Adjunct faculty protest Board of Trustees meeting Thursday
Colorful signs and groups of people gathered along the walls of the President’s Conference room are not typical of a Board of Trustees meeting.
But such was the case Thursday, when several adjunct faculty spoke to the board on behalf of the Union of Teaching Faculty of Central Michigan University.
The group of adjunct faculty filed for a union representation election Feb. 23 with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission.
UTF has worked with the American Federation of Teachers of Michigan since May 2009.
UTF is in negotiations with the CMU administration about the composition of the bargaining unit — the group of adjunct faculty eligible to vote in the union certification election.
“(They) want to place a threshold on bargaining,” said Dan Kukuk, an organizer from AFT of Michigan. “We hoped that we could make our case to the Board.”
The administration is trying to limit membership on UTF’s bargaining unit, excluding adjunct faculty that do not teach more than a certain number of credit hours, Kukuk said.
“CMU administration does not believe that all nontenure-track faculty share a ‘community of interest’ and proposed a unit that excludes a number of people that are interested in unionization with UTF,” reads a press release from the UTF.
Steve Smith, director of public relations, said there are several bargaining units across campus that CMU’s administration works with equitably. “The university will work with (UTF) in the same spirit,” Smith said.
Alper Dede, adjunct faculty with the political science department, Carol Riddle, adjunct faculty with the English language and literature department, and Peter Gallinat, a CMU qlumnus and Union Township clerk, all spoke before the Board to express concern for adjunct faculty across campus.
“The UTF hopes to be the bargaining agent for CMU’s nontenure-track instructors,” Dede said. “Nontenure-track faculty are one of a few groups not represented by a union.”
Several supporters stood behind Dede as he said adjunct faculty work as hard and as consistently as tenure-track faculty.
“(We) do a lot of the same things that tenure-track faculty do,” Riddle said. “More than half the classes are taught by temporary faculty at CMU.”
Graduate Students
Several members of the Graduate Student Union also attended the meeting.
Ferndale graduate student and GSU president Alyssa Warshay spoke to Trustees on behalf of GSU.
“A number of graduate assistants don’t have health insurance because they cannot afford it,” Warshay said. “These students try to scrape by without getting sick.”
Warshay continued to express concern for the health of graduate students and the low wages they receive.
It feels like CMU does not value graduate assistants and the work they do for the university, she said.
“We are not here to take anything from CMU — we are here to add to it,” Warshay said.
