Thank you for all of your support during our recent strike at Wright State. I am writing to ask for some further support. Please bear with me on this somewhat lengthy message.
 
The faculty strike at Wright State ended on February 11, after 20 days. It ended up being the second longest faculty strike at a public university in U.S. history.
 
The administration and Board’s obvious intention was to break our union because we have been the most prominent voice in criticizing the reckless and wasteful spending that led to an almost entirely self-created financial crisis and the most insistent voice in asserting that academics need to become, again, the primary institutional priority.
 
Largely the same Board approved five years of deficit spending that erased more than $130 million in reserves. That spending was almost entirely on non-academic initiatives and enterprises—schemes often driven by cronyism—none of which produced any of the additional revenue streams that were promised. In fact, some of the affiliated entities created to facilitate those schemes are each still costing the university several million dollars every year.
 
In the contract that the administration and Board imposed on January 4, they eliminated our right to bargain over benefits and thus our ability to bargain meaningfully over compensation. They eliminated our MOU on workload, our right of first refusal on summer teaching opportunities, and objective standards for merit increases. They effectively eliminated the possibility of continuing contracts and job security for most of our non-tenure-eligible full-time faculty, and they allowed for unlimited furlough days while asserting that teaching and service would not be disrupted by the furloughs. Worse than all of that was a retrenchment proposal that would have made tenure meaningless, a proposal that they had presented to the fact-finder but left out of the imposed contract. We were certain, however, that if we failed to strike over the imposed contract, that proposal would be on the table when negotiations on the next contract began in spring 2020.
 
In the successor agreement that we reached to end the strike, we rolled back all of these things. We did not get the sort of healthcare plan that we wanted, with more emphasis on premiums than on deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, and we made significant, if contract-limited concessions on summer teaching compensation. We will receive raises in the last two years of the five-year deal, but we will have paid for them several times over by the time we receive them. We said all along that the strike was not about money, and we are, indeed, taking a significant financial hit in the new contract. That said, the accepting the imposed contract would have meant accepting even larger and very open-ended losses in pay.
 
I am writing because our members are taking a further financial hit that we did not anticipate.
 
About two-thirds of our members remained on strike until the strike was ended, and it was very clear that the university was not covering a third to half of the scheduled class sections. On just about every day, there was some announcement about cancelled, suspended, or rescheduled classes, with the creation of a spring B-term supposedly being necessitated by the extended strike. So, when the strike entered the third week, we assumed that the university would need to make up the lost class time and that we would be compensated for a significant part of the pay lost due to the strike.
 
But within a week of the end of the strike, all class sections had simply been put back on the original spring schedule. We do not think that the administration can have it both ways: either a large percentage of our students are not receiving 20% of what they paid for (with all of the obvious implications related to accreditation, professional certifications, and financial aid), or we are being asked to make up the lost time and work without compensation.
 
I am currently collecting documentation of how the lost time and work are being made up, and we plan to file a grievance than will almost certainly go to arbitration.
 
In the meantime, our members are being docked for about 7.5% of their base pay, all of which is being deducted from their last four spring checks.
 
It is extremely important that faculty not be dissuaded from striking out of concern over the financial consequences and that no precedent be set that this is an effective strategy for breaking a strike or a union.
 
So, while we are pursuing the case that will end up in arbitration, we are shifting our Solidarity Fund to a Strike Fund so that we can offset at least some of the lost pay. As the monies are distributed, everyone will receive the same amount, and so our lowest paid members will receive a higher percentage of their lost pay.
 
We have established a GoFundMe account for individual donations, and we are asking that you distribute the link to your members and allied groups. Here is the message on our Facebook page, with the link, which might be used in a communication to your members:
 
On January 22nd, the majority of Bargaining Unit Faculty represented by AAUP-WSU made the choice to go on strike. Not for higher wages but for the protection of the academic mission of the university and our right to negotiate over our terms and conditions of employment. We stood strong for 20 days as the administration drug their feet to the bargaining table. Our  #solidarity prevailed.
 
The end result? A much stronger contract than the one the administration imposed on January 4th with restored protections and the preservation of our legal rights. We call this a win, but it comes at a price.
 
Collectively it cost our striking members over 7% of our annual salary and many will experience financial hardships due to the loss in pay for being on strike.
 
MANY, MANY people {friends, family, and colleagues, both affiliated with Wright State and from afar} have asked how they can help. Therefore, we have created a GoFundMe page to help striking members financially in the wake of #fighting4Wright.
 
Thank you for your support and encouragement. It has never ceased to amaze us!
 
https://www.gofundme.com/aaupwsu-strike-fund?teamInvite=XrKsR8c1pnknynyIbjLAiLah6mA3qH8B3sGy5OcKrTmq9YUkKavAa6u7n9KmF6Tr&fbclid=IwAR1xQVGNUcNcDu4C2Oe-8j7vXB8jW-XK1uUhvPppMkKn5xh-JQBwBaZ3rNc
 
We are hoping that even modest contributions from individual members, as well as from chapters and conferences, will add up. And, when we get a more precise sense of what the strike has cost our chapter, we plan to supplement the contributions that we receive with funding from our own accounts.
 
If your chapter has already sent us a check during the strike, thank you again on behalf of our leadership and our membership.
 
If you have not and wish to send a check instead of contributing to the GoFundMe account, please make the check out to AAUP-WSU and send it to: Tom Rooney, Treasurer, AAUP-WSU; 113 Medical Sciences Building; Wright State University; Dayton, Ohio 45435.
 
Following this blog post are three documents: a chart comparing the imposed contract to the successor agreement, as well as a letter from CBC Chair Paul Davis and John McNay’s article for Plunderbund, both of which highlight the significance of our strike. Please feel free to post them or to distribute them in any way that you think will be effective.
 
Thanks so much for all of your solidarity and your support,
 
Marty Kich
President, AAUP-WSU

plunderbund.com/2019/02/21/wright-state-faculty-successfully-defend-ohio-higher-ed

John McNay

Now that the dust is clearing from the faculty strike at Wright State University in Dayton, let’s to take a look at what happened. A tentative agreement was reached on Feb. 10, 2019.
 
Faculty at WSU went on strike on Jan. 22 and finally settled three weeks later. It was the longest academic strike in Ohio history and apparently the
second longest in the country. The faculty union at Wright State is a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
As the Wright State faculty continually, and correctly repeated, this strike was not about money. It was about quality of education that would be endangered by allowing a corporate-style administration to have unilateral control over such things as teaching loads and class sizes.

The Wright State administration seemed to think that they had the upper hand going into this struggle. “The actions of one-sixth of our employees will not alter our mission as an institution of higher learning,” WSU President Cheryl Schrader told the Dayton Daily News. She could not have been more wrong. Even though the administration advertised nationally for strike breakers, the fact is that they could not operate the university without the faculty. Schrader’s comment shows the problem with too many of our administrations. Engaged in so many other activities, they lose track of the reason that we have our universities – education. It isn’t building office palaces or playing games or rubbing elbows with the corporate big wigs. It is education.

What precipitated such a struggle? Primarily, it was gross mismanagement on behalf of the Wright State board of trustees and its administration. This crisis has statewide importance because of the actions of the Wright State administration and its board of trustees. Like others in charge of our public institutions of higher education in the state, the WSU leaders have spent more taxpayer money and student tuition on administrative bloat, grandiose construction projects (and in WSU’s context off-campus real estate purchases, including $26 million in Greene County alone), athletic department deficits, and, generally, non-academic initiatives. At WSU, these non-academic initiatives
were supposed to produce additional revenue but instead have cost tens of millions.

The Wright State faculty drew a line in the sand and won.
Hopefully, it sends a message to our other corporate-style administrations. The actual timing of the strike was triggered by the board of trustees’ decision to unilaterally impose its contract offer. The vote that came suddenly on Jan. 7 was a surprise but the union was determined. “We can’t trust these folks to be good managers. They have shown themselves incompetent,” Noeleen McIlvenna, a History professor and union contract administrator, said. “I do hope that the community understands that this is a final straw.”

Certainly, what happened at Wright State seems to have been a perfect storm of incompetence. Some of the mismanagement has even been illegal. The ongoing FBI investigation into whether WSU violated work visa laws has so far cost the school more than $2 million. Other boondoggles have included spending more than $4 million (including updates to the Nutter Center) attempting to host the first presidential debate in 2016: Wright State spent more on the debate – that it didn’t host – than Hofstra University spent to host it.

Hard as it is to believe, the former president of Wright State, David Hopkins, under whom most of these blunders were made, had a contract that was certainly irresponsible. For the last years that Hopkins was employed, he was listed among the top 10 highest paid university presidents in the country and for four of those years his taxable compensation was over $1 million. Even today, the president who has overseen the failed negotiations that led to this strike, Cheryl Schrader, is pulling in more than $680,000 in taxable compensation (more than my entire eight-person department at UC Blue Ash).

And, as reported in the Dayton Daily News, there is more:

• An Ohio Inspector General’s investigation concluded in December a report that questioning $1.8 million of the $2.3 million WSU paid to a consultant, a so-called “rainmaker” for grants.
• Wright State University spent $850,000 on a branding effort that included a new logo that was scrapped in mid-2016 amid criticisms that it looked too similar to Rumpke Waste & Recycling.
• Wright State in November paid $1.98 million to settle a complaint brought by the U.S. Department of Education over how the school was handling student aid.

Notice that none of these actions involved actually spending funds directly on the university’s primary mission – instruction and research.

So, it is clear to see how the university created its own financial crisis and that the faculty had nothing to do with this. Shockingly, faculty salaries and benefits make up only 17 percent of Wright State’s budget. Nevertheless, two years ago, when negotiations first began, faculty accepted they were going to have to take a financial hit to help correct the administration’s mistakes. But as negotiations unfolded, it became clear that the administration was not intending to let the budget crisis go to waste. Instead, they aimed to gut the faculty’s contract in what now seems a determined attempt to break the union.

Over the two years of negotiations, the administration agreed to meet only about 10 times. They were reluctant to put anything in writing, and stood by extreme demands. Faculty members had been targeted to make up for these mistakes since 92 full-time faculty positions already had been eliminated. As we often tell our students across the state: “You should ask where your money is going, because it is not going for your education.”

Salary had not been a sticking point because the union agreed early on to no pay increases in this contract given the financial hole the administration had dug. Instead, two other issues have been at the heart of the WSU dispute: workloads and health insurance. Faculty workloads typically are determined by departments based on the academic need for the students. But the WSU administration has proposed to eliminate workload agreements and impose a top-down approach that would have the accountants making decisions in engineering, biology, English, medicine and other disciplines. Wright State faculty insisted on defending quality higher education and research by having expert faculty in the disciplines involved in making these decisions.

Of great importance, the administration wanted to eliminate health insurance as a negotiation topic. The objective in any such proposal is to be able to bar the union from negotiating for compensation. If one cannot negotiate for healthcare, any pay raise one receives can be taken back with a premium increase. This is a union-busting tactic, one that was part of the infamous Senate Bill 5 attack on public employees in 2011, which Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected and repealed, including the people of Dayton and the surrounding counties.

For those who joined the picket line with the Wright State faculty, one was immediately struck by the sense that they must have done this before. It was impressive that so many people stood up and took hands- on leadership roles to make the strike work. It appeared to be a smoothly-running well-oiled machine as picketers braved snow, rain, and bitterly-cold temperatures. And yet, this was a first for everyone involved.

Some things they did very well that helped with the victory:

• Higher education faculty from all over the state showed their solidarity in various ways. Faculty from AAUP chapters at University of Cincinnati, Kent State, Bowling Green, Akron, Cincinnati State, Miami, Ohio State, and others walked the picket line and showed their support in other ways – donating food or coffee and social media posts. Kent and Akron even did a virtual picket from their universities. AAUP national and state staff and representatives were on hand as well helping to support in any way they could. Some days there were hundreds of picketers.
• They formed over the months and years before strong ties with the broader labor movement, some of the connections going back to SB 5 days. Even with the extremely bitter weather picketers faced, one found on the picket line day after day, Ironworkers, school teachers (both OFT and OEA), electrical workers, other public employee unions, as well as other member unions of the AFL-CIO.
• They made good use of their political contacts. Many politicians offered support. Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley came to strike headquarters to speak to the faculty. Both she and Sen. Sherrod Brown sent letters to the board and administration expressing the same sentiment. Brown wrote, for example: “I urge you to reconsider your approach to these negotiations, specifically the hard line you have taken with the Wright State faculty.” Even area Republican legislators sent a letter encouraging a return to negotiations, something the faculty were eager to do and the administration refused. The Democratic caucuses in both the state House and Senate sent letters to the administration that were supportive of the faculty and calling for the administration to return to negotiations.
• The faculty had amazing support from the students. They had sit- ins outside administration offices. They picketed with faculty. They had very active social media platforms on Twitter and Facebook defending the faculty.
• With the help of the Ohio Conference, WSU faculty held a press conference that drew media, politicians, and a surprise and welcome visit by the new Chancellor of Higher Education, Randy Gardner, who spoke to the over 100 faculty, students, and allies. Gardner was on the phone a great deal in the final week or so of the strike with both sides encouraging a return to serious negotiations.

In the end, after finally agreeing to the use of a federal mediator, the administration gave up on a series of bad proposals, including unilateral control of workload and merit pay and unlimited furloughs. About insurance, the new contract will include a clause guaranteeing the faculty’s right to negotiate over healthcare although the union did agree to go into the same insurance plan as the other employees at Wright State. Because they negotiated for two years, they have essentially agreed to two contracts, one will complete the year left on this term, and then another three-year contract which provides for small raises in 2022 and 2023, the last two years of the second contract – at that point faculty will have gone five years without an overall pay increase.

There are going to be a lot of wounds to heal going forward. We agree with the sentiments of Chancellor Gardner:

‘The first people I thought about last night when I heard the news of the agreement were the students I met with Friday at the Statehouse,” Gardner said. “I’m hopeful that their plans and goals for the future – and those of thousands of others as well – are restored.”

You can be sure that the Wright State faculty will be working to restore those futures. As WSU-AAUP Chapter President Marty Kich said “I am sure all our members are glad to be going back to the classroom where we hope things will return to normal for our students as soon as possible.”
—–
 
John McNay is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, and author of “Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class”

 

Duration
Contract imposed January 4
Expiration on June 30, 2020.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
Technically, there will be two CBAs: first expires June 30, 2020; second expires June 30, 2023. For practical purposes, this will amount to a single CBA expiring on June 30, 2023.

Workload
Contract imposed January 4
Our workload agreements were nullified, leaving the admin/board with unlimited rights to assign workloads to faculty in any way they wanted.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
Our workload agreements stand as they are. Likewise, the workload article in the CBA itself will be unchanged from the 2014-2017 CBA.


Merit Pay
Contract imposed January 4
Merit pay could have been given to any BUFM with a
2.0 overall annual evaluation score, a standard met by nearly all BUFMs. Otherwise, whether a BUFM got merit pay or not, and if so how much, would have been totally controlled by chairs and deans.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
The merit pay system in the 2014-2017 CBA remains intact. Annual evaluation scores – obtained by comparison of one’s performance to criteria in bylaws – determine merit raises, not the whim of administrators.

 
NTE Promotion and Job Security
Contract imposed January 4
Continuing appointments (i.e., good job security) would have been awarded only to those who had been promoted to the highest available rank (Senior Lecturer or Clinical Assistant Professor) and had served at least nine years. For most NTEs, those two requirements would have made a continuing appointment impossible without twelve years of service.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
Continuing appointments remain as they were in the 2014-2017 CBA, except that one additional year of service (seven years altogether) will be permitted for fixed-term appointments. This change will only apply to NTE faculty who sign an initial offer letter after April 1, 2019; so, no change applies to current NTEs. Even with the change, our CBA provides the best-in-the-US job security for NTE faculty.


Health Care
Contract imposed January 4
The imposed contract gave the admin/board total control over our health care benefits. De facto we would have ceded our legal right to negotiate health care benefits, and the admin/board could have worsened the plans as much as they wanted, as often as they wanted, restricted only by law.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
Specific CBA language will ensure our ongoing right to negotiate health care.
 
Effective April 1, 2019, BUFMs will have the same health care plans as those that were available to other employees on January 1, 2019; these plans cannot be changed through December 31, 2020. The admin/board will continue to provide two medical plans.
 
After December 31, 2020, cumulative increases through June 30, 2023 in monthly premiums and out-of-pocket maximums will be limited to 35%.

 
Furloughs
Contract imposed January 4
Furloughs, a.k.a. Cost Savings Days, could have been assigned provided other WSU employees were furloughed, but otherwise restricted only by the University’s general furlough policy – which can be changed instantly and arbitrarily by the admin/board. Furloughs notwithstanding, BUFMs’ work responsibilities would not have been lessened at all.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
The number of furlough days will be limited to at most one day per semester.

 
Summer Teaching
Contract imposed January 4
BUFMs’ summer teaching rights were totally eliminated. Summer teaching would have been controlled completely by chairs and deans, so (for example) all summer teaching could have been given to adjuncts.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
BUFMs’ summer teaching rights remain as they are in the 2014-2017 CBA. However, the pay rate drops from 1/36th of the academic year base salary per credit hour taught to 1/45th in summers of 2019 and 2020, 1/44th in 2021, 1/43rd in in 2022, and 1/42nd in 2023.

 
Raises
Contract imposed January 4
Promotion raises and minimum salaries remained as they were in the 2014-2017 CBA. Otherwise, there would have been no raises for the 1 ½ year duration of the contract (through June 30, 2020.

Tentative CBA obtained by negotiations February 10
For the academic year 2021-2022: 2 ½ % across the board and 3% increase in minimum salary scales; for the academic year 2022-2023: 2 ½ % across the board, 1% merit, and 4% increase in minimum  salary scales. Promotion raises remain as they are in the 2014-2017 CBA.


About Retrenchment: even in the contract imposed on January 4, the admin/board agreed to keep the provisions in the 2014-2017 CBA. However, had we accepted the January 4 imposition, it is very likely that the board/admin would have gone after retrenchment again in the next round of negotiations, which would have been started less than a year from now.