The UFF-FAU Bargaining Team relies heavily on the results from periodic faculty surveys. The Bargaining Team also consults with the Executive Council (elected and appointed officers of the UFF-FAU chapter). The UFF-FAU Grievance Committee Chair is consulted regarding any issues that have come up recently in grievances and were not resolved well. Chapter officers and organizers also solicit faculty views via open luncheon meetings, office visits, e-mails, and other channels. Members of the Bargaining Team and Executive Council consider and discuss views from individual e-mails and conversations with faculty members who are interested in expressing their concerns and priorities for bargaining.

If you want to propose that a specific issue be prioritized, or would like an explanation of UFF-FAU’s position on a specific issue that is being bargained, contact a member of the Bargaining Team.

In addition, if there is a new issue that you’d like to have addressed, let your steward know or e-mail president@uff-fau.edu. If there is a potential for improving the working lives of the faculty that the union represents, the president will contact union members to ask if others are also interested in pursuing this same issue through bargaining. If several people are interested in the same issue, you can form a committee or task force to briefly research and develop a bargaining proposal in consultation with the union’s negotiating team. You or the team can then present the proposal to the representatives of the Board of Trustees at the bargaining table. The union has used this approach successfully with recent proposals on a promotion structure for instructors, benefits for unmarried partners of faculty, and paid parental leave.

One of the most valuable contributions that individual union members can make is to attend a bargaining session with administrators and advocate for a particular union proposal. For the attorneys and administrators who bargain with us, the issues are often abstract and impersonal. In the absence of a compelling argument, their default question is often: How much will this cost us? One way the union can help administrators to see us as humans is for individual faculty members to attend a bargaining session and talk personally about what difference the implementation of a union proposal will make to them, their colleagues and the prospect of hiring more good faculty in the future.