be true.”
A statement posted on the Office of the Provost website said, “The University has responded to many proposals and issues raised by the union and will continue to do so.”
The statement noted that because this is the first contract between the University and the union, “numerous issues have been raised and discussed at the bargaining table. There are some proposals that have been submitted by the union that the University has not immediately responded to due to the need to gather additional information and present the union an informed response. Collective bargaining is a back-and-forth process and that requires give and take on both sides. The University will continue to engage in good faith bargaining by responding to all proposals and issues raised by the union, and we hope the union does so as well.”
The union also complained that the number of negotiating meetings dropped to once a month for November and December, after being at twice a month earlier in the year. A University spokesman said: “The University and the union scheduled the November and December bargaining sessions based on the mutual availability of parties, taking into account all holidays and breaks.”
Latest negotiations
The latest meeting over the union’s initial collective bargaining agreement was held on Dec. 14.
Evan Schneider, a member of the union’s bargaining committee and assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, said the union had really been pushing for the administration to put some proposals on the table around the job security issue of automatic renewals.
“I think yesterday we were really pleased because they did, in fact, come to the table with proposals,” she said. “And so I think we’re feeling pretty cautiously optimistic about our ability to make some progress on this issue and in bargaining. … They definitely made some movement in our direction on the issue of contract renewals.”
Schneider said at the talks this week “generally people had a positive attitude at the table, and we’re really looking forward to making some progress on these issues. And just from the perspective of someone on the bargaining committee, it’s really nice to have proposals so that we have some work to do.”
The number of bargaining meetings will be back to two a month in January and February, she said.
The protest
At the protest last week, the provost met with those gathered in the eighth-floor lobby via Zoom, as is her standard protocol for her monthly open office hours. She reiterated the statement members of the administration have offered at several shared governance meetings recently about what she can and can’t discuss.
“I cannot discuss anything with bargaining unit faculty member any aspect of bargaining,” she said. “That will be direct dealing and the union has said to us they will press charges of unfair labor practices against us. This is not what we prefer, but it is what the union has told us. So just so you know, I can sit back and listen, but I can’t discuss.”
Three faculty members then shared their concerns over contract renewals that can be as frequent as every semester.
Marcy Pierson, teaching associate professor in the Department of Music and chair of the union’s Council of Representatives, said, “I could certainly talk about how the renewal process generates unnecessary anxiety and labor for myself, but instead, I want to talk about how it impacts the many part-time instructors with whom I work closely.”
She said the number of full-time faculty hasn’t kept pace with the demand for classes, so a large number of important classes are taught by part-time faculty.
“They can’t tell students who want to take another class with them what they’ll be teaching until well after it would be useful for registration,” Pierson said. “They often don’t have bus or library access until a week or more into the semester during fall term, making it incredibly difficult to do their job. Because of these avoidable humiliations, combined with the constant precarity and low pay, the level of burnout is extremely high and we hemorrhage valuable people.”
A long complaint of part-time faculty and those with pending contracts is the lack of access over the summer to email, libraries and other campus services requiring a Pitt ID. In September, Senate President Robin Kear said Pitt IT is working on a grace period of 155 days to give these faculty a bridge until their contracts are renewed. They also are working on a technical fix for those with new contracts to get an ID from Panther Central. The estimated project completion date is April 30, 2023.
Pierson and Jenny Ganger, a teaching professor and associate chair in psychology, noted that constantly finding new part-time faculty takes time away from faculty, staff and administrators. Ganger said it’s hard to find people because “we can’t offer enough pay to compensate them fairly, and secondly, we can’t offer them job security. We don’t know from semester to semester, year to year, if we’ll have enough in our budget to offer them positions and we can’t offer them longer-term contracts, which would be better for them and for students.”
Ganger said even though she is associate chair and teaches core undergraduate courses, she also doesn’t have job security and will be up for renewal when her five-year contract ends. “Why don’t we have an automatic renewal process that guarantees that teaching faculty like myself can only be let go for cause or if our work is not needed?”
Ellen Lee, a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Classics, said she has been at Pitt since 2019 and had to go through the renewal process last year. She said the initial job application process pales in comparison to the renewal process. She had to submit a roughly 50-page document that included a personal statement, recommendation letters, evaluations from peers, comments from people she’d done pedagogy work for outside the University, several syllabi and student teaching evaluations.
“The uncertainty about the future of my employment wasn’t just stressful for me and my family though. It created problems for my students and for curriculum development in my department,” she said. “My working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. I spent all last year unable to tell my students … that I would be around to teach future classes or advise their thesis projects or write letters of recommendation for them necessary for their future. In addition, the time that I spent preparing materials for the onerous renewal process could have been far better spent meeting with my students, giving feedback on their assignments or developing my courses — doing my job.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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