Dear Colleagues:
We did it! After 16 long months of bargaining, we have our second contract. Voting ended earlier today with a super majority of UAOSU members participating and a resounding 98.3% approval of the new collective bargaining agreement.
Represented faculty who are eligible for the AY 24-25 pay increase should expect the $3000 increase to their base annual salary to take effect in May, and will soon see the one-time payment of $2500 (pro-rated by FTE) added to a future paycheck – hopefully in May or June. We’re also excited for a host of new benefits for our faculty, including continuous employment for promoted faculty, improvements to workload guidelines, and a second tuition discount that can be used for undergraduate education at OSU. These are exciting wins and you can see more of the highlights here.
My thanks go out to our Bargaining Team, who spent over a year strategizing and negotiating with the administration to work out the agreement:
Marisa Chappell
Lori Cramer
Louisa Hooven
Filix Maisch
Kelly McElroy
William Thomas
Dan Andersen
Megan Dickison
Thanks also to our Contract Action Team, college reps, committee members, and union activists, which spent months organizing a campaign to rally our members and community allies to bring pressure on the administration to come to the table with fair proposals.
And a special thanks to all our members who spent over two years in hours of one-on-one conversations, listening sessions, work groups, and in bargaining sessions. Literally hundreds of you have shown up, helping to develop and refine a message of what faculty at OSU need for stability, equity, and respect in their workplace. We’ve been able to grow our ranks, and strengthen our ties to one another in ways that make our union capable of moving ahead to do better work.
This second contract is an improvement over our first one, but it is not everything we had hoped it could be, and certainly it is not everything we deserve as faculty in order to continue offering excellent teaching, research, service, and extension. For instance, there is still much to do to improve faculty salaries and working conditions, particularly in responding to inflation and the high cost of living in Oregon. Yet, we feel it gives us a good place to stand as we continue to fight for the good of public higher education.
Now there is still much for our union to do. All of us need to stay engaged to protect the gains we secured and collectively enforce our new contract. This includes staying in touch with union representatives about merit increases in your units, keeping an eye on workload policies and bridge funding use among other things.
Our organizing must continue, as well. We need to lock arms with our allies to protect the mission of OSU in these times of political and economic turbulence. I look forward to the ties our union is forging with the Faculty Senate and other campus labor partners–CGE, SEIU, and the undergraduate workers union– to defend academic freedom, to insist on shared governance in decision making, and to demand dignity and respect for our families and communities.
There are many places in which you can join in for this work: please let us know what matters to you and how we can connect you. It’s important to remember a crucial point: our union is not a service provider, it is an organization we are building with one another to give voice to the needs of faculty at Oregon State. We have been able to accomplish what we have because of the engagement of you and your colleagues. Continue to stay engaged and be ready to take action together.
My best wishes to everyone on finishing this Spring term and I look forward to working with you.
In Solidarity,
Joseph Orosco, UAOSU President