EMU AAUP blogs

Domestic Partner Benefits: The Language the Administration Rejected (even though they say they're committed to diversity)

emu aaup — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 08:25:11 -0700

Because of the decision of the Michigan Court of Appeals, in the matter of National Pride Network et. al. v. City of Kalamazoo, et. al., EMU has to delete from this contract all the domestic partner benefit language that has been in the last several contracts. This action is required by the state, but the administration is responsible for its other actions on this issue and making them consistent with the university's stated commitments to diversity. Here's how the negotiations went and the ideas we presented that they rejected.

The administration's starting point on this issue was conveyed verbally: the administration would accept the recommendations of the factfinder if the AAUP would agree to delete all domestic partner language. We believe that they needed to accept the fact-finder's recommendations because it was the right thing to do (he was a neutral third party and the administration had invited us into the process).

The final result, a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) that will be part of the contract, states that EMU will re-institute benefits if allowed by law. It establishes a co-chaired benefits committee, with four members piked by the AAUP and four by management. The committee no longer disbands on Aug 30, 2007 (as the administration wanted), but exists for the duration of the contract. It reports yearly and the first report triggers a meeting of the negotiating teams. Part of its mission is to educate the university community about the impact of the court's decision. Members can bring in outside legal and benefit consultants to help inform the deliberations.

The AAUP wanted to include some specifics, not to narrow the charge but to give the committee some starting direction and resources. Below is what we presented to them and which they vigorously opposed. The administration rejected all variations on the ideas represented below.

Administration Accepts Fact-finding, But Has Unacceptably Weak Response on Domestic Partner Benefit Loss

emu aaup — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:38:50 -0700

The good news is that the administration accepted ALL recommendations of the fact-finder and on Friday the two sides tweaked the contract language the AAUP created to implement the fact-finder's recommendations. But the domestic partner benefits issue remains outstanding as we try to figure out how to proceed in the wake of Michigan's marriage amendment and the court's ruling that new contracts cannot contain domestic partner benefits. While we will be discussing this issue at the general faculty meeting Monday (2:30 Roosevelt Auditorium), I wanted to have some discussion of it here for those who can't make it and to help clarify where we stand.

Basically, we're disappointed at the administration's lack of engagement and creativity in seeking solutions given EMU's culture of diversity and the use they make of it when trumpeting the virtues of our university. Being proud of EMU's commitment to diversity in the face of a challenge requires some further actions from the administration, which is why we are continuing to negotiate. For those faculty who are concerned about pushing this matter, please remember that the AAUP has spent thousands of hours improving this contract, so have confidence we can resolve this issue in a way that does not jeopardize what we have all fought for. Indeed, those being denied benefits because of this issue have been on strike with us, have picketed and have protested the administration's numerous acts of disrespect with us. Please show your support while we negotiate the best terms we can in the short time that remains.

While there are strong politics around the issue, the Negotiating Team and AAUP leadership are involved because this means the loss of benefits for bargaining unit members. Faculty have expressed unhappiness - even dismay - about the health care provisions, so everyone should be able to imagine the additional impact of losing coverage for a partner, which for some members happens at a time they are in the process of adopting children or dealing with serious illness.

Further, EMU is frequently noted for diversity, and President Fallon's personal perspectives and values contains support for diversity and he noted in a remarks to the Second Baptist Church of Ypsilanti:

EMU is a passionate defender of human rights, and of fair and equal treatment. As its president, I have already demonstrated my willingness to use my bully pulpit to spread that message to heaven and back as long as I can. And while our work will never be done fully along these lines, we all, I believe, have a moral obligation to do anything and everything we can to promote and accept diversity as a key element of our status as children of God.

EMU's Institutional Values from the Strategic Plan [.pdf] mentions:

Human Dignity and Respect -- We believe that wisdom, sound judgment, acceptance, and respect for other persons, cultures, and ideas are characteristics of an educated person. We seek to demonstrate, through all programs, activities, and services, an appreciation of human diversity and an atmosphere of mutual respect and support for individual differences.

The test of commitment comes when there are challenges. We believe the university can do substantially better in its commitment. We would like to see spokespeople for EMU have credibility when they talk about their commitment for diversity, which would not happen if we accepted what they've offered so far.

The administration's original position was simply to delete all the language in the contract about domestic partners. We did not believe that was good enough.

Then, on Friday, the administration came to the table with a commitment to reinstate benefits if it became legal. That's good, but unlikely. They also offered to create a committee on Benefits Eligibility. That's not bad, but we don't want the committee to be window dressing - an experience we've all had with a supposedly important committee.

The AAUP consulted with our lawyers, who consulted with lawyers for advocacy groups. They crafted a proposal that we presented across the table. They said they would show it to their lawyer. Our current position is that on Monday lawyers for the university need to talk with our lawyers. While the lawyers have previously talked about domestic partner benefits, they have not had a discussion about this particular language. It is important to be able to exchange concerns about the specific language and hear from those who have been involved in developing this proposal. Although time is short, I would note that EMU - unlike U of M - has held no open forums on this issue, nor has it done outreach to those affected by the issue. We have seen no evidence of active and engaged search for alternatives by the administration, so this discussion seems like an exceedingly modest step for a university supposedly committed to diversity.

This proposal may not work, and its legality is unclear. The AAUP does not want to fiercely advocate for a position that would quickly be declared illegal, so we are seeking an engaged dialogue about an alternative. We are also aware that the administration is fearful of negative publicity resulting from taking a stand, especially after the string of negative publicity lately. However, much of the prior negative publicity was based on - how shall I put this generously - poor decision making by administrators. The AAUP refuses to surrender the interests of its members because the administration feels that timidity is required here because of prior poor administrative decision making.

That doesn't mean we're going to force the university into an untenable position or poison the contract because of this issue. But we do not feel the administration has engaged - just dropped benefits while talking about the importance of diversity. So, we want a conversation about our idea. And we are actively refining language on the committee to give it more direction, resources and make sure it is not just window dressing, but consistent with leadership on the issue of diversity when facing a challenge.

The Administration Reduces the Cost of a 1% Raise But Doesn't Make Us A Better Offer

emu aaup — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:11:01 -0700

In an earlier blog entry, I noted that the union and the administration disagreed significantly over the cost of a 1% raise. We suggested the sides get together and work out this issue, but it didn't happen. Instead, in the last 20 minutes of fact-finding the administration presents a new and greatly reduced cost estimate. In January, they said a 1% raise cost $750,000, but in the fact-finding exhibit it was closer to $600,000. So the same amount of money already allocated for the contract could have gone further and given us an average raise of 3.86% - even more than we were requesting. Here are my comments on this matter to the Board of Regents on this matter.

_______________________

Hello and thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Paul Leighton, and I teach criminology in the Dept of Sociology. I have been at EMU 10 years, through three contracts and been on strike three times. I was on the negotiating team this summer and became chief negotiator in December.

My talk was originally going to be about why the administration should accept the recomendations fo the fact-finder. But I now want to raise the question of why the union should. I ask that no to undercut the petition President Bunsis delivered from faculty urging you to acept the fact-finding recommendation. Nor I am announcing a change in EMU-AAUP position - we will accept the fact-finder's recommendations if the administration does.

My question is promoted by a new calculation from the administration on the cost of a 1% raise for faculty. The new estimate introduced in the final moments of fact-finding is significantly lower than earlier estimates, which means the same budgeted resources could go much further. My question is why the university didn't make a better offer, and why we shouldn't settle on the basis of that rather than wait for the fact-finder's recommendation.

3 Feb Negotiations Blog: Fact-finding Report Done

emu aaup — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 21:03:47 -0800

The blog has been quiet because we have been putting in serious overtime working on the fact-finding presentation. We did well in round one, which established our comparable institutions. The task this time around was to use the comparables to justify our positions on salary, retirement, health care, duration of the contract and several other small matters.

Some of these matters are quite complex, and the comparable institutions do not always have comparable ways of dealing with issues - especially health care. Creating the summaries to use for comparisons involved a great deal of work and hundreds of page of appendicies that include the relevant portions of other contracts, background data and assumptions, etc.

5 January Negotiations Blog: Meeting with Administration

emu aaup — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 06:52:19 -0800

On January 4, the Negotiating Team met with the administration's team to follow up on their offer from December and our concerns about the breach in the confidentiality agreement through which they released that offer. We've posted the agenda for the meeting and a Framework for a Fair Contract elsewhere on the site, and I'd encourage you to check it out. (The Team spent time over the break preparing and refining the framework over the break to get ready for the meeting, and I can tell you the Fact-finding team has also been exchanging emails about the favorable decision by the Fact-finder on comparable institutions and starting to organize for the next round.)

Since this is a somewhat long post, it broken down into two sections. The first is on our concerns about the confidentiality agreement and the effect of its breach. It reviews some of the history and what we said at the meeting. The second part deals with our conversation about the framework and the plan for going forward.

Confidentiality Agreements Made Mutually Should Be Broken Mutually, Not Unilaterally

For those who missed it because of the end of the semester/holiday distractions, we posted a few concerns about confidentiality and the an analysis of the administration's offer on Dec 20. This grows out of the early Dec meeting, following President Fallon's 'invitation' to return to negotiations, meaning they had an offer for us. The administration had written up an extensive, very restrictive confidentiality agreement (the .pdf of the cover letter is available through the link above). We were exceedingly skeptical and wanted them to run it past our lawyer, Harvey Wax. In spite of having days to do so and knowing his schedule, it didn't get to him in time.

We flat out refused to sign the letter and discussed a verbal confidentiality agreement, under which we would be able to share details of the offer with the Executive Committee but not the Bargaining Council or the faculty generally. We all believed that sucked. Standing in the hallway for a caucus, the notion "this is Bulls%@t" came up more than once. We came very close to just leaving the meeting. But ultimately, we felt it was int he best interests of the membership if got to the point where we could actually receive the offer they had worked on and talk about it.

The offer itself was unimpressive, as we've analyzed in the link above, and as Howard indicated to faculty in emails. But what's relevant here is that the administration decided, without further consultation with us, to make the offer formal and share it widely with the EMU community. This was the concern we tried to raise with them at the meeting - the confidentiality agreement was worked out mutually and should require mututal agreement to modify. The AAUP had already agreed to meet with them in January, so there was no need for unilateral action here.

Ultimately, what's the point of negotiating an agreement if one side can abandon it on a whim? While they claim to have done this for us and so we could communicate with our membership, we are deeply skeptical of the administration acting unilaterally in ways they see as being for our own good. That's a bad precedent, and it would have been better to show respect for the mutual agreement and the bargaining process to return to that before moving forward unilaterally.

Bottom line - we've told them officially that the confidentiality agreement is no longer in place, that we won't be negotiating another one in any form, and they've undercut what trust remained in the process. We will not be attending meeting if they indent to show us a proposalon paper, then try to collect it before the end of the session (something they did over the summer). Unless we can take the paper with us and talk to the full membership about it, we're not interested.

Framework for a Fair Contract and the Lack of a Couter-proposal

When we left the session in December, the administration's outside attorney Jim Ggreene said he expected a "significant" counter-offer from us. So there's the game: throw us a few bread crums and expect a counter-offer where we give up a lot more than they gave. The Executive Committee voted not to make a formal counter-offer, and the Bargaining Council did the same after a brief summary of the offer that was consistent with the confidentiality agreement. Our last request of a contract that had a net raise (raise minus health care premiums) of 3.5% and there was substantial agreement that we should no come down from that.

The Framework came out of the desire to respond to aspects of their proposal we found unacceptable - the money not to base salary in year 1, no retroactivity, and a very backloaded contract. It articulates some ongoing concerns - how the AAUP has proposed many changes in healthcare, how we have shown reasonableness in restructuring health care for the long run, and how we think they should now compromise on their excessive demands for high premiums in the first year. (It's amazing that the Health Care Task Force recommended a wellness program and other options to implement before health care premiums, but the administration has not taken basic steps that are well established to help control health care costs, and just wants to massively increase premiums and get us to commit to 10% a year increases after that.) Many thanks to Jim Carroll for starting this document an offering many helpful suggestions.

As we ran through the framework, they did not have too many questions. Most of the discussion was on the combination of a flat wage increase and a percentage increase. Over the summer we had proposed this as a way to make sure premiums did not adversely affect those withthe lowest salaries. We liked this idea, although it was not a formal element of all the proposals because it gets complicated to compare offers with more moving parts (ie the new proposal has new health care premiums and new flat raises). But we're committeed to this and wanted to make sure the concept was clear, so we had a foundation for implementing whenever we agree on raises and premiums.

When we were done, they wanted a counter-offer to put detail on our framework. We refused and explained that coming down from our lasst reasonable offer was not in our best interests. They were surprised and annoyed we were not playing this game. They cancelled negotiating session over the summer when we wanted more, they walked out when we wanted to talk, but we're the bad guys now for believing that fact-finding is more likely to get us a good contract than swapping another few series of proposals.

What came out in the end is that we'll produce a 'demonstration paper' that will be the same as our last offer, but elaborated to include the flat plus percentage increases. We wanted to make sure that if we produced it, there wouldn't be a PR attack for offering the same proposal again, so we're going to work on a short memo whereby they invite us to submit the demonstration paper fleshing out our last offer, and whereby we don't attack them for rejecting it.

As a final note/concern: late in the session, it became clear that each side had very different assumptions on what a 1% raise cost. We had a very elaborate explanation of how we calculated the cost of our salary proposal when we did the original presentation (click here and go to salaryproposal.pdf). They never engaged on this, and when they presented their original 2% salary offer they didn't include any analysis or supporting documentation for it, so this issue never even came up as it should have.

So, we've proposed that we create an explanation of how we arrived at our figure that could be run by the new VP of Business and Finance to see if we can come together on the figure a little.

No new meeting dates have been set. the fact-finding team meets today at 10, and I'l be leaving in just a minute for that. I hope everyone can be patient a bit longer and hang tight with us. This is frustrating, but we do not want to sacrafice our long-term interest in a good contract.